Web Disservices: Microsoft's Misstep, Mark Pilgrim (XML.com) with an interesting analysis of how MS chose to deploy a simple test web service. Seems the object was to make it easy with MS tools, hard with anything else, and not web friendly (cachable, urls, using decent HTTP authentication methods). Mark reformats it to put the method name in the URL, arguments as query arguments and authentication in the HTTP header. Lots of nice quotes, here's one:
* Microsoft has implemented its web services in as complex a manner as possible, and then it proceeds to sell developer tools that make calling those web services trivially easy. *