Ok, how do I sum up Day 1. After the keynote there were only a two session slots to fill. I visited “What’s Next for the .NET Framework and Distributed Applications”, which was a nice round up of things to come in the BizTalk area. The most interesting keyword here was Biztalk Services (see http://labs.biztalk.net/). I had the chance to dip into a bit of BizTalk back in 2000 as part of a Compaq Early Adopter program but haven’t gone any deeper or refreshed my knowledge since then - basically because I haven’t had to. But BizTalk Services sparked my interest again. There’s a good blog post here and I’ll just quote a bit.
BizTalk Services are a first step to implementing what Microsoft calls an Internet Service Bus (ISB) in order to support SaaS (Software as a Service) and S+S (Software and Services) models. The fabric of the ISB is built on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). WCF, itself, is a platform-level messaging framework, and part of the .NET Framework. It is not a product, and is not really a service bus, but it is a (very rich and flexible) foundation on which service buses can be built. ISB is a service bus built on that foundation. Interestingly, the main functionality for the ISB provided by the BizTalk Services SDK is packaged in an assembly called System.ServiceBus.dll, which makes it sound like a future extension to the.NET framework libraries.
The second session was about DinnerNow.net. A nice demo showing off all the current Microsoft technologies. Check it out here.
I’ll leave with you some visual impressions…
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