I was sitting in Steven Martin's session this afternoon at Tech∙Ed EMEA Developer in Barcelona and was glad to see that Microsoft is continuing to invest in Modeling and Services. From a personal perspective, I was especially excited by one particular thing - BizTalk Services in the clouds.

I have been experiencing BizTalk Services for a couple of months now and thought that it is actually a very good idea to bring Services, Identity and Workflow out of the firewall and start expanding the scope of what Enterprise developers are producing by exposing it to the clouds.

However, I was still worried by the message you get at the bottom of the home page of the http://labs.biztalk.net/- "Keep in mind that the technologies available at BizTalk Labs are experimental. In many cases we have not decided on what they will be named, whether they will become fully released products, or how we will charge for them"

So every time I wanted to show this implementation to someone else, I was always threat whenever it would actually still exist in the next day, and since it was an experimental lab, I was also wondering if I could really rely on its architecture for future scenarios and start to evangelizing it. Now I have my answer : YES.

Steve's presentation was really emphasizing BizTalk.net services as the vision of Microsoft platform and as a master piece of how the .NET Framework and the BizTalk Server product will evolve. So, for those who are not very familiar with BizTalk services, let me introduce it quickly.

BizTalk Services (http://labs.biztalk.net) is a set of online connected Services. It has a Relay service that enables you to publish your service to the Internet without having to set up the entire infrastructure behind exposing a Service to the clouds. It also provides an Identity Provider Service (Security Token Service) compatible with CardSpace that delivers SAML tokens in order to protect your services. Finally, it plans in a short future, to host your Workflow Foundation Business Process for a fully-integrated business scenario implementation; all of this IN THE CLOUDS!

Imagine a world - not too far from now - where you won't need to build a complex DMZ, buy extra boxes for hosting your services & business processes - because of course, they can't sit in your Intranet - and have a dummy Identity Service (AD, LDAP service, Membership Local Database) sitting in your DMZ, completely separated form your enterprise identity provider, that uses its proprietary token just for the purpose of securing your Internet Services. This world is almost there and you can already benefit from it .

"Oslo" is the code name for a set of technical investment and architecture design we'll be making in the next release of a series of products that will support Model Driven development and that will enable Services to cross boundaries - BizTalk Service is one concrete experimentation that is serving Microsoft to envision not only .NET Framework future versions but also BizTalk Server, Active Directory through ADFS, Visual Studio and Infrastructure products like System Center.

Where should you start? Start writing Services using WCF; make sure your services are interoperable, use WCF eXtensible Security Infrastructure for Claims-based Authorization. Claims are WCF internal mechanisms for managing/mapping identity and authorization but also, Claims are easily transportable from systems to systems and from organizations to organizations using Federation.

Second, try out http://labs.biztalk.net and experience building WCF services that has been designed with the principals above, can be easily exposed to the world through just a few mouse clicks and start imagining how far you could go not only with your personal services but also with Enterprise business or Corporate business as well.

Stay tuned ... there will be more around BizTalk Services later this month.