Schema validation in webservices

Recently a friend of mine was working on a .NET SOA project and was facing a peculiar problem.The XML Schema he was using had a lot of restictions such as minOccurs, maxOccurs, int ranges, string regular expression patterns, etc.

But unfortunately in .NET 2.0 webservices, there was no easy way to validate input messages based on this schema. The reason for this behavior has to do with XmlSerializer, the underlying plumbing that takes care of object deserialization. XmlSerializer is very forgiving by design. It happily ignores XML nodes that it didn't expect and will use default CLR values for expected but missing XML nodes. It doesn't perform XML Schema validation and the consequence is that details like structure, ordering, occurrence constraints, or simple type restrictions are not enforced during deserialization.

Unfortunately there is no switch in .NET 2.0 that can turn on Schema validations. The only way to validate schemas is to use SOAP extensions and validate the message in the extension code block before deserialization occurs. The following links show us how to do it:
1. MSDN-1
2. MSDN-2

In the J2EE world, JAX-WS 2.0 has become the default standard for developing webservices. In most toolkits, we essentially have 2 options: Let the SOAP engine do the data-binding and validation or separate the data-binding and schema validation from the SOAP engine. For e.g. In Sun Metro project, validation can be enabled for the SOAP engine using the @SchemaValidation attribute on a webservice.(https://jax-ws.dev.java.net/guide/Schema_Validation.html)
In Axis 2, there is support to enable schema validation using the XMLBeans binding framework.

I found this whitepaper quite valuable in understanding the various options for schema validation in JEE webservices.