Setting WebPart Properties through the WSS Web Services API

UPDATE: This is wrong. Read this.

I think we just found a small void in the Windows Sharepoint Services API. We're creating functionality to generate sites on the fly and we'd like to do this using the WSS Web services to avoid the dependency to Microsoft.Sharepoint.dll. The problem is that the web services API have no way of accessing webparts on the site after creation if you haven't added the wps yourself.

There is a accessor method that takes the webpart GUID as in-param, but no way of getting the collection of all WebParts on the site. There is an Add method that returns the GUID of the webpart, but we don't want to manually construct the site from scratch each time; we're using a pre-defined STP template file.

So the resolution was to go back to coding against the Sharepoint object-model directly. Though break, doing it through web services would have been that much cooler.