Simon Fell > Its just code > WS-Interop

MSDN has a new section on WS interop, the primary content of which seems to be documents on getting .NET to interop with X, whilst this is great info to have, to me it also signals what is wrong with WS-* today, despite the WS-I and other efforts, interop today is no better than it was 2 years ago, we're still at the N x N-1 efforts for interop, but when we have 10, 50, 100 soap toolkits, that just doesn't scale. I spend a whole bunch of time checking interop between various toolkits and service, and even the simple stuff runs into trouble.

As Tim points out, everyone is out writing specs and building new plumbing for WS-* but the basic tools are still not that great, .NET is great example of this, WSE adds all sorts of additional functionality for WS-Security, WS-Policy, WS-KitchenSink, yet the core XmlSerializer has broken support for simple things like minOccurs='0', its 'clever' ability to roll up elements that contain only a repeating element in an array (and removing one of the nesting levels that's in the doc), is not quite smart enough in some cases, and I've seen it trip itself up, generating proxy code which just doesn't work. (I'm waiting for a new .NET 2.0 beta to see if this is fixed). Other environments fair no better, Java has a multiple of toolkit offers, yet on more than one occasion I've seriously considering writing my own doc/lit SOAP engine for Java.