Web Services Enhancements

While Visual Studio and the .NET Framework 2.0 provide support for the development of basic Web services, customers in recent years have required advanced Web services functionality, including end-to-end security, routing and message attachments. Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 3.0 is a fully supported extension of the .NET Framework 2.0 and add-on to Visual Studio 2005 for building secure Web services. Released in November 2005 to coincide with the release of Visual Studio 2005, WSE 3.0 implements the latest industry-supported WS-* specifications.
Now that the WS-Security family of specifications has, to a large extent, solidified, the main goal for WSE 3.0 is to provide developers with the first complete implementation of these security specifications. As such, WSE 3.0 supports the following WS-* specifications (see Appendix for versioning information):

XML, SOAP, WSDL
WS-Security
WS-Trust
WS-SecureConversation
WS-Addressing
MTOM
The focus on security was also one of the reasons why WSE 3.0 supports MTOM. Securing attachments over Direct Internet Message Encapsulation (DIME) requires transport-level security, whereas MTOM attachments can be secured by using either transport- or message-level security. As a result, developers can secure Web services attachments by taking advantage of some of the benefits of message-level security, such as end-to-end security and support for different credential types.
WSE 3.0 also introduced a set of "turnkey" security scenarios. These scenarios are high-level security building blocks that allow developers to concentrate on the business logic of a service in the knowledge that the underlying Web services communication is secure. The new configuration editor has also made creating and maintaining WSE policy files much easier. A GUI wizard creates and configures turnkey scenarios, without the developer having to resort to the XML representation of the policy file. WSE 3.0 also defines security sessions via policy, such that any given service can also act as a Security Token Service (STS).

One of the main objectives of the WSE 3.0 release is to provide a path to WCF, the unified programming model and runtime for building secure, reliable and transacted Web services. WSE 3.0 offers interoperability with WCF when using the turnkey security scenarios and also provides some programming model parity with WCF.

.NET Framework 3.0
In parallel to the development of WSE, Microsoft has been developing the .NET Framework 3.0, its next-generation managed code programming model for building applications on the Windows platform. The .NET Framework 3.0 enables developers to create visually stunning, connected, and workflow-enabled applications. It will ship as a core part of Windows Vista and will also be available on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 through the .NET Framework 3.0 Runtime Components. The main components of the .NET Framework 3.0 for building and leveraging Web services are WCF, the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows CardSpace.