Wow!! finally something huge to look forward to. Just got alerted to the Oslo announcement at the SOA BPM conference and theres good details on blogs from Tim Rayburn and Charles Young. Looks like factories will make their way into the Biztalk space and not only that, theres even a full blown repository.
Gosh, I wish […]
So the keynote at the SOA & BP Conference did a slightly better job of setting
down exactly what the tenets of Project Oslo are than the material I had previously
received. Basically there are two “big bets”:
Services – The phrase “Doubling down on services” was the catch phrase, but in short
the innovation level that drove the creation of WCF will not be slackening, but instead
it will not begin to roll across the whole server line. This is how server products
will expose themselves is the message. Good to hear, but slow in the coming.
You’re going to be a rev or two for many of these server products before they have
WCF hooks built in.
Model – Microsoft will ship a unified modelling tool which will cut the vertical slice
from development to management. The demos were incredible, the visualizations
sharp, and it will all be stored in a single common repository. Out-stand-ing.
If they can deliver on this, it will change the game.
Obviously this will engage a large number of teams at Microsoft, and as such there
is risk involved in their delivery of it. Further a slick demo is easy, and
I look forward to playing with the actual CTPs which have been promised “next year”
to be able to actually work with this myself.
MS
is announcing Oslo today – http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/oct07/10-30OsloPR.mspx.
I’m
here at the SOA/BPI conference listening to Don Ferguson and Robert Wahbe – and I
think they are about to announce.
Oslo
is going to bring a pretty interesting time in Services development over the next
few years. The thing I am most happy about is the continued investment in the
technology I love – BizTalk. I also think BizTalk Services is going to
be really big – and not to leave out the modeling. For those of you have seen
me talk about BizTalk and WF – I always emphasize the power of having a model of your
business process. Now we are talking about having a model of the whole application
as well, and a repository to hold them. The future looks bright….
Check out my BizTalk
R2 Training.
Today in Redmond, during our keynote for the SOA and BPM conference, we announced our vision and multiyear investment in a wave of products which will simply building SOA & BPM solutions (codenamed “Oslo”). For more information, please see the related CNN Money article.
You definitely want to check out our newly launched SOA web site which provides lots of guidance on how to implement SOA & BPM solutions today.
Best Regards,
Marjan Kalantar
Today is the first day of the Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference 2007
and they have decided to start it with a bang. This morning Microsoft has come
clean with a great deal of detail regarding a new project code-named Oslo. Oslo
is not a product, but rather an over-arching project which will contain within it
updates to many products and services including BizTalk Server, Visual Studio, and
more.
What does Oslo contain?
Oslo is going to invest heavily into 5 major areas, specifically:
.NET Framework : Major investments into Model-Driven Development
surfaced through WCF and WF. These changes will manifest in the .NET Framework
vNext (presumably the .NET Framework 4.0 but we all know about Microsoft’s marketing
division and .NET Framework versioning).
BizTalk Services : These services currently
available in a test form will reach full commercial implementation. If you’ve
not had a chance yet to look at these previews, now is the time because they are definitely
a major part of the future vision.
Visual Studio : Two things, one great, another I could live without,
are going to happen to Visual Studio. The great part is that Model-Driven Development
will get “deep support”, and will focus on delivering composite applications.
The part I could live without is that there is talk about Rosario (vNext of Team System)
supporting “greater roles” … and as we all know, more roles means yet more sub-divided
SKUs for Visual Studio.
Repository :Incredible as it may seem, Microsoft has caught
onto the clue-train of Metadata repositories and will be investing in System Center,
Visual Studio and BizTalk Server to make them all talk to a common repository.
This is great news, and will help close some of the overall SOA gaps.
BizTalk Server “6” : The vNext of BizTalk Server will expand the
integration with both WCF and WF. What does that mean? Details are few
right now, but it will probably mean two things.
First the XLANG/s Orchestration engine is going to be deprecated and a new Windows
Workflow Foundation engine will be introduced.
Second the existing adapter framework will also be deprecated (which it essentially
is in R2) and Windows Communication Foundation will be used for all future adapter
development.
An interesting part of this is the word that BizTalk will likely support the WS-Eventing
protocol and a full Publish-Subscribe routing model. As I’m sure I’d be reminded
by Sam Gentile, Neudesic already
has a publish-subscribe product today.
Sounds cool … when can I get some?
Short answer is 2009 or later. As with most Microsoft dates this far out I’d
bet on later. There is nothing here which is remotely CTP or Alpha yet, this
is a lot of vision from the Connected Systems Division about where they are headed.
Key thing to remember is we are talking about technology built on a version of the
.NET Framework after 3.5, which won’t release for a few weeks yet
itself. Still it is good to know where Microsoft’s head is at officially on
these things.
Bottom Line
Taken as a whole, there is only one part of this which is really huge, and that is
the Repository announcement. That Microsoft is investing in a solid metadata
repository, that they get the reasons for this, and that they are attacking a complete
vertical slices in System Center (runtime management), Visual Studio (design time),
and BizTalk Server (runtime environment/host).
The other thing we should be ready for is that “BizTalk” is now a generic term like
“SQL Server”. Just like how “SQL Server” is slapped on everything (Reporting
Services, Service Broker, Notification Services, Express editions, etc) we can expect
that the “BizTalk” brand will start appearing on more and more things. There
were signs of this already with the “BizTalk Adapter Pack” which in fact have no BizTalk
dependency and are in fact simply WCF adapters.
Takeaways
If you are a BizTalk developer and you don’t know WCF and WF well already, go learn
them right away and in that order.
Spend some time learning about metadata repositories from the competitors in the market
(IBM for instance) so you’ll understand what the fuss is about here.
Software + Services : Microsoft has been promising this is their direction for some
time now, and it appears BizTalk Services may be one of the first actual set of services
to reach a full commercial release.
The official announcement session is about to start here at the conference, I’ll follow
up with more posts if they hit on anything not covered here already.
My friend Aaron Skonnard has published a phenomenal white paper about the WCF adapter in BizTalk Server R2…(read more)
Sitting here at the Microsoft SOA & BP Conference…listening to the keynote.
They just said it in public…”Oslo”.
What is it? A huge vision from Microsoft for a modern SOA platform.
More to come.
I’ve just arrived in Seattle for the Microsoft SOA & BPM conference that kicks off on Tuesday 30th October in Seattle, I’m presenting a best-practice session on Wednesday afternoon titled “How everyone should test their BizTalk Server based solutions”, it’s a great deck with some compelling demos that went down very well at a internal technical conference earlier this year. If we can get BizTalk solutions tested properly – the world will be a much better place!
More as the week goes on, should be some interesting presentations……. In the meantime Sam Gentile has a great running commentary of the week.
A question was recently raised on the biztalkgurus.com forum, that went something along the lines of:
I’ve seen the phrase Message2(*) = Message1(*) in the ‘helper text’ for the Message Assignment shape, but I’m not too sure what it does, or how it is different from Message2 = Message1. Any ideas?
I replied to the question, albeit […]