After reading Rebecca Dias' entry on the future of SOAP Toolkit, I'm a bit baffled by all this. Quite honestly, I find some of her comments somewhat naive, and hard to believe, also. Let me explain why.
Rebecca mentions that "The SOAP Toolkit was deprecated by the .NET Framework". Are you serious? I mean, it's hard to take that seriously. If you are using the SOAP Toolkit, big chances are your application is an unmanaged one (for whatever reason that is). Well, then using the .NET framework might just not be an option. Besides, deprecating a single component with a whole new development platform seems like an overkill ;). How's that deprecation thing working out?
She goes on to say: "The toolkit was originally released to demonstrate basic Web services capabilities with COM components and applications.". Huh... sorry to be the one to say this, but seems like someone didn't tell the rest of Microsoft about it, since things like SQLXML depend on it, which means just released Microsoft products like BizTalk Server 2004 depend on it.
See, Rebecca: I have no problem with MS saying they're not gonna support the SOAP Toolkit anymore. That's fine. What I do find extremely annoying (and somewhat patronizing) is saying that it was "just a demonstration", given the fact that, at that time, it was pushed hard by Microsoft itself (else why make it a supported product in the first place, if it was only meant to be a demonstration?). It sounds way too much like an after-the-fact change of mind.
And yes, fwiw, I *do* have production apps running quite happily with the SOAP Toolkit that were build in pre-.NET Framework 1.0 days. They work just fine, and the client has been very happy with them.
