Hace unos días un amigo (trabaja en un partner) me comentaba que había dedicado un rato a ver un Webcast de SQL Server 2008 y que la experiencia le había resultado buena; vamos, que como primera toma de contacto le servía de ayuda para un primer conocimiento, en este caso, de las mejoras de esta nueva versión de SQL Server.

Este comentario me ha recordado que el recurso de los Webcasts es, creo yo, bastante desconocido o poco utilizado, y, sin embargo puede aportar bastante para empezar a conocer una determinada tecnología o saber de qué va un tema. Por este motivo pongo aquí una pequeña lista de algunas sesiones sobre SOA que están disponibles en microsoft.com/soa, con una breve descripción (nunca se sabe, en un rato de aburrimiento o noche de insomnio a uno hasta le puede dar por ver un Webcast).

• SOA Workshop for Architects: SOA Overview

Presenter: John deVadoss, Microsoft Corporation
Learn how the Microsoft Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) vision and technology can help you realize a more agile and connected enterprise by using an IT infrastructure that can help streamline business processes, increase customer responsiveness, and improve interactions with key partners.

• SOA Workshop for Architects: Messaging & Communications

Presenters: Steve Swartz and Don Smith, Microsoft Corporation
Applications commonly communicate with other applications, both inside and outside the organization. Modern applications also must often fit into a service-oriented architecture (SOA), exposing some of their functionality as interoperable services accessible by other software. Achieving these goals requires support for service-oriented applications to communicate with other services.
In this session we’ll share with you the technology Microsoft provides to build web services that support the latest WS-* standards endorsed by all major vendors. In addition, we’ll tie it in with the previous discussion around Software Factories and show how Microsoft supports rapid development of these services through tooling support.

• SOA Workshop for Architects: Business Process & Workflow

Presenters: Kris Horrocks, Microsoft Corporation
In this session we will discuss the Business Process and Workflow capabilities necessary in service oriented architecture and provide guidance for selecting the most appropriate technology from Microsoft’s portfolio. We will discuss the requirements for service composition in client applications, composite services, service intermediaries, and line of business applications. In addition, we will examine the differences between general purpose workflow platforms, domain specific workflow products, and cross organization business process concerns.

• SOA Workshop for Architects: Tools & Modelling

Presenters: Erik Gunvaldson, Don Smith, Microsoft Corporation
The advance in tooling has allowed business to drive down the cost of development by over 100% in the last 10 years. However, in the same period of time the number of successful projects has not increased significantly. In fact it has consistently run at right around 30% of projects are deemed successful. Software development, as currently practiced, is slow, expensive and error prone, often yielding products with large numbers of defects, causing serious problems of usability, reliability, performance, security and other qualities of service.
This talk addresses how to identify typical customer pains in software development and shows how Microsoft tools offer a solution that enables collaboration across the extended team of project managers, architects, developers, testers, and business stakeholders and allows new solutions to be developed faster, cheaper and better though industrialization of software development.

• SOA Workshop for Architects: Enterprise Service Bus

Presenter: Kris Horrocks, Microsoft Corporation
This webcast explores the service oriented capabilities necessary to support mediated service communication and our guidance for implementing an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) on the Microsoft platform. In addition, we will discuss the increasing need for broadly available service bus capabilities beyond the edges of the enterprise.