Disclaimer The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.
UPGRADE: MCSD Microsoft .NET Skills to MCPD Enterprise Application Developer by Using the Microsoft .NET Framework: Part 2
Configure SOAP messages.
MSDN has a section on formatting SOAP messages. Know about the SoapDocumentMethod attribute and SoapDocumentService attribute. Know that you can control the formatting using XML Serialization attributes.
I guess the basic information for a web service application would be specified using the WebService attribute. You can control the name of the web service, and the namespace.
Binding defines a concrete set of operations. It is implemented by the WebServiceBinding attribute. You can specify what WSI spec your service conforms to (as of now, Basic Profile 1.1 or none), whether or not the service emits conformance claims, the location of the binding (defaults to your web service), and the namespace associated with the binding. Christian Weyer has some thoughts about the attribute on his blog.
The XML Web Services repository has a good FAQ. In in, some of the things controlled by the web/machine.config are pointed out. Here's how to enable/disable WSDL generation. Also you can control the location of a dynamic reference to a web service in the config file.