We figured that there wasn't enough excitement already about the fact that Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0 has RTM'ed, and so we will be announcing on Monday the release of WSE3.

Microsoft Web Services Enhancements (WSE) has come a long way since its inception back in 2002. WSE was Microsoft's "speedboad technology release vehicle", delivering support for some of the emerging WS-* standards (particularly WS-Security) as they baked through the standards process. New versions of WSE have been released every 6-9 months, each delivering increasingly solid support of the standards as they themselves stabilized.

WSE 3.0, which releases on the web on Monday 7th November, greatly extends and solidifies the capabilities of the WSE stack, whilst also providing a foundation which truly acts as a stepping stone from Web Services today to Windows Communication Foundation tomorrow. WSE 3.0 will be wire-level compatable with WCF and has a programming model which, while a little different to WCF, will generally be simple and mechanical to migrate to WCF in the future.