The needs for exchanges between Information systems are numerous and varied and are located at all levels. Several solutions for electronic transmitting dematerialized documents are available today on the market; however, these solutions are seldom interoperable or reusable without additional cost to transport other data flows.

The French government through the voice of the DGME (Direction G�n�rale pour la Modernisation de l�Etat) has recently published the �PRotocole d�Echanges Standard et Ouvert� 1.0 (aka PRESTO) specification. The PRESTO protocol is a secure and reliable transport protocol that aims at providing a generic message exchange layer for exchanging potentially any e-gov messages in the context of the ADELE program for the eAdministration in France.

To achieve the aforementioned design objectives, the PRESTO protocol is built on the foundation and promises of the WS-* (STAR, which stands for Secured, Transacted, Asynchronous & Reliable) stack.

The PRESTO Starter Kit is intended for architects, developers or any people that are interested in consuming (from a .NET code) or exposing services (in .NET) that �speak� PRESTO. Whatever the role people are going to play, the samples provided as part of the PRESTO Starter Kit are intended to be interoperable with other implementations that conform to the publicly published PRESTO specifications. In this preliminary release, all the samples are written in the C# language.