Introduction to WSE 2.0

WSE (Web Services Enhancements) v2.0 is a product from Microsoft that extends and enhances the web services offering provided by the .NET Framework version 1.1. WSE is a class library that provides utilities for writing code that works with some of the new web service industry standards such as WS-Security, WS-Attachments, WS-Addressing, WS-Policy, WS-SecurityPolicy, and WS-Trust. The next section will give you some insight as to the industry movements that spurred the development of WSE and how it came about.

Overview of GXA

With the advent of various implementations of web services by Microsoft, Sun, IBM, and others, it became apparent that simply being able to send simple messages and remotely invoke methods would not satisfy all the needs that companies had to use web services safely, reliably, and securely.

Over the past eight years, Microsoft has worked with multiple partners in the computing industry to create what we now know as XML Web Services. GXA, the Global XML Web Services Architecture, spawned the industry standards that support the business needs for doing business using web services. GXA defined the standards for secure, reliable messaging between end points using web services and much, much more.

Evolution of WSE

WSE originally showed up as a 1.0 Technical Preview that developers could download from MSDN. It provided a basic implementation of some of the additional standards that extend web services such as WS-Security and WS-Addressing, and so forth. Since the original 1.0 Technical Preview came out, WSE has evolved. And with the 2.0 Release Candidate (the current version as of the writing of this book), WSE has become an incredibly powerful set of tools for both web services programming and XML messaging without the aid of Internet Information Server.