As of July 1st, 2009, Web Services Dynamic Discovery 1.1 is an official OASIS standard, Microsoft revealed. OASIS, which is an acronym standing for the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, defines itself as a not-for-profit consortium focused on fueling not only the development, but also the convergence and adoption of open standards that are designed to serve the global information society. Mary P McRae, director, Technical Committee Administration, OASIS, informed that Web Services Dynamic Discovery 1.1 had been submitted for standardization. Voting Representatives of OASIS member organizations had between June 16th, and June 30th, 2009 to submit their votes and, as of the first day of July, Microsoft's WS-Discovery 1.1 is an OASIS standard.

“This specification defines a multicast discovery protocol to locate services. By default, probes are sent to a multicast group, and target services that match return a response directly to the requester. To scale to a large number of endpoints, the protocol defines the multicast suppression behavior if a discovery proxy is available on the network. To minimize the need for polling, target services that wish to be discovered send an announcement when they join and leave the network,” Microsoft informed.

According to Vipul Modi, Microsoft Software Design Engineer/Test, the “discovery bits included in the .NET 4.0 Beta1 package implement this specification.” Microsoft released the first Beta of the .NET Framework version 4.0 in mid-May 2009, concomitantly with the Beta 1 development milestone for Visual Studio 2010.

“The Web service specifications (WS-*) are designed to be composed with each other to provide a rich set of tools to provide security in the Web services environment. This specification specifically relies on other Web service specifications to provide secure, reliable, and/or transacted message delivery and to express Web service and client policy,” the Redmond company added.

.NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 is available for download here.