Simon Fell > Its just code > WS-Gap

I've been spending some time recently working more with the .NET 1.1 SOAP stack and with Axis 1.1, it was a brutal reminder of how big a difference there is between (a) the current tools, (b) current best practice (e.g. WS-I BP) and (c) the WS-* stack of specs. Both tools (and the rest I imagine, PocketSOAP certainly not excluded) have their pain points, .NET's use of public fields in classes rather than properties is a PIA when it comes to data binding and an even bigger PIA with the additional XXXXspecified properties, which you need to remember to set when sending them out of the client, otherwise your XXX value is going nowhere. [tell me this is fixed in Whidbey, right ? (still fighting to get a working Whidbey install)]. Axis, which does a much better job at that part, has some real strange header handling, the WSDL documents which headers are valid for which operation, but once you've set a header, Axis will just blindly send it on every subsequent request. So you're left to remove the header yourself on the operations that shouldn't send it, but dang!, there's no direct way to remove a header, you have to grab all the current headers, call clearheaders, then add them all back in, minus the one you wanted to remove. urrrgghhh. And to top it off, when faced with the task of generating a server side stub from WSDL, they both end up generating code that doesn't work. (how exactly did wsdl.exe /server make it out unfixed in 2 releases of .NET ?)