An add-on component to Visual Studio 2005 and the .Net Framework 2.0, WSE 3.0 "dramatically simplifies the development of secure Web services," said Ari Bixhorn, director Web services strategy at Microsoft. WSE 3.0 also serves as a prelude to the planned Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) for Web services, formerly known as Indigo, which is planned for inclusion in the Vista release of Windows in 2006, Bixhorn said.

"Developers are going to see a 30 percent improvement in the performance of their Web services, upgrading from WSE 2.0 to WSE 3.0," Bixhorn said.

The package includes turnkey security profiles. "What those do is allow developers to build five of the most common secure Web services scenarios with just a few clicks of a mouse," Bixhorn said. One profile features the building of a secure Web service that can be called via the Internet using a name and password.

"Developers are going to benefit greatly from these profiles because [they] dramatically reduce the amount of code that they have to write to build secure Web services," Bixhorn said.

"WSE 3.0 is really a bridge," to Indigo, said a user of the package, Andy Neilson, a senior software architect at Kinaxis, which develops software for manufacturers.