Microsoft Delivers Web Services Toolkit

By Richard Karpinski

Microsoft this week made available an add-on to its Visual Studio development platform that makes it easier for developers to build applications that support the Web services specifications it is forwarding.

The new Microsoft Web Services Development Kit supports specs such as WS-Security, WS-Routing, and WS-Attachments. Though there is broad industry support behind some of these efforts -- especially WS-Security, which now has wide backing and is on a standards track in the OASIS group -- none are yet official standards.

Yet the specs are strongly backed by Microsoft, and thus inclusion of them in the popular Visual Studio not only puts them into wide use, it sets up a scenario that could push rivals -- such as Sun Microsystems -- to back the specs or push its developers in another direction. That begins to move the battle over Web services specs out of the standards bodies and into the marketplace.

Microsoft, Sun, and others continue to talk a good game on Web services standards, but some major fissures remain. Perhaps most notably, Sun has not yet been asked to join the Web Services Interoperability group as a board member, it says, a requirement for joining that organization. And while Sun has climbed on board WS-Security, the latest major Web services forwarded at OASIS saw IBM, Microsoft, and BEA taking the lead -- and Sun nowhere to be found.

The new development kit is available for free download from the MSDN developer Web site. It plugs into the Visual Studio .Net development tool and fits the company's overall .Net framework.

The kit aims to make it as easy as possible for developers to support the new specs -- for instance, a few lines of code is all that is necessary to add a WS-Security-compliant digital signature to a Web service using Visual Studio and the new add-on.

WS-Security, which now has wide industry backing, adds support for multiple security models, mechanisms, and technologies to Web services, including digital signatures and encryption. WS-Routing defines the ability to route a Web services through multiple destinations along a message path. WS-Attachments lets XML Web services contain attachments that are not serialized into XML.