Microsoft

Microsoft shares tips on Azure cloud development

By Rob Barry

Ahead of its anticipated formal unveiling of the Azure cloud platform at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) next month, Microsoft is firming up tool and platform details on its version of cloud architecture. Continued »

Oslo team joins MS data programmability group

[ANALYSIS] - Microsoft has made its Oslo design team part of the company’s Data Programmability group. The news was released via the web blog of Doug Purdy, product unit manager for Oslo. It has been a journey. Continued »

New AmberPoint suite links to WCF and Dublin

Last month Microsoft re-confirmed aspects of its BizTalk server roadmap, which includes a specialized Windows ‘SOA’ server known as ‘Dublin.’ Included in the announcement was word of ESB and SOA guidance from the company that takes the form of patterns, or best practices, for customers going the SOA route.

A bit overlooked at the time was word that governance software maker AmberPoint had followed a demo at Microsoft’s November PDC expo with a formal announcement that it would extend its governance and management capabilities for the Microsoft platform.

Dublin represents Microsoft’s latest enhancements to its Windows Server application server, according to Ed Horst, Chief Marketing Officer, AmberPoint. “Like the latest version of WCF, Dublin is built from the ground up to support distributed composite applications,” Horst told SearchSOA.com in an e-mail message.

AmberPoint’s part is to govern the resulting composite applications to ensure they are compliant with management policies for such things as security and service levels, as well as to manage the transactions flowing across these federated systems, Horst said. New links with Microsoft’s WCF means developers won’t need to hand-code SOA management capabilities as they build WCF apps.

Microformats for fast REST APIs?

Microformats have been described as a set open data format standards for structured blogging and web content publishing. They have been tried out, for example, in the realm of XHTML. One tenet of the microformat movement has been to try to work with existing architectures and patterns, sometimes described as ‘paving the cow paths’. Continued »

Application modernization: COBOL meets .NET

How will IT organizations maintain the COBOL applications written by the whiz kid programmers of the 1970s? Continued »

SOA meets Cloud Computing at Microsoft PDC

For Microsoft there seemed to be a somewhat humbler tone at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles this past week. Even the biggest new SOA modeling and Cloud Computing initiatives were described as “nascent” works in progress and subject to change.
Continued »

Microsoft’s muddled modeling: Getting the ducks in line

Microsoft basically has a sturdy place in the enterprise, but its role just now is very fluid. Of course, its Windows servers have been in the enterprise a long time, and its tools are very prevalent. But its success with desktop-based developer tools is only slowly converting to success with server-based developer tools, and this is due in some part to a a muddled modeling strategy. Continued »

IBM vs. standards bodies?

Can major vendors buy standards bodies’ approval for specifications that support their products?

Continued »

Bill Gates shakes up SOA - Oslo embraces UML

It hasn’t received much attention in SOA circles yet, but last week Bill Gates broke what might be the biggest news Microsoft has made in the SOA space since the debut of .NET.

At the TechEd conference in Orlando, Fla. he announced Oslo, Microsoft’s SOA modeling project, will incorporate UML. It was also revealed that Visual Studio 10 will feature UML support. At first blush that may not sound like a big deal. After all, it’s just Microsoft embracing a popular standard modeling language.

Yet Oslo is Microsoft’s Hail Mary pass over the rest of the SOA market and apparently the company has decided to end its religious differences with UML for the sake of giving Oslo mass appeal. Previously Microsoft had been pushing domain specific languages (DSLs) as an alternative to the general purpose format of UML. Unfortunately for the folks in Redmond, DSLs have failed to gain much traction. Part of the problem is getting the people who form a domain to agree upon a standard syntax. Another part is having that DSL interact with anything outside of its domain. Those things surely will come with the march of time, but the uptake has been painfully slow.

SOA demands some commonality, that everyone stop trying to be so special and idiosyncratic. Microsoft has always understood that on some levels, but it’s got skin in the proprietary software business (actually it’s got skin, blood, muscle, bone, you name it). Its maverick tendencies have often led to it offering users products that do SOA the Microsoft way. That is in stark contrasts to the company’s Web services tooling, which has for the most part embraced open standards and heterogeneous systems (most notably Windows Communication Foundation). This is where I remind some readers out there that, yes, there truly is a difference between SOA and Web services.

In fact, one way to look at Oslo, which supposedly will offer a Community Technical Preview in September, is that this is Microsoft’s flag in the ground for SOA. It emphasizes the importance of modeling, attempting to bring the technology as close as possible to the business. As such, UML represents an excellent choice. It should create interoperability between Oslo projects and those built with rival modeling tools (e.g. IBM Rational). And Eclipse’s Modeling Development Tools Project will have a UML2 component ready by the end of the month.

UML gives Oslo a reach it never would have had if it were based on a proprietary modeling language. The UML foundation means Oslo stands a chance of being truly universal, which is as SOA a concept as you can get. It also puts pressure on the vendors backing Service Component Architecture. Has Microsoft managed to leapfrog them in terms of offering a general purpose SOA modeling platform? Or perhaps could this lead to Microsoft embracing SCA at some level, perhaps via Apache Tuscany?

With this UML announcement, Oslo suddenly ranks as a potentially powerful new addition to the SOA space. Nice to see that Bill Gates can still shake things up, even as he prepares to step down as full-time chairman of Microsoft.

Technology lock-in, SOA and Magyarsoft

Our sister site, TheServerSide.com, has an interesting post on a kerfuffle between Microsoft and some Hungarian students who are angered that the company has bought the nation’s technology curriculum.

The TSS.com audience takes the whole matter down an educational rabbit hole, but let’s try to keep focused on the technology issue here: Microsoft apparently thinks it can unring a bell. The notion that there is one technology to control them all is dead. Steve Ballmer can funnel all the cash he wants into the Hungarian educational system, but students are still going to get exposed to a bevy of technology outside of the Microsoft platform.

There’s simply too much information available to think that what amounts to a technology abstinence program has any chance of succeeding. The kids will pick up Java in the streets. They’ll program with Ruby on Rails when you’re not looking.

This is the chief reason why I dig SOA. It aims to tackle the big questions. What are the big questions you might ask? Well, you’ve now got a network that extends around the globe and a massive selection of technology at your disposal. That selection will only grow, as will the number of nodes on the network. They will in fact grow at alarming rates. So how do you use all of that in some sort of cohesive fashion? How do you find order in that chaos? How do you prepare for everything and anything? Service-orientation comes equipped with a set of principles to help address those questions.

I’ll quote Burton Group’s Anne Thomas Manes from an article we ran last year:

The technology really is irrelevant. The technology you use today is going to go away at some point. It’s about how you use technology, not what technology you use.

If you don’t get that, then you’re not ready for 21st century IT. No one is immune from it, not even Microsoft … and the national borders of Hungary will provide no defense from it. We have hit the point where there is so much technology that no single technology can afford the conceit that it will exist by itself. In fact, those technologies that seek to cloister themselves will quickly become irrelevant.

I suspect that reality will undermine Microsoft’s investment in Hungarian mindshare, turning the story from one of unseemly corporate influence to one of angry shareholders demanding to know why anyone thought this was a good idea in the first place. In fact, I imagine that after Microsoft spends beaucoup Euro on teaching young Hungarians all sorts of non-Microsoft technologies, the PR spin will be that this is an example of what a good corporate citizen it is and that it’s hoping to reap the dividends of good karma.

There’s plenty of money to be made as a player in the development market, but the quaint notion that you can curb the supply or demand for development technology stands to kick a vendor right in the balance sheet.