Best practices to host and consume web services?

Question

We have few asp.net applications running on the same server. In all of the applications we have common c# class files like DataAccess and ConnectionManager , which have a local copy in all of the applications supports the same general function to deal with DB, I am planning to change them to web services and host them on server, So that each time I develop a new application I can just call these services to deal with the Data Management.

I don't have much effective experience to the web-services, kindly point me to the best way to implement it.

I have few questions like :

1. Do I need to apply credentials to it, or its safe since all applications would be hosted on same server.
2. A simple web-service would just solve the purpose or need to create WCF or SOAP stuff, again no experience to this.

Answer 1

Why would you expose them as web services?

It sound like you would be better putting the files in the GAC and sharing between applications that way.