The Microsoft SOA solutions team recently released the Managed Services Engine - View Release  which should help nicely to fill some voids in the total SOA solution story in terms of services, repository,  provisioning and governance.

This announcement coincides with the announcement around Oslo in the SOA Business Process Conference occurring in Redmond this week. 

I had some issued installing  :

if you are installing this on Vista with SQLExpress like I do remember to open up a command window with admin access and type (thanks Chris)

Msiexec /i MSE6.msi SQLSERVER=.\SQLEXPRESS

And there you go!!

if you get this error

One of other issues I have seen

Your SQL Server may need to allow for CLR integration - by doing this  (thanks again Chris)

EXEC sp_configure 'show advanced options' , '1';
go
reconfigure;
go
EXEC sp_configure 'clr enabled' , '1'
go
reconfigure;
-- Turn advanced options back off
EXEC sp_configure 'show advanced options' , '0';
go

Lastly - go to your config file for the catalog services.exe  and update the config file to add .\SQLEXPRESS (from .)

            <WCFCatalogSvcConfig xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://services.microsoft.com/2006-07/ServicePlatform/MSE6">
            <DebugMode>true</DebugMode>
            <DBConnString>Initial Catalog=MSE6DB;Data Source=.\SQLEXPRESS;MultipleActiveResultSets=True;Integrated Security=SSPI</DBConnString>
            <baseAddress>http://localhost:8090/ServiceCatalog</baseAddress>
            <serviceEndpoints>

So what does the new MSE do - what value does this add - and here is my take..

1) No more tight coupling of services - and you don't have to install a huge ESB infrastructure solution to just solve this problem. It does this by implementing a messenger-broker-dispatcher pattern out of the box

2) Supports contract first design in WCF by allowing development teams to work while the MSE engine takes care of stubbing out the request and response while implementation occurs

3) Service Catalog and versioning - actually have a service repository that can now store various versions of the same service and all the services in your organization in one place... it only allows for the WSDL of the latest version to be published while retaining metadata of

all the old service versions

4) Leveraging POX or plain old XML based legacy interfaces that may not be WS-* compliant and quickly re-using them!!

5) Service Policy Enforcement via XAML based interface and role based view of services - for example - architect, developers, administrators  all get their own views in the mmc based tool

more later...