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:
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.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.