Microsoft have released SOAP Toolkit 2.0 Beta 1, which integreates WSDL more thoroughly, and is also billed as a "fully Microsoft supported product."

New features in this release include:

• A SOAP Server that can call a service that exposes a COM dispatch interface with the contents of a SOAP Message based on a WSDL description of the SOAP Message and a Web Services Meta Language (WSML) file that maps the SOAP message to the COM interface.
• HTTP Interfaces for Windows 2000, NT4, Windows 98, and Windows ME.
• A WSDL reader that parses WSDL files and exposes IDispatch COM interfaces for RPC-style SOAP Services.
• A simple tool that reads basic COM typelibs and generates a WSDL file that describes a SOAP message supporting that interface.

These features show a close integration coming between Microsoft operating systems, including their key COM technology, and SOAP.

WSDL support is not yet complete in this beta release, although it implements an "extensive, but not complete" subset. Promised features in future beta releases include complete SOAP 1.1 section 5 encoding support, more complete SOAP Header support, and interoperability testing.

Microsoft appear to be using their frequent release strategy for this toolkit, which proved to work very well with recent releases of their MSXML libraries.