Another CTP release is coming for the .Net Services cloud offering in October and again there are some changes to their existing web service offerings. The team is changing their focus from primarily SOAP-based services to REST-based services and simplifying the product and protocols.

It’s not specifically mentioned but I’m going to assume that they’ll continue to be based on WCF 3.5 until after we release .Net 4.

Here’s a look at what’s being added as well as what’s being removed from their existing service offerings:

• The access control service is getting an authorization module to handle Web trust scenarios for REST services
• Some of the existing access control service features related to single sign-on and SOAP-based security integration are being removed
• The service bus HTTP SOAP bindings will be reduced to the most recent version of protocols instead of also supporting older protocols (we originally released WCF before many of the SOAP web service protocols were standardized and created later versions as an update in Orcas)
• The service bus router and queue are being replaced with simpler alternatives

The complete announcement for the October 2009 .Net Services CTP is on their team blog.