Welcome to Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 3.0

Welcome to Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 3.0

The Web Services Enhancements 3.0 for Microsoft .NET (WSE) enables developers to create interoperable Web services with advanced Web services features. With WSE 3.0, you can secure your messages using digital signatures and encryption, use MTOM to efficiently send large amounts of binary data, route messages through intermediaries, host Web Services outside of IIS, use the TCP/IP protocol and more. WSE 3.0 comes complete with samples and product documentation. For more information, visit the WSE home page on MSDN.

System Requirements

• Microsoft® Windows® XP Home or Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional or Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Professional or Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Server or Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003
• Microsoft® Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0, 5.1, or 6.0
• Microsoft® .NET Framework version 2.0 or Visual Studio 2005 which can be installed from here.
  Note that if you install the Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions these do not support the WSE Configuration add-in tool. This is because these versions of Visual Studio 2005 do not support any additional add-ins. However the standalone version of the WSE Configuration tool can be used to configure the project and generate policy file. The standalone version of the WSE Configuration tool can be found in the WSE Tools installation directory or launched from the Start button.

Major Features In Version 3.0

• Easier message level security with the introduction of Turnkey Security Scenarios by providing high level security building blocks that enable you to secure messaging patterns rather than having to consider how to secure the request and response messages independently. These Turnkey Security Scenarios, otherwise known as security assertions, are industry best practices when securing end-to-end messages.
• Interoperability with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). WSE 3.0 aligns with WCF on the same set of Web service specifications (see the product documentation for the complete list) thereby achieving wire-level interoperability for messages. Furthermore, the security simplification and relevant API names have been aligned so that conceptually WSE 3.0 provides many of the security features found in WCF. WSE 3.0 Policy is akin to WCF Binding. WCF clients can communicate with WSE 3.0 Web services and WSE 3.0 clients can communicate with WCF services.
• Improved Policy Framework
  • The Policy file format has been simplified to reflect the Turnkey Security Scenarios. Policy still allows configuration-based declaration of security requirements for incoming and outgoing SOAP messages, but it now concentrates on where to get the security tokens from based upon the chosen security assertion.
  • CLR attribute based programming. Policy files can now be associated with a client proxy or a service by applying a Policy attribute i.e. [Policy("ServerPolicy")]
  • Imperative and declarative programming models for policy have been aligned to provide uniform programming abstractions. In WSE 2.0 there was no correlation between the code written to secure a message exchange and declarative policy files. In WSE 3.0 through the use of the CLR Policy attribute and the SetPolicy method on WSE generated client proxies (via Visual Studio's Add Web Reference or by using the wsewsdl3.exe command line tool) policy files can now be used in code to secure a client or a service.
  • Policy also allows significant extensibility mechanisms for user-defined or custom policies in code. By extending the Microsoft.Web.Services3.Design.PolicyAssertion class to create your own policy assertion, custom transformations of the SOAP envelope can be performed at any stage in the pipeline. For example this enables you to define a logging assertion or have a policy assertion that enforces specified XML schemas for message validation. The same assertion can then be used in the declarative policy file. You can also extend the built in policy security assertions thereby tailoring the turnkey security scenarios to your needs. For example adding additonal supporting tokens to the message. Examples of custom policies are provided in the Quickstart samples.
  • An updated Security Settings Wizard helps secure an application by generating a policy through a series of simple steps. The Security Settings Wizard asks questions to choose the most appropriate Turnkey Security Scenario when securing an application and walks you through the best choice of Policy assertion for your chosen application deployment.
• Web services hosted by ASP.NET, otherwise known as ASMX Web services, can now be hosted outside of IIS, for example in console applications or Windows services and called with the TCP/IP protocol. The existing lightweight, message-oriented, SOAP programming model based on the SoapSender and SoapReceiver classes remains as an alternative messaging API.
• Support for the W3C MTOM Recommendation to enable large amounts of binary data to be sent efficiently, securely and integrated into ASP.NET Web Services programming model.
• Integration of Policy and the SoapHttpRouter class. As a result of the improvements to policy, policies can now be applied to both the received and forwarded messages when using the SoapHttpRouter class.
• More detailed tracing showing the pre-processed message on the wire, the policy assertions that processes the message and the processed message that emerges from pipeline before it is dispatch to you business logic.
• Improved session management when using WS-SecureConversation and Security Context Tokens (SCTs). SCTs can now encrypt and contain the original client authentication security token when sent from the client to the service, which enable sessions to be re-established if lost e.g. when a Web service's application domain is reset. This provides reliability for the session and enables sessions to be used in Web farm scenarios.
  • WS-SecureConversation sessions can now be cancelled explicitly.
• Signature Confirmation. Message signatures sent in message from the client can now be reflected back to the client in the response message from the server indicating that the service was able to successfully process the request.
• Integrated tool support with Visual Studio 2005. The WSE 3.0 configuration tool can be accessed via the context menu on the Visual Studio 2005 Solution Explorer. Usability enhancements have been made to the WSE 3.0 configuration tool to address common scenarios such as overriding the build in token managers and selecting certificates from particular stores when securing a message.
• Support for updated Web services specifications including WS-Addressing, WS-Security, WS-Trust, and WS-SecureConversation. For more details, see Web Service Specifications Supported by WSE in the documentation.
• Support for 64 bit runtime.
• A comprehensive set of QuickStart samples showing the numerous features of WSE 3.0.
• See the product documentation for more detailed information.

Known Issues

• The WSE Settings Tool does not appear on the Visual Studio 2005 Solution Explorer content menu. This occurs if you install Visual Studio 2005 and then install WSE 3.0 without first having started Visual Studio 2005. Ensure that you start Visual Studio 2005 before installing WSE 3.0. Alternatively you can use the Visual Studio 2005 Add-in Manager available from the Tools menu item to manually install the WSE 3.0 Settings tool if you do install WSE 3.0 without having started Visual Studio 2005 first.
• Cannot write WSE diagnostic trace files. With Microsoft Windows 2003 Server SP1, all Web services that run under the NETWORK SERVICE account cannot write WSE diagnostic trace files. To enable these services to write diagnostic files, either add write access permission for the NETWORK SERVICE account to the directory where the diagnostics files are being written or alternatively run the service under an account which has write access privileges.
• Wsewsdl3.exe cannot produce ASP.NET proxy clients when just the .NET v2.0 Framework Runtime is installed on the machine. The .NET v2.0 Framework SDK is required to be installed on the machine to successfully generate client proxies. .

Runtime and Installation Issues

• Ensure that you have ASP.NET v2.0 installed and registered. If you have Visual Studio 2003 already installed on the machine when you install Visual Studio 2005 then by default ASP.NET v2.0 is not the running version. These are the steps to ensure you have ASP.NET v2.0 running as the default.
  
  • In a Visual Studio 2005 command prompt window type in the following command: aspnet_regiis /Lv
    
    You should see the following:
    
    C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC>aspnet_regiis /lv
    1.1.4322.0 C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\aspnet_isapi.dll
    2.0.50727.0 Valid (Root) C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll
    
    Make sure you have “Valid (Root)” beside the specific version of .NET Framework 2.0 (in this case 2.0.50727) as shown in the example above.
    
    
  • If you do not have “Valid (Root)” do the following.
    In the same command window, run this command: aspnet_regiis /i /enable.
    This installs ASP.NET v2.0 and enables the ASP.NET Web Services Extension.
    

Policy Advisor Tool

The Policy Advisor is a security tool for WSE 3.0. It examines the configuration and policy files for one or more WSE endpoints, highlights typical security risks and provides remedial advice. The absence of warnings does not in itself provide strong security guarantees; nonetheless, Policy Advisor can find issues that may otherwise be missed.

The Policy Advisor is an XSL file which uses an XML endpoints file to discover and analyse WSE 3.0 security policy and configuration files. If you elected to install samples, the Policy Advisor can be found here.

 

Viewing the Documentation

In order to view the WSE 3.0 documentation you need to have either Visual Studio 2005 or .NET Framework 2.0 SDK installed on the machine.

QuickStart Samples

A comprehensive set of Quickstart samples has been created for the WSE 3.0 release in both the C# and VB.NET languages. These are located in the \Program Files\Microsoft WSE\v3.0\Samples directory. WSE 3.0 does not include prebuilt versions of the QuickStart samples. Please refer to the samples readme.htm file in the \Samples directory for instructions on building and configuring the samples.

Major Class Library Changes from WSE Version 2.0

This list is not comprehensive but highlights the some of themajor changes from the WSE 2.0 SP3 release for reference purposes.

• The assembly name has been changed from Microsoft.Web.Services2.dll to Microsoft.Web.Services3.dll. The root namespace has been changed to Microsoft.Web.Services3.
• The Microsoft.Web.Services3.Policy namespace has been superseded by the Microsoft.Web.Services3.Design namespace
• The Microsoft.Web.Services2.Security.X509Certificate class has been replaced with the .NET v2.0 Framework System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates.X509Certificate class. The same also applies to X509CertificateStore class.
• KerberosToken2 has been renamed to KerberosToken so there is only a single Kerberos token type which only supports SSPI. LSA is no longer supported.
• See the product documentation for more information on migrating WSE 2.0 applications to WSE 3.0.