Speaking of standards – I’m thrilled to report that we will release the “M5” (Milestone 5) CTP (Community Technology Preview – think Beta) for .NET Services (part of the Azure Services Platform) tomorrow! For those who aren’t familiar with this effort, here’s the primer Almost two years ago, we introduced these services – Service Bus (secure messaging across networks and firewalls), Access Control (user access to web apps and services across multiple standards-based identity providers), and Workflow (for orchestrating and routing Service Bus messages). From the beginning, .NET Services was designed for multi-cloud, multi-platform use. Developers can use the .NET Services in conjunction with ANY programming language (using support for industry-standard protocols, or via available SDKs for .NET, Java and Ruby) on ANY platform to create or extend federated applications. A good overview of .NET Services is available here.
This milestone contains enhancements to all of the services including expanded support for standards like REST, ATOM, SOAP and HTTP. As I mentioned previously, we demonstrated at MIX cloud to cloud interop in action. Specifically, we showed how the Access Control Service and Service Bus could be integrated with a Python Application deployed into Google App Engine using just two lines of code. As always, feedback from developers is critical to us. So, please take time to sign up for the CTP, and tell us what you think. We’re on our way to commercial availability later this year and we need your help to get there.
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