Busted

The wise Scott Hanselman and Richard Blewett both noted that my recent post about SoapParameterStyle.Bare was apparently at odds with Tim's post about the same thing. Well, they're right. The reason? My post was - to use the euphemistic engineering term for “lame“ - sub-optimal. But allow me to explain, hopefully clearing up any web service confusion that may have arisen.

Tim and I had had an interesting conversation one afternoon while I was at his place, in which he explained to me the pattern he describes in his post...of which SoapParameterStyle.Bare is an part, but only a part. More important is combining SoapParameterStyle.Bare with the style of using a single input and single output parameter - without this you don't realize all the benefits that Tim outlines in his excellent blog entry.

Anyway, when I posted, I didn't want to tell the whole story, because I was trying to goad Tim into blogging it, and didn't want to steal his punchline. But by only explaining half, the post wound up missing the point. I've updated my old post to point to Tim's stuff in the interest of community service. :)