Java and .NET interoperability session at Egypt Java Developers Conference

pooyad — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 18:49:00 GMT

I had the pleasure of speaking at the 2nd annual Java Developers Conference being held in Cairo (where Microsoft was a gold sponsor) by the Egyptian Java User group. The session was about interoperability, specifically interoperability at the application layer between Java and .NET and the many ways you can achieve interop, but really the one that stands out is web services. Most of my work is done around SOA these days and usually we talk about reusability, but it's also about platform and language indepent implementations that are interoperable, all because of webservices and XML.

This session for about 600 Java developers also gave me the chance to change some perceptions of Microsoft and show off some of our cool new technologies where I focused mainly on the web. After just coming back from MIX, there was no shortage of demos and I only wish I had more time in the session.

The audience was great and asked some good questions, they were very interested but as happens with people who are not in the "Microsoft world" they were'nt aware of many of the new aspects of .NET and the path that Microsoft is on with our work in open source.

Update: In a timely manner, Kirk Allen Evans posts on Java and .NET interoperability from a slightly different angel, pointing out fast infoset and the .NET and Biztalk implementations for JMS. Incidentally, Kirk's blog was the first place I learned what an Architect Evangelist does at Microsoft even before joining the company myself.

Another big step in the right direction

pooyad — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 19:07:00 GMT

Microsoft has continued to improve in the area of interoperabillity in the recent past and today is a big day in that regard. I spend a lot of time talking to our customers about our efforts in interoperablity, fighting some past perceptions of Microsoft. Most of these discussions are in the SOA space where a set of standards (XML, WSDL, SOAP, WS-*, ...) have played a big part in making interoperability for applciaitons real. Today, Microsoft announced a major step towards even more interoperablity; see the press release and the interoperablity site for all the details, the highlights for me are below:

... starting today Microsoft will openly publish on MSDN over 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows client and server protocols that were previously available only under a trade secret license through the Microsoft Work Group Server Protocol Program (WSPP) and the Microsoft Communication Protocol Program (MCPP).
To promote user choice among document formats, Microsoft will design new APIs for the Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications in Office 2007 to enable developers to plug in additional document formats and to enable users to set these formats as their default for saving documents.

Both of these are major steps and in the end should help our customers to give them more choice.

Pooya's place (in the Gulf) : interoperability

Java and .NET interoperability session at Egypt Java Developers Conference

Another big step in the right direction