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Rating: 
Summary: Most up-to-date book on WSE and the related standards
Review: As a Microsoft programmer, I've been watching emerging Web service standards with great interest. Having programmed extensively with WSE 1.0, I am eagerly awaiting version 2.0 of WSE as it supports WS-SecureConversation, WS-Trust, and WS-Policy and its related specifications. Jeannine's book is the only one out there that covers these critical new WSE 2.0 features and specifications, and she gives some great examples of using SecurityContextTokens in a client-service interaction and using policy statements to automate security for a Web service. Since the WSE SDK documentation hasn't been great, this book is a must for WSE programmers. Hopefully, Jeannine will add some TCP-based messaging samples in a future version of this book. As a bonus, she describes some important specifications not supported by WSE, like WS-Coordination and WS-AtomicTransaction, and her ideas on where Web services are headed are very compelling. Clearly, this book is on the cutting edge of advanced Web services.
Rating:
Summary: .Net - the future
Review: I am a user of .Net Services in a variety of forms. My favorite is Blackboard for teaching. The .Net Specifications book provides a great insight into what can be done with the XML message interfaces. It also shows that a high level of security can be maintained. I am going to keep this book handy as I try to really understand .Net applications.
Rating: 
Summary: This was the most useless book I've seen from MSPress
Review: The book offers not more information that can be found on MSDN but formatted much much worse than the MSDN content. There are very few specifics and virtually no detail. The code and XML snippets are hardly described. This material qualified for a magazine article at most, and not for a professional book.
Rating:
Summary: Most up-to-date information on the WS-Specs and WSE out righ
Review: This book gives readers a brief introduction to WS-Specs like WS-Security, WS-Policy, WS-Attachments, WS-SecureConversation, WS-Trust and WS-Transactions, and shows how to use the WSE (based on early adopter 2.0 code) in conjunction with these specs. This book is good for someone who is a beginning to intermediate web services programmer, who wants to learn how to use the WSE to secure their web services. I thought Jeannine did a good job of laying out the basics, with enough code samples to walk the reader through. It does require basic knowledge of .NET coding, since the code samples use C#. I'm looking forward to downloading the sample code - although it's based on a beta of the 2.0 code, and all we can download right now is the tech preview. There is no other book out there right now with the 2.0 code, or the latest on the specs, which are still in the process of changing.
Rating:
Summary: Great read for web services programming
Review: This book helped me understand more about WS-specifications, and to learn to program with Microsoft's new version (2.0) of the WSE. It was easy to read and had useful programming examples.
Rating:
Summary: Very informative introduction to Web Services.
Review: This book really increased my understanding of the subject WSE SDK. The code samples helped me understand more about the WS-specifications. The author explains the potential of WS-security and WS-policy and shows examples of how this can be implemented.
Rating: 
Summary: Great review of WS concepts
Review: This is a great book for system architects who build complex, distributed, advanced applications using XML Web services in .NET, or would like to. While admittedly not a code-centric tutorial guide, it does serve to clarify many of the questions a developer considering the Microsoft .NET Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 2.0 would have, and demystifies many of the questions posed about interoperability between WSE versions and across platforms like .NET and J2EE.Contrary to the criticism that some have unfairly labeled the book with, I didn't find the material to be rehashed MSDN articles that would be otherwise easily accessible on that site. Rather, author Jeannine Hall Gailey gives an academic overview of the areas for WSE 2.0 under development by those architecting the web service model on a macro level (BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Sun, etc.). Instead of regurgitated programming articles, Jeannine (whose body of work in writing about WSE and the high-end use of SOAP in .NET environments is most impressive) presents a complimentary collection of easy-to-follow articles on advanced uses for extending SOAP's capabilities, using a writing voice that's welcome and friendly. (You'll surely appreciate this latter benefit, as the material can get quite complex at times.) So rather than give you code to nail down a specific problem, an overview of the web services model and of next-gen apps relying on SOAP is examined. And you'll more well-rounded and better off because of it. When used in combination with the code found on her articles at MSDN, they make for a very effective guide to helping you build powerful systems. At 232 pages, the book is a great quick read, giving the reader a high-level understanding of many of the concepts being discusses and/or enforced by the web services powers-that-be. The major WS-* considerations such as attachments, security, reliable messaging, coordination and policy enforcement are described. The book is written beautifully and organized logically, with easy to understand hypothetical scenarios. The book makes mention of SOAP 1.2, and while it admits to leaning towards the SOAP 1.1 spec for the moment, does take the time to mention the differences between the two. There's also a very healthy amount of information for two technologies you're likely to have lots of questions about - encryption and DIME attachments. There was a terse mention of working with SOAP messages across SMTP, and I would have liked to see more of a discussion on this topic. There's lots of good information about other transport protocols like HTTP, TCP and UDP, but sadly, not much on SMTP for building secure messaging systems over e-mail. But I can't pin this minor shortcoming directly on the author - the Web is currently sorely lacking such information outside the scope of mentioning that SOAP can transport across SMTP. But aside from that, this book is a great read for those looking to take SOAP to the next level and really leverage the WSE in their applications.
Rating:
Summary: Great review of WS concepts
Review: This is a great book for system architects who build complex, distributed, advanced applications using XML Web services in .NET, or would like to. While admittedly not a code-centric tutorial guide, it does serve to clarify many of the questions a developer considering the Microsoft .NET Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 2.0 would have, and demystifies many of the questions posed about interoperability between WSE versions and across platforms like .NET and J2EE. Contrary to the criticism that some have unfairly labeled the book with, I didn't find the material to be rehashed MSDN articles that would be otherwise easily accessible on that site. Rather, author Jeannine Hall Gailey gives an academic overview of the areas for WSE 2.0 under development by those architecting the web service model on a macro level (BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Sun, etc.). Instead of regurgitated programming articles, Jeannine (whose body of work in writing about WSE and the high-end use of SOAP in .NET environments is most impressive) presents a complimentary collection of easy-to-follow articles on advanced uses for extending SOAP's capabilities, using a writing voice that's welcome and friendly. (You'll surely appreciate this latter benefit, as the material can get quite complex at times.) So rather than give you code to nail down a specific problem, an overview of the web services model and of next-gen apps relying on SOAP is examined. And you'll more well-rounded and better off because of it. When used in combination with the code found on her articles at MSDN, they make for a very effective guide to helping you build powerful systems. At 232 pages, the book is a great quick read, giving the reader a high-level understanding of many of the concepts being discusses and/or enforced by the web services powers-that-be. The major WS-* considerations such as attachments, security, reliable messaging, coordination and policy enforcement are described. The book is written beautifully and organized logically, with easy to understand hypothetical scenarios. The book makes mention of SOAP 1.2, and while it admits to leaning towards the SOAP 1.1 spec for the moment, does take the time to mention the differences between the two. There's also a very healthy amount of information for two technologies you're likely to have lots of questions about - encryption and DIME attachments. There was a terse mention of working with SOAP messages across SMTP, and I would have liked to see more of a discussion on this topic. There's lots of good information about other transport protocols like HTTP, TCP and UDP, but sadly, not much on SMTP for building secure messaging systems over e-mail. But I can't pin this minor shortcoming directly on the author - the Web is currently sorely lacking such information outside the scope of mentioning that SOAP can transport across SMTP. But aside from that, this book is a great read for those looking to take SOAP to the next level and really leverage the WSE in their applications.
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