WSE 2.0’s messaging API gave us the ability to host web services outside of IIS. Though it was very cool, I didn’t dig that too much because you had to give up all of the other WSE goodness that only worked in ASMX – including security.

In WSE 3.0, they changed this so that you could build ASMX web services, do all of the great security stuff and then host it outside of IIS – for me this meant TCP, though there are other transports you can use as well.

Now that I am using WSE3 to secure my web services that are currently being used (while we await WCF 🙂 ), I am trying to do so with WCF in mind. It is no secret that WSE 3.0 is going to be wire level compatible with WCF as this is was of it’s major design goals.

As I dig further into this, I learn that this is only true for HTTP but not the TCP hosted services. However, it is possible to write your own transport channel in Indigo specifically for this purpose and this is something that Yasser Shohoud and Kenny Wolf did at PDC (here’s the code for that). Luckily for me, I have the DVD because that was not a session I attended. I also missed Mark Fussell’s talk on moving messages between WSE 3 and Indigo since I had remembered it as a 10:15 session when it was in fact an 8:30 am talk (and had a leisurely breakfast instead – oops!). (Again, thank goodness for the DVDs)

At ASP Connections in April, I will be doing a talk about using WSE 3.0 so that the messages produced by WSE 3.0 today to secure your web services,  will still be valid when communicating with apps that use WCF.  So as I prepare for this, I will probably be sharing tidbits here and there.

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