Looking for a guide to all of the web services protocols implemented by WCF? There's no single document that captures all of the information, but there is a group of documents that talk about the implemented protocols and some of the choices in those implementations. The level of detail varies from document to document as a few are high-level summaries across areas of the product while others are low-level details of a particular protocol. Web Services Protocols Interoperability Guide Web Services

A working draft for a 1.1 revision to XQuery went up earlier this week. The changes from XQuery 1.0 (which was finished just last year) to XQuery 1.1 appear to be small. There are two additional operators for grouping and windowing over a data stream. The group operator is fairly standard while the window operator is a bit more unusual. Applying a window controls what it means to draw a sequence of consecutive items from the stream. You can get the complete specification from the W3C site. XQuery

New working drafts have been published for XSD 1.1, which starts a last call period for comments lasting from now until September 12th. The previous last calls in 2006 and 2007 resulted in a substantial number of comments and revisions. You can get the XSD 1.1 drafts from the W3C web site. W3C XML Schema Definition Language (XSD) 1.1 Part 1: Structures W3C XML Schema Definition Language (XSD) 1.1 Part 2: Datatypes

Now that I've covered several of the new feature additions in Orcas I also want to include mention of some of the fixes done to improve interoperability with other platforms. Allowing an empty SOAPAction. Previously we required that the HTTP SOAPAction header exactly match the addressing action. We now let you process messages with an empty SOAPAction as many other systems were processing messages based only on the addressing action. Handling empty messages that claim to be chunked. Previously we

Over the weekend XML 1.0 turned 10 years old from the day it was first accepted as a W3C recommendation. It started as a subset of SGML that allowed generic document content to be served and processed over HTTP. It's now used for everything, including the kitchen sink . XML 1.0 included a number of quirks, such as a large and complicated language production that created a custom subset of Unicode for defining names. XML 1.1 tried to fix these quirks but broke compatibility in the process, leading

Michi Henning has written an interesting article for ACM Queue entitled "The Rise and Fall of CORBA". His overall conclusions in the "Lessons Learned" section seem spot on to me: Standards consortia need iron-clad rules to ensure that they standardize existing best practice. There is no room for innovation in standards. Throwing in "just that extra little feature" inevitably causes unforeseen technical problems, despite the best intentions. No standard should be approved without a reference implementation.

It's been another busy few weeks in the Web Services Standards Team at Microsoft recently! Last week, we did another republication of the Devices Profile and WS-Policy specs. Today the W3C acknowledged and published our Member Submissions of the WS-Eventing, WS-Transfer and WS-Enumeration specifications, along with a big list of co-submitters. The W3C Staff comments on WS-Transfer make interesting reading - and really summarize what WS-Transfer is all about: WS-Transfer can therefore be seen as an

Today we republished the Devices Profile for Web Services spec based on community feedback received and implementation experience. Mostly it's to clean up some things around device metadata, plus some other minor housekeeping. This version of the Devices Profile specification is expected to be the last revision before submission to a standards organization, and it matches what will be shipping in Windows Vista. The Change Log from the previous version is below, for those who are interested....