Last night at my .NET user group meeting the topic was WCF (Windows Communication Foundation); our speaker was a Microsoft evangelist from Hartford (his blog).  WCF is Microsoft’s next evolution beyond webservices; my take-aways from the presentation:

• separation of concerns; focus on the business logic and not the plumbing
• configuration magic (also seen as the rough edge of the current version of WCF; MS is working on improving that piece for admins)
• unshackled from IIS
• Retarget your end point to JSON, RSS, you name it, with just a few lines (one line?) of code

Of course there’s a lot more to it than that… I plan on looking into it more when I can find the time.  If you like webservices I think you're going to love WCF.  .NET 3.5 SP1 is coming out sometime this summer, they’re going to be adding further enhancements to WCF in that release.