>>>>Recently, there has been several threads on maintaining the state of a Web Service. [...] SOAP 3 provides a greater flexibility in achieving that task. [...]
>>>
>>>[...] Are you talking about SOAP Toolkit 3.0?
>>
>>Yes, MS is presently in Beta right now. [...]
>
>If I got it right, the state info is passed outside the SOAP message itself. If this is so, do you thing this is a commendable approach?

SOAP 3 is more compliant with the standard HTTP header. So, more information is passed in it and will keep the cookie state as well. If you extract the HTTP header from every message, you'll see that you have much more data available. As for the cookie state, this requires the client to have as well SOAP 3 and use it with a Web Service that requires it for specific manipulation.

If I recommend it? Definitely, as this is practically the same approach as any Web application is using right now to deal with cookies.