Web Service Enhancements (WSE) Supported Environments

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Web Services Enhancements for Microsoft .NET (WSE) is an add-on to Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and the Microsoft .NET Framework. WSE provides a toolkit that developers can use to secure interoperable Web services (ASMX) based on many WS-* specifications such as WS-Security, WS-Addressing, and WS-Policy. 

NOTE: You can use WSE to implement WS-* specifications on classic .NET 2.0 or earlier ASMX web services. If you are doing any new web service development, it is strongly encouraged to develop Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services instead.

There is some confusion about what environments WSE is supported in, so I want to take this opportunity to clearly lay out these supported scenarios:

WSE 1.0

WSE 1.0 is built for developers using Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework 1.0.  There was one service pack released for WSE 1.0 version

WSE 2.0

WSE 2.0 is built for developers using Visual Studio .NET 2003 and the .NET Framework 1.1.  The WSE 2.0 installation package included an add on for Visual Studio .NET 2003 IDE. There were three services packs developed for the WSE 2.0 runtime. Each service pack release required you to uninstall the prior WSE 2.0 version to install the updated WSE 2.0 Service Pack version.

WSE 3.0

WSE 3.0 is built for developers using Visual Studio .NET 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0. The WSE 3.0 runtime is only supported in .NET applications that have the .NET 2.0 runtime loaded. It is not officially supported in .NET 3.0/3.5/4.0/4.5 applications. For .NET Framework versions 3.0 and higher you should develop WCF services to support the various WS-* specifications. WSE 3.0 did not release any service packs but there were two QFE updates to WSE3.0 that are still available.

Below indicates which versions of the operating systems that the versions of WSE is supported on. Please note that even the latest version of WSE, WSE3.0, was never tested or supported on Vista or later operating systems.

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Fig 1. Supported platforms for WSE runtime

Support for WSE is tied to the Support Lifecycle of the Microsoft .NET Framework. This support consists of:

 

More Information

For help migrating your WSE 3.0 application to WCF please reference the MSDN article Migrating WSE 3.0 Web Services to WCF

There are additional support requirements for each version of WSE. Please see the respective download pages for more details.

Cheers,
-Todd Foust