An updated version of Microsoft’s Web Services Enhancement (WSE) developer toolkit allows developers to build Web services with improved security. The new toolkit, WSE 2, offers support for several new draft Web service specifications, including WS-Trust and WS-SecureConversation, which allow a series of Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messages to be signed or encrypted. WSE 2 also includes a policy framework that allows developers to specify their messaging requirements (such as the requirement that all message bodies be signed with an X.509 certificate) via an XML-based configuration file rather than by writing custom code.

Microsoft and other Web service vendors have been working to make Web services suitable for large-scale business applications by adding important capabilities such as secure messaging and reliable message delivery. WSE is Microsoft’s way of delivering early implementations of these draft specifications to leading-edge developers who are willing to accept less integrated tools, as well as APIs and specifications that are subject to change. Most corporate developers, however, are better off waiting until the underlying specifications are finalized and the technologies are directly supported by Microsoft products, such as Visual Studio and BizTalk Server.

A new version of the Web Services Enhancement (WSE) toolkit offers support for the latest versions of some key Web services security standards and improved integration with Visual Studio. However, it comes at the same time that Microsoft is encouraging developers to begin evaluating the Windows Communication Framework, another Web services framework that is not source-code compatible with WSE but will be included with Windows Vista and available as an add-on to current versions of Windows.

WSE is Microsoft’s toolkit for advanced Web service developers who want to use Web services protocols not yet supported in Microsoft’s other developer products, such as Windows and ASP.NET. Because its goal is to keep up with the various Web service protocols (often denoted as WS-*) as they are developed and standardized, WSE is updated frequently and Microsoft makes no guarantees of version-to-version compatibility. Indeed, WSE 3.0 is not source-code compatible with previous versions and developers will need to modify their code if they choose to upgrade.