Yeah, that's really the only time it works. The problem is, for 10 years vendors have been crowing about how it enabled .net to talk to java to talk to Cobol

Yeah, that's really the only time it works. The problem is, for 10 years vendors have been crowing about how it enabled .net to talk to java to talk to Cobol (or whatever) and that's just plain false. I've been in multiple shops where we established it was easier to write custom wire protocols than it was to try and get the various SOAP providers to talk to each other... e.g. Like Biz-talk... what a joke... Works great as an enterprise integration tool as long as your entire enterprise is running the same version of windows... and start drinking heavily now if you happen to have mainframes or -nix machines, cause you'll waste gob's-o-cash trying to get these things all hooked together.