As part of its emphasis on developer and security issues at its annual TechEd conference next week, Microsoft will tutor attendees in the finer points of its Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 2.0 technologies.

WSE is the vehicle via which Microsoft provides annual or biannual updates to its Web-services support. The 2.0 release includes support for Web services specs upon which Microsoft, IBM and BEA have collaborated, as well as support for greater security.

It has been almost a year since Microsoft talked up its planned WSE 2.0 add-on for Visual Studio. Last July, company officials made available a "technology preview" (a k a alpha release) of the WSE 2.0 toolkit.

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In March of this year, WSE 2.0 reached the "code complete" milestone. The next logical step — which may or may not be announced at TechEd — will be the issuance of a release candidate, or near final beta, of the Web-services-specification add-on.

Company execs have said the 2.0 release will be primarily about security. It will allow developers and administrators to apply security policies on Web services that run on the Microsoft .Net Framework, according to Microsoft. Via WSE 2.0, Web services will be able to be signed and encrypted using Kerberos tickets, X.509 certificates, username/password credentials and XML-based security-tokens.

Version 1.0 supported the WS-Security, WS-Routing and WS-Attachments Web services standards. Version 2.0 will add support for WS-Trust, WS-Policy, WS-SecureConversation and WS-Secure Policy. Version 2.0 also will feature a new message-oriented programming model, Microsoft officials have said.

(This is an update to an article which originally appeared in the March 15, 2004, issue of the Microsoft Watch newsletter.)