News

Microsoft WSE V.2: Signs of Web services to come

• By Jack Vaughan
• July 16, 2003

Microsoft announced yesterday the availability of a new Web services preview that adds enhanced support for TCP and HTTP, as well as asynchronous and synchronous communications. The release, dubbed Microsoft Web Services Enhancements (WSE) Version 2.0, also eases the task of setting security policies for Web services, according to Rebecca Dias, product manager for advanced Web services at Microsoft.

“[XML-based] SOAP and WSDL are inherently extensible, but some stuff wasn’t there. Microsoft has been working with over 25 customers and partners to define the Web services architecture for secure, reliable Web services,” said Dias.

Elements in this release address the fact that “people wanted TCP transport support,” said Dias. “It means you do not have to use a Web service and HTTP handler together. So it supports different business applications, like P2P.” She noted that HTTP timeouts and other low-level details can be troublesome to some apps.

The new software also supports a declarative programming model that will take care of policy at runtime without requiring recoding, she said.

This release, which works as an add-in to Visual Studio .NET, is significant as it shows Microsoft’s upcoming direction for Web services.

Like IBM and others, Microsoft is working quickly, often in concert with competitive providers, to add important security and reliability traits to the original “lite” Web services architectures. The architectural enhancements mean that users do not necessarily have to employ a Web server to do Web services, which could usher in a new stage of XML system development.