WSE 2.0 Highlights New Programming Model

Often, software development tools include not only a set of programming interfaces but also define a programming model-a way for developers to think about programming tasks and translate those thoughts into code. The success of Visual Basic (VB), for example, is due to the simplicity of its programming model-applications are built in an iterative manner by dragging controls from a tool palette to a container and then writing code that is triggered by those controls-much more than its choice of programming language or the specifics of the programming interfaces exposed by the controls.

The initial releases of the .NET Framework preserved a key aspect of the Windows programming model-its procedural nature. Whether developers use VB or the underlying Windows SDK, their programs call APIs (collections of procedures) provided by the OS. A program that calls a procedure of an API waits for the call to be completed before moving on to the next. The .NET Framework makes implementing or calling a Web service look very much like implementing or calling a procedure of a “regular” Windows API.