So URI based services are super popular right now. REST/POX etc...

SOme great stuff coming in .NET 3.5 to do this really easily by basically allowing URI based access into WCF services. Includes things like the ability to push back raw binary data across the HTTP stream.

This allows .NET developers to QUICKLY do 'Webby' style web services.

All these bits are there to be played with in the Biztalk Services SDK. Basically they have branched off a good chunk of the new .NET 3.5 Beta 2 bits and shipped them in this SDK.

The blog to watch on this is Steve Maine- he's the PM for Web Access features in WCF.

http://hyperthink.net/blog/

There is more great stuff around this in the Biztalk Services SDK. Particularly ServiceModel.WebClient namespace. This is basically client side stuff for easily accessing URI based content.

SO the new web response has a generic GetBody method... so you can do

response.GetBody
<

.

It's all just syntactic sugar across HttpWebRequest so it works very similar in terms of resource usage (little) and auto prroxy config.

Just saw a cool piece of tooling that shipped with the BT Services CTP yesterday.

It allows you to copy a piece of example XML to the clipboard.

Then go Edit > Paste XML as Serializable Type

It then infers schema and does an xsd.exe all under the hoods and pastes in a serializabl .NET type.

It's a batch file in the tooling directory.

So to get it RIGHT NOW go and grab the Biztalk Service SDK.

This SDK is Biztalk in name only.... it's a far more broadly applicable to general distributed .NET development.... This is definitely something you should be downloading if you do WCF dev.