We attended a .Net User Group last night the .Net evangelist gave us quite an in depth overview of Web Service Extensions 2.0, 3.0, the history of WSI Web Service Interoperability Organisation (the guys who come up with the standards) and a sneak preview of Indigo.
Indigo looked very cool, quite a nice vision by Microsoft 3 lines of declarative code to enable queuing, transactions and security i.e. COM+, MSMQ, WS extn’s rolled into one. Not to mention the x number of lines of configuration xml one smart developer recognised would need to be in place … looks like Microsoft hasn’t been able to come up with mind reading software, the instructions still need to sit somewhere. Indigo should add a lot of value and ease of implementation to cross-machine\process boundary method calls.
How Indigo will integrate with BizTalk was touched on Indigo handling the message transport with BizTalk sitting atop it orchestrating the integration logic. See my post entitled The Future of BizTalk.
The big surprise however was when we go to the section entitled “How should I make my applications Indigo ready”. There were basically two points here:
1) Make sure your applications are loosely coupled and don’t expose any implementation logic outside their interfaces.
2) Don’t use .Net Remoting as Indigo won’t support it (but will provide a replacement)
The second point brought a few gasps and giggles from the crowd present. When asked the Evangelist wasn’t sure .Net Remoting would be supported in future versions of the framework. The feeling I got from him was that Microsoft has made a decision to move away from this technology and that the System.Runtime.Remoting namespace is soon to be unsupported, defunct and be absent from future versions of the framework. So you ask what should we use until Indigo is released well MSMQ or Web Services was the answer.
R. Addis