Web Services Toolkit Updated

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.