Microsoft Corp. debuted a new SOAP Toolkit, announced native SOAP support for the Microsoft Windows XP operating system, and invited SOAP developers to an interoperability event. Microsoft announced an updated version of the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit for the Visual Studio 6.0 development system. The new version 2.0 provides full support for SOAP 1.1 and the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). With the Toolkit, developers can build XML Web Services or add such capabilities to any existing application that supports the Component Object Model (COM). In addition to offering new samples and debugging tools, this release also is fully interoperable with XML Web Services built using the Microsoft .NET Framework and has been tested with SOAP implementations from a variety of other vendors. A release candidate is available for download on at http://msdn.microsoft.com/, with the final release expected to be available from the same location later this month. In addition to the stand-alone Toolkit, Microsoft also announced that Windows XP would have native support for SOAP. www.microsoft.com