I’ve recently needed to make a RubyOnRails web app “talk” to .NET, and chose to use a set of internal .NET web services as the integration layer. Getting it working was a bit of a pain, and took me quite a few hours. Despite Googling it to death, I still couldn’t find any conclusive articles/posts that solved it for me.
Note, if you’re new to this as I am, it may help you at some point to actaully observe the communications coming to and from your web services using a sniffer program. This was the only way I was able to understand why things weren’t working and troubleshoot the issues. The sniffer will basically let you see the HTTP information being sent to and from your Rails app and the .NET services.