When meddling with mashups I have found it helpful to have a simple utility that allows me to play with REST (Represential State Transfer) web services. REST has become very popular as it is really easy to implement and generally straight forward to understand.
Public Class RemoteAPI
Public Shared Function GetRESTQueryResults(ByVal URI As String) As String
Dim req As HttpWebRequest = WebRequest.Create(URI)
Dim resp As HttpWebResponse = Nothing
Dim results As String = Nothing
Try
resp = req.GetResponse
Using sr As New StreamReader(resp.GetResponseStream())
results = sr.ReadToEnd().Trim
End Using
Catch ex As Exception
results = String.Format("<error>{0}</error>", ex.Message)
End Try
Return results
End Function
End Class