After reading a comment here on my blog, (thank you for actually commenting here, I really appriciate people that read). I though a little more on the subject. I remain basically at my previously stated opinion but would like to add a small exception, which of course for most of you is actually the main issue - so you would think I agree with you.
I think it is a vendors obligation to support the tools he provides. For a small vendor that would be supplying documentation amd bug fixes, for larger vendors, supply some code snippets and tools to use. This to a large extent is whats happening in this case. MS (and IBM, though I'm not really famailiar with what they provide) supply the REST developer with many tools.
You can use VS (also .NET) to develop any rest application you want, You can use WinHTTP (or XMLHTTPRequest) to test it in various ways (not to mention IE). Actually I believe that today more main stream automated QA tools support REST only, and do not even know how to deal with SOAP.
Code examples? Just take a look at older MSDN and other related stuff. It is practically full of it. How do you think I learned how to do it. See this for example.
The problem is, MS is not doing this anymore, hardly (if any) code examples of the old methods, certainly no articles in any magazine. No demos of exciting options, no Best practices or design patterns.
As a programmet who still uses these on a day to day basis, or as a system architect thinking of using such method, I would have liked to have this info from the source - i.e. Microsoft. Someone who is cerified to tell me what is better POST or GET, Key+Value, CSV? XML? I don't expect a framework because the whole beauty of REST is that you can do it anyway you want - IMHO that's the most powerfull feature, but some more info would be welcomed. I suspect that during the .NET development and through years of supporting these methods, Microsoft has more info than we can swallow - so please share with us. We would really appriciate it.
On the other hand, I understand MS has vested interest, so, to conclude, I don't want (I do but I can give up on) fancy dev events, and free CD's and toys. But a few Webcasts [* I work for Interwise we have some stake in webcasting - but I really think that it's a good tool for learning] or even better documentation on MSDN would be most welcomed.