SOAP isn't actually that bad if you use it with a typed language like C#. It's hell trying to use it with something like Ruby/Python though - I remember struggling to talk to a SOAP API with Ruby and getting into headaches that my data was being rejected until I realised that the XML properties had to be in the exact order unlike JSON which doesn't care usually.
Import a WSDL into Visual Studio and you've got your client code automatically generated & documented (if the API was written properly), works pretty nicely to be fair. Even easier than using something like Nswag to generate JSON clients from Swagger/OpenAPI specs.
I never gave the Visual Studio WSDL code-generator the respect it deserved at the time. With hindsight, it was amazingly easy to use and generally "just worked".
> (if the API was written properly)
A very important caveat! I remember we hired some consultants from a world-renowned tech company - let's call them Big Red for now - and their big integration deliverable was a SOAP API with... one method. It accepted a string, and returned a string. And what was that one string? ...A SOAP request! The best code-generator in the world wouldn't have helped.
To this day I wonder if we actually ended up paying for that. I sure hope we didn't.
Import a WSDL into Visual Studio and you've got your client code automatically generated & documented (if the API was written properly), works pretty nicely to be fair. Even easier than using something like Nswag to generate JSON clients from Swagger/OpenAPI specs.