.NET Developer's Journal Interviews Don Box

...on his role at Microsoft. Here's an excerpt:

.NETDJ: I'm perfectly happy using ASMX for Web services - why should I care about Indigo?

DB: ASMX is the closest to "the truth" of all our shipping technologies for distributed computing. If you are doing service-oriented programming, ASMX is the easiest to use and the most likely to keep you on the straight and narrow. You have to work harder to do the wrong thing. .NET remoting is more unbounded and happily allows you to do both right and wrong things with equal ease.

There is nothing wrong with ASMX. It has some limitations. One of the limitations is that the current implementation is bound to ASP.NET and pragmatically, that means it is really about working over HTTP. It can work over other transports, but there is no easy way to do that...some assembly is required. So, as people want to use other transports, ASMX won't be enough.

ASMX also has a very coarse-grained extensibility model. SOAP Extensions allow you to replace pieces of the plumbing, but only with a very coarse-grained tool. If I want to see the actual bits as they go in or come out, or the stack frame, there are integration points exposed for this. However, if I want to see the intermediate XML, I have a lot of work to do. For example, Web Services Enhancements (WSE), has to do some fairly obscure back-flips in order to fit into this model and to do XML-based processing. The ASMX/WSE user doesn't see this, but it's definitely more work for us than it should have been.