Web Services on the Current Platform

While Microsoft hopes to make Visual Studio.NET and the .NET Framework the best way to build Web services, many companies want to build Web services now, with their existing tools and skills. For these companies, Microsoft has released toolkits and components that enable developers to create Web services using Visual Studio 6.0 and Windows APIs. These offerings are an important way for Microsoft to fight for mind share in the developer community against competing Web service technologies from vendors such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Oracle. The two most important elements are the SOAP Toolkit and the Universal Discovery, Description, and Integration (UDDI) Software Development Kit (SDK).

SOAP Toolkit. The SOAP Toolkit is a set of tools and code libraries for converting COM components into Web services, and for converting COM client applications into Web service clients. It thus enables developers to update applications that use COM object technology to offer and use Web services. Among other components, the toolkit includes a “SOAP listener” service that allows COM components to implement SOAP-based Web services, and a “SOAP proxy” client-side library that allows applications to transparently use SOAP Web services as if they were COM components.