.NET Services Team Blog

The IT industry is in the midst of a computing transformation as more applications are delivered over the Web and through the browser. Today businesses and customers have the power of choice to run applications locally, in the cloud, or a combination of both.

The hybrid model prioritizes user and organizational experiences that rise above the level of a single computer, phone, corporate data center or Web browser, and beyond the forced choice dictated by a single deployment model, data center, or bandwidth constraint. To capitalize on these hybrid scenarios presented by cloud computing, customers need the flexibility to run their applications and services on a variety of hardware and software platforms, across a myriad of deployment scenarios.

In heterogeneous environments, customers need three capabilities in order to realize success:

(1) Connect Applications and Users – Microsoft .NET Services connects disparate applications, whether on-premises, hosted, or cloud-based, across network and organizational boundaries..

(2) Interoperability by Default – .NET Services supports Web standards and is Web addressable, enabling developers to use any programming language to connect, collaborate, and create federated applications.

(3) Federation of Data, Messages, Identity and Access - .NET Services federates data and messages, simplifying the crossing of network and organizational boundaries.  It also federates identity and access, making it easier to implement access control through a variety of identity providers, using a cloud-based service for access control. As an example, you might want to allow users to sign into your service using Live ID, a Yahoo! ID, Google, Facebook Connect, OpenID, OAuth, or any number of other standards-based ID providers.  With .NET Services, developers will find those solutions easier to build.

.NET Services includes a hosted .NET Service Bus for connecting applications and services across network boundaries, and .NET Access Control for securing applications.

Today’s news

Today, Tuesday July 7 2009, Microsoft will release an updated Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the .NET Services Software Development Kit (SDK). The latest .NET Services SDK CTP delivers support for Windows 7 RC, expedites the set-up experience, improves service security and reliability, and follows-through on the planned removal of the.NET Services Workflow Service.

As we approach commercial availability before year-end 2009, we will continue to deliver incremental improvements to the .NET Services SDK which enable loosely-coupled connections between applications and organizations, improve our by-default-interoperability across Web services standards and various programming languages, and ensure a simple, familiar experience for developers utilizing .NET Services.

Additional Detail

The July CTP Release for.NET Services SDK introduces the following updates:

(1) Windows 7 RC Support - .NET Services now supports Windows 7 RC, in addition to Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Vista.  The July CTP Release SDK can be installed on machines running Windows 7 RC.

(2) Set-up - There are multiple improvements in the set-up experience, which make it quicker for developers to get started and take advantage of the benefits of .NET Services: 

   - One-click install.

   - Integrated installer (combined UI/ unattended install) for both the SDK and the Client Redistributable.

   - The SDK installer now also supports incremental upgrades.

Workflow Service – As announced previously, after listening to customer feedback this service is being removed from .NET Services until further notice.

You can –

   - download the latest SDK at www.azure.com/netservices,

   - visit the Developers Center at http://msdn.microsoft.com/azure/netservices, and

   - follow .NET Services (@dotnetservices) on Twitter at http://twitter.com/dotnetservices.

The Microsoft .NET Services Team

Please see this blog post for the .NET Services July 2009 CTP breaking changes and scheduled maintenance detail.

.NET Services Team

Please see this blog post for the pre-announcement and scheduled maintenance detail.

.NET Services Team

Please see this blog post for upcoming changes to Microsoft .NET Workflow Service.

.NET Services Team

Last week, Network World featured a “10 Questions” article with Burley Kawasaki, Director of Developer Platform Product Management.  The article, by Julie Bort, focuses on .NET Services and covers themes of interoperability, extension of the .NET Framework, and the tie to the Azure Services Platform.  Julie makes note of the March CTP release and points out the importance of .NET and Java interoperability in a time of heated debate around cloud computing.  Other highlights of the Q&A include a mention of Microsoft partner S3Edge extending an existing .NET app to .NET Services, as well as John Shewchuk’s demo at MIX.

In addition to the Q&A, the article contains a short song about .NET Services which resulted from her challenging us to write lyrics – if she promised to sing it.

Quote Highlights:

"We want Java developers to feel comfortable accessing our technology, without having to learn anything new - they can continue to leverage their existing skills and extend their existing Java apps."

“Most of our customers have a large investment in their on-prem apps that they are trying to leverage and extend. This includes Java, COBOL, .NET, etc. Anything you can imagine can be - and is - being used in the enterprise... So it's an important design principle for us that we have to be able to interoperate with the full heterogeneity of the enterprise.”

        -Burley Kawasaki

.NET Services Team is excited to announce the release of the .NET Services March 2009 CTP.  There are many exciting improvements in  cross-platform interoperability, Services Bus and Workflow Service capabilities and the developer experience.  To learn more about this release, please see our official release announcement.

.NET Services Team

Back when what is now known as the .NET Services Team was first getting started, the team made available very early access to their work through the labs.biztalk.net web site and supporting endpoints.  This gave the team an opportunity early on to engage early adopters in order to get meaningful and very helpful feedback.  This feedback helped the team codify the work that ultimately went into the October CTP release of .NET Services. 

With the release of the .NET Services October CTP we are now able to open up this dialog to an even broader set of customers.  And although the labs.biztalk.net site served us well, it is now time for us to retire it.  Azure.com and the supporting developer portal for .NET Services and SSDS supersede the the initial work done with labs.biztalk.net.  So, as of today, we are retiring labs.biztalk.net. 

Thank you from the .NET Services Team.

We’ve experienced incredible interest in the Azure Platform Services offering we announced at the Microsoft PDC.  The CTP we made available was limited to invitation only participation. The amount of requests for invitation codes required to use the CTP has well exceeded our expectations.  As a result of such strong interest we gave Microsoft PDC attendees priority in our invitation code approval process.

As of this past Monday, we started to approve non-PDC attendees.

The .NET Services Team burned the midnight oil over the past couple of months to bring together the technologies we introduced in our October 2008 CTP release.  The team was very excited to finally be able to show our work to customers and be able to talk about what we’ve been up to and what our vision is for Cloud Services.  We heard some great feedback and we are using that to help guide our plans as we move forward.

From everyone in the .NET Services Team, we wanted to offer all the PDC attendees a warm Thank You for making the event such a success for us.