A collection of Web services developed by Microsoft Corporation that are intended to reposition the company as a provider of Internet-distributed services, including software maintenance and upgrades and transparent access to one’s data, files, and software from any device at any location.
The architecture is intended to replace Microsoft’s Component Object Model (COM) and COM+ middleware architectures with a framework that closely resembles Sun’s Java 2 Enterprise platform (J2EE). It relies on a Java-like development language (C#), a Common Language Runtime (CLR) that resembles a Java virtual machine, and a set of protocols for Web-based services, including XML, SOAP, Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI). See antitrust, SOAP, UDDI, XML.
