New Toolkits Power Web Services Now

With the production release of the Visual Studio.NET (VS.NET) development environment still months away, Microsoft has released software toolkits that enable developers to create Web services using Visual Studio 6.0. Organizations that have heavy investments in current developer technologies (VB, C++, and COM) will find that these new tools give them latitude to create and work with Web services without forcing them into expensive code rewrites. These tools also enable Microsoft to fight for mindshare in the developer community against competing Web service technologies from vendors such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Oracle.

Web services, which enable cross-platform program-to-program communications over the Web, require two layers of code: one to provide the “plumbing” to handle Internet communications, and one to provide the application service. The new toolkits put in place the plumbing layer along with certain support services needed to make the plumbing work. (For more information about Web services, see “The Web Services Layer Cake” and “Web Services Interactions“.)