title: How do you measure the progress of a web service call?
body: <p>I have an ASP.NET web service which does some heavy lifting, like say,some file operations, or generating Excel Sheets from a bunch of crystal reports. I don't want to be blocked by calling this web service, so i want to make the web service call asynchronous. Also, I want to call this web service from a web page, and want some mechanism which will allow me to keep polling the server so that i can i can show some indicator of progress on the screen, like say, the number of files that have been processed. Please note that i do not want a notification on completion of the web method call, rather, i want a live progress status. How do i go about it?</p>