What is the WSE? And Why Should I Care? The Web Services Enhancements Toolkit is an application that allows .NET web services programmers to implement advanced web services standards. It implements a set of input and output filters that allow you to manipulate SOAP messages, an API that enables programming of the filters from your .NET application, and a set of tools to configure the WSE, to work with X.509 certificates, and to integrate with Visual Studio 2003.  Why You Should Care If you want to use SOAP messages in your .NET web services that conform to web services specifications like WS-Security or WS-Policy, you can use the WSE to automatically generate XML elements without having to serialize them yourself. Why You Should Learn About the WSE Now The WSE is the gateway to Indigo, the Longhorn solution for XML Messaging. Microsoft plans to support this technology and it is the only tool Microsoft offers programmers right now to implement advanced web services functionality.