Use a simple Windows form to verify .NET's capability to consume Apache, CapeClear, Delphi, and other rpc/encoded Web services. The Visual Basic .NET code is available for downloading.
Article. May 3, 2002.
Sun's Scott McNealy accused Microsoft of "hijacking XML" during his March 2002 JavaOne conference keynote. The accusation undoubtedly relates to Web services, where Microsoft and IBM have taken the reins with the SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, and, more recently, the WS-Inspection Language (WSIL) and the Web Service Interoperability Organization (WS-I). To see for myself whether Microsoft had nefarious intentions in the SOAP interoperability sector, I decided to write a simple Windows form app to exercise Web References from a few rpc/encoded sample Web service created by competitors' toolkits (see Figure 1).
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My tests so far indicate that Microsoft is sticking to today's Web service standards and Scott's accusation isn't credible. No one can gain a monopoly on XML tag names and namespaces, regardless of their marketing and financial clout. My take is that McNealy made the claim in a fit of pique over a late invitation from Microsoft and IBM to join WS-I as a regular member, not a founder. (J2EE release 1.4's delay to January 2003 might be a contributing factor.) Hopefully, WS-I—with or without Sun as a member—will deliver soon on its promise of implement
