Back in my VB days I wrote an article for ASPToday that, if I recall, described a sort of Web Services API before people called it that. Or maybe not; I don’t have access to the article.
I see at least one person read it; they gave it 1 out of 5 stars. :)
Go see if you can figure out how to view the article without a subsciption: http://www.asptoday.com/Content.aspx?id=164