Microsoft Delivers Updated SOAP Toolkit

By Richard Karpinski

Microsoft Wednesday released a new version of its Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) toolkit, an add-on that helps developers build Web services using its Visual Studio development tool.

Microsoft's SOAP toolkit 3.0 includes support for DIME (Direct Internet Message Encapsulation) and WS-Attachments, both of which define how to package binary data up with SOAP messages.

While SOAP provides an envelope for exchanging structured XML information, it does not have an efficient way of exchanging binary data, Microsoft said.

DIME and WS-Attachments provide a binary message format that reduces the overhead of dealing with attachments in SOAP. DIME is the message format; WS-Attachments defines how to encapsulate a SOAP message and attachments in a DIME message.

Both DIME and WS-Attachments have been submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force as potential standards.

The SOAP toolkit 3.0 and information on and WS-Attachments can be found on the Microsoft Web site.