Info from the SOA and BPM Conference
Well ... the conference ended yestesday. Here are my main comments:
- In my opinion the most important topic was the introduction of the Roadmap for the convergence of Biztalk, .NET and other products. The proyect code name is "Oslo" and you can find additional information in Darren's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/darrenj/archive/2007/11/01/codename-oslo.aspx
- Next we have two new tools in order to make it easier to implement SOA. If you are building with WCF, then the Managed Service Engine will be useful:
http://www.codeplex.com/servicesengine
According to the description: "The MSE fully enables service virtualization through a Service Repository, which helps organizations deploy services faster, coordinate change management, and maximize the reuse of various service elements. In doing so, the MSE provides the ability to support versioning, abstraction, management, routing, and runtime policy enforcement for Services."
And if your solution will be Biztalk based, the ESB Guidance is also useful:
http://www.codeplex.com/esb/
According to the description: "The Microsoft ESB Guidance provides architectural guidance, patterns, practices, and a set of BizTalk Server and .NET components to simplify the development of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) on the Microsoft platform and to allow Microsoft customers to extend their own messaging and integration solutions."
There is a degree of overlap on both solutions, but there are by no means identical. The main information to remember is that the ESB Guidance is more oriented towards heterogenous integration (by supporting of example ramps for JMS and SOAP), while the MSE is more related to achieving some degree of governance of WCF services.
- There were several presentations on the topic of Governance and the MS proposal for a maturity model, that will be public soon. In general, we will propose a set of capacities and you will be "maturing" as you implement thm. There were explicit references to our partners AmberPoint and SOA Software.
- And the is always interesting presentations about customer cases studies, monitoring with SCOM 2007 and others. In particular I liked the presentations of how SOA enabled integration with MS own CRM and Dynamics products. These are scenarios I expect to see even more in the future. The proposal of using CRM as a customer for services makes a lot of sense, since CRM already provides several entities that you can extend using metadata. And of course you can use services to obtain information from external sources and fill those fields. I do not have a link for demos at this time, but guess this will be of interest:
http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2007/10/30/microsoft-dynamics-crm-titan-ctp3-developer-training.aspx
- I also got my hands in the latest CTP of Web Service Software Practice, but ran into problems. After some Live Searching, I traced them to GAT uninstall,see more information here:
http://savij.com/2007/05/24/uninstalling-guidance-automation-extentions/
A quick note: in Vista the C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Recipe Framework\RecipeFramework.xml folder is redirected to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Recipe Framework (which also took some Live searching). Removing the entries in RecipeFramework.xml was non trivial, since I was not able to save the file from notepad. Was I did was: copy the file to another folder with the same name, delete the original file, modify the copy and paste it back in the original folder. It worked.
I am preparing for the P&P Summit next week.
