Test-Drive Microsoft's New Web Services Development Kit
The WSDK Technical Preview adds WS-Security, WS-Routing, and WS-Attachments classes to the .NET Framework.
by Roger Jennings
Posted August 26, 2002
Industry analysts, magazine editors/columnists, and Web service pundits appear to agree that Web services won't gain serious traction until SOAP security issues are resolved. A Google search on "authentication authorization confidentiality integrity non-repudiation," the mantra of security mavens, returns more than 7,000 pages, of which 564 include the term "Web services." There's no question that Web service security is a hot topic.
The original Microsoft/IBM WS-Security specification is on an OASIS standard track, and Sun Microsystems has signed on as a WS-Security supporter. IBM delivered an early WS-Security implementation for Java in version 3.2 of its Web Services Toolkit. What's been missing for Visual Studio .NET developers is a set of WS-Security classes for the .NET Framework.
The newly released Microsoft Web Services Development Kit (WSDK) Technical Preview not only delivers a well-designed set of classes for enabling encryption and signing of SOAP message payloads, but also implements parts of the WS-Routing and WS-Referral specs (see Resources). Addition of classes for Direct Internet Message Encapsulation (DIME) brings attachment handling to better-than-even par with the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit 3.0. In this article, I'll describe my experiences working with an advance copy of the WSDK Technical Preview that I received in mid-August. You can preview this article's sample app with an ASP.NET WSDK client on the OakLeaf Web site.
The WSDK's setup program installs the Microsoft.WSDK.dll to support the Microsoft.WSDK namespaces and adds a Programs | Microsoft Web Services Development Kit menu with Documentation, QuickStart Samples Release Notes, Release Notes, and WSDK on the Web choices. The WSDK documentation is a bit incomplete; for example, the Help section's "Frequently Asked Questions" topic, DIME implementation details, and descriptions of most of the members of the Microsoft.WSDK namespace are missing. The "Global" prefix to XML Web services architecture (GXA) was conspicuous in its absence from the documentation, but I did find remnants of "gx" in some of the source code samples. It appears to me that GXA has joined DNA in marketing slogan purgatory. The only two Microsoft DNA press releases dated later than 2000 that I can find refer to DNA in the past tense.
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