News

Microsoft Publishes More .NET Specs

• By Scott Bekker
• 05/24/2001

Thursday the company published three developer related specifications for its .NET initiative. They are the SOAP Routing Protocol (SOAP-RP), XLANG and the Direct Internet Message Encapsulation (DIME) protocol. All three can be found on Microsoft's .NET site for developers, www.gotdotnet.com.

The three specifications come a few days after Microsoft signed up security vendor McAfee.com as one of the first high-profile companies to commit to Microsoft's "Hailstorm" services.

The specifications published Thursday are:

The SOAP Routing Protocol is Microsoft's effort to provide a way for applications to send and receive messages that are routed through other applications using non-HTTP transports. Microsoft says SOAP-RP will help federate Web services of the future.

XLANG, think XML Language, is Microsoft's XML business process language in BizTalk Server. It provides a way to combine existing applications and XML Web services into larger applications. By using XLANG, developers are supposed to be able to aggregate applications into components in a business process.

DIME provides a set of extensions to SOAP and SOAP-RP that lets SOAP carry richer data types, such as audio files and bitmap files, efficiently.

On Tuesday, Microsoft announced the alliance with McAfee.com. At first, McAfee.com will launch a security service that uses Microsoft Passport for single sign-on and registration across several Web sites. Later, McAfee.com will integrate Hailstorm services as they come online.