WSE technology has helped Kinaxis make its application flexible, according to Neilson. "The problem with security is that it's not a one-size-fits-all problem," he said. Different clients have different requirements, Neilson noted. "What's different about what's in WSE and Indigo and Web services in general is [they] allow you to say, 'That's something we can configure later,' " without having to rewrite the application itself, Neilson said.

Also featured in WSE 3.0 is expanded support for WS-* (pronounced "WS star") Web services specifications. MTOM (Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism) support is included for building secure Web services that include attachments such as documents or media files. MTOM supercedes the previous WS-Attachments specification.

Updated support for the WS-SecureConversation and WS-Trust specifications is also in WSE 3.0, offering better performance, according to Bixhorn.

WSE 3.0 also supports 64-bit Windows platforms and allows for building Web services that can communicate across a variety of protocols, including TCP, HTTP, and custom protocols. Web services built using WSE 3.0 will be interoperable with WCF when that ships.

"The fact that WSE 3.0 is an add-on to Visual Studio 2005 and .Net 2.0 and released alongside Visual Studio 2005 is actually one of its strengths," said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, in an e-mail. "Developers who leverage these technologies will benefit by the greater consistency across the tools. For developers looking to work with WCF, they will also see consistency in the programming model and API from WSE to WCF."