An important thought for anyone building services for a service oriented architecture. When you build your service, also build a service stub that your clients can use to test against. Such a stub should provide canned responses to a fixed set of requests, simulate error conditions, and be runnable on a client's machine. You'll need to ensure that the stub mimics the true systems behavior properly. By providing a stub for your clients, you make it much easier for your clients to use your service; which of course means that your service is more likely to be used.