There is no doubt that the web-services team at Microsoft are ahead of the game when it comes to supporting the latest specifications for web-services technology. I've been fortunate enough to get my hands on WSE 2.0 and have spent some getting my hands dirty with it.
Overall I have been extremely impressed with the set of API's however as it nears release I've been spending more time with customers talking to them about how they can leverage the toolset create standards compliant web-services. Now, most customers have seen the five minute marketing presentation on building and consuming a web-service using .NET (hey, I was impressed when I first saw it - I build my first web-service on a crusty old version of SOAP4J).
When it comes time to talk about WSE I explain that Microsoft has three basic developer profiles that they target their tools at, Mort, Elvis and Einstein. The out of the box way to build and consume web-services is very much for your Mort developers, but WSE is more for your Elvis types (has anyone else described it like this). WSE 2.0 builds a proxy just like the out of the box functionality if you want to consume services in an RPC-manner - but I am trying to encourage my customers to think more message orientated.
What I would like to see in the next release of WSE (3.0, lets consider 2.0 feature frozen) is a really compelling designer experience. I'm not talking about an additional option on the project context menu, I am talking about dragging and dropping components onto the component design surface to allow me to configure the pipeline. Dammit! When a message arrives I want to be able to wireup to a “MessageArrived” event in the designer to rip the body of the envelope out.
I really wish I had thought about this much earlier, but unfortunately I didn't. I'd also love to hear what Keith and the team plan post WSE 2.0, are we going to have to wait for Indigo? You better have a Indigo4Mort (or Wse4Mort) experience sorted, let me tell you!