Final Version of WSE 3.0 Released to MSDN

WSE 3.0 has just been released to MSDN to coincide with the launch of Visual Studio 2005. You can find it here. The Readme is here

It was pretty tough getting this released to be on the same day, but we really wanted to ensure that the time difference between WSE 3.0 and VS2005 was as small as possible so that you could start building secure web services on the latest standards today that are also interoperable with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). I have started to compile a set of WSE resource links, but there is plenty of content on the WSE home page.

There a significant paradigm shift when using WSE 3.0 compared to WSE 2.0 and to help with this the WSE Hands On Labs (HOLs) have been completely re-written. These were done by Aaron Skonnard and Keith Brown and are a great
starting point to understand the capabilities of this release. Most people use these HOLs to start off understanding the capabilities of WSE. We split the labs into Basic and Advanced labs to make it clearer when you are most likely to use a given feature. The examples that Aaron created showing how to plug new Transports into the WSE extensiblity model are extremely good. The labs can be found here;

WSE 3.0 Messaging Hands On Lab

WSE 3.0 Security Hands On Lab

I also update the "What's New in WSE 3.0" article for this release, so that the code and names were accurate. On the whole most of this article has stayed the same, which is good as it shows the original design goals at the start of the public CTP releases were solid.

We are going to create plenty more content for WSE 3.0 over the next few months. Tomasz Janczuk, who is the dev lead on WSE 3.0, has written a great article on how to implement your own security policies that will appear in the January 2006 issue of MSDN magazine (due out in Dec 2005). I am working on a WCF <-> WSE 3.0 interoperability article which includes "Understanding WCF for WSE Developers" which you should expect toward the end of this year. If you want a quick overview of the relationship between WSE 3.0 and WCF, I did a short MSDN TV on WSE 3.0 overview so you can watch me in person!

If you have further suggestions for articles or comments on the WSE 3.0 release I would love to hear from you. Enjoy this great release of WSE 3.0.