Recently, I’ve spent some time working with the WSDK and I am quite impressed with what I have seen thus far.
The Web Services Development Kit (WSDK) Technical Preview is a .NET class library (Microsoft.WSDK.dll) that features support for a number of GXA specifications including DIME, WS-Attachments, WS-Routing, WS-Referral, and WS-Security.
The WSDK supports both client-side and server-side communication; it provides a protocol class (Microsoft.WSDK.WSDKClientProtocol) for proxies as well as a HTTP module (Microsoft.WSDK.HttpModule) that integrates nicely with the ASP.NET runtime. Architecturally, both utilize a pipeline of filters that communicate with a context (Microsoft.WSDK.SoapContext) to process SOAP headers as messages cross application boundaries. It also appears that the WSDK also has support for custom filters.
My experience with the WSDK thus far has been extremely positive. If I had to sum up my experience, I would do so as follows:
Pros
- Easy to program
- Highly extensible
- Highly configurable
Cons
- Difficult to troubleshoot problems
- No support for .NET Remoting
Lack of support for .NET Remoting doesn’t bother me too much. It is - after all - a technical preview at the moment. For what it’s worth, Werner Vogels recently reported that the WSDK engine can be supported outside of ASP.NET. Excellent!
On a side note, I have not had a chance to test interoperability of the WSDK with IBM’s Web Services Toolkit (WSTK) v3.2.2. It has reported on various newsgroups that both are able to exchange WS-Security headers.
All in all, I really like the direction the XML Web Services team at Microsoft is headed. I believe that GXA and the WSDK both represent “goodness” (as Don Box would say). I look forward with eager anticipation to see what other interesting goodies Microsoft plans to dump on us.
11:12:04 AM 
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