What's going on in WSE land?

The plate is full right now for the WSE team, we have three pieces of work underway concurrently keeping everyone on the team busy (along with all those summer vacations, of course).

First up is the C# implementation of the WS-I compliance test tools. I doubt many people know that this is also developed by the WSE team. Right now, the focus is on completing the implementation and testing of various Basic Profile and Basic Security Profile assertions. The BSP assertions right now are limited to examining the message without unravelling the signatures and encryptions; further on down the road we're expecting that we'll be linking to tools to WSE itself in order to perform more detailed verification of secure messages.

Second is WSE 2.0 Service Pack 2. Like SP1, this will include bug fixes for reported problems, so if you have a bug that is causing you problems make sure that you report it either on the WSE public newsgroup or to the feedback e-mail address in the documentation. Unlike SP1, SP2 will also include some new functionality in the form of additions to the built-in tokens and token issuers in the product. One of these will be a replacement for the existing Kerberos token in WSE 2.0 that will more closely track the Kerberos Token Profile being developed by the OASIS WSS Technical Committee. We'd like to see the folks on the TC accelerate the finalization of this profile as we're beginning to see demand for a more interoperable form. Unfortunately, I can't say anything about the other addition at the present time.

Thirdly, we're progressing through the planning milestone for WSE 3.0. We're pretty much locked down on the plan of record for the products features and timing, we have a bunch of design work and some prototyping in progress as well. At the present time, I can't announce the details of the product but we believe that we've struck the right balance in what was a very tangled web of requirements, several of which were incompatible. What I can say is that we plan to adopt a more open approach to delivering public builds of the product for everyone to work with and provide feedback against. Once we have an initial build complete, we're hoping to release incremental builds on a very regular schedule up to the point of final release. This is like the Visual Studio Community Drops, only that, being WSE, we plan to go a little faster! We're adopting some modifications to our existing engineering process that we believe will allow us to meet those goals and execute more smoothly this time around.