Much of Microsoft’s enterprise computing updates are being applied to the Azure cloud, with earth-borne versions to follow. These efforts were on display at last month’s Build conference. One new Azure aspect is represented in the Windows Azure Service Bus September Release.  This software is intended to help developers build distributed and loosely-coupled applications in the cloud, as well as hybrid applications across on-premises and the cloud. Enhancements enable asynchronous cloud eventing, event-driven SOA, and advanced intra-app messaging. With this release developers no longer need to handle exceptions due to torn network connections explicitly.

While it came to life long after IBM’s Message Queue software, Microsoft’s 1999 introduction of MS MQ to Windows Server came at the right time for many .NET developers, and became a useful part of the company’s middleware portfolio. Service Bus represents a big step forward. The software supports publish-and-subscribe messaging patterns that Microsoft uses the term ‘topics’ to describe.

”Service Bus is where all our messaging based investments go on the Azure platform. It is where Microsoft’s messaging [integration middleware] is going,” said Tony Meleg, Senior Technical Product Manager, Microsoft. Everything on Service Bus is handled as a service, he said.

Service Bus is intended to work with SOA and event-oriented architectures. That is why Meleg says ”it’s not just messaging, but doing interesting things with messages.” Meleg said many such improvements to Azure eventually will appear on Windows Server.

Clearly, many cloud computing applications will be new and innovative. But many will look to relocate work that is already being done – albeit with hopes of superior outcomes. Many enterprises want to take the data transformations and message brokering being done in today’s data centers, and place that on a cloud platform. Full ESBs on cloud have been discussed. While it is not alone, Microsoft’s effort to meet architect’s messaging needs places it in the forefront of cloud vendors.

He said: ”There are Web services. And there is SOA. Microsoft has been pretty early in adoption of Web services. Where it has not put as much energy is in enabling enterprise SOA – in enabling the infrastructure of SOA. It is content with its application development framework. Microsoft has deliberately not focused on SOA governance.” This, of course, is fine with SOA Software, which supports heterogeneous systems.

For its part, SOA Software has just released a new version of its Unified SOA governance automation tools for Microsoft’s Enterprise SOA platform. It is a way of dealing with SOA services across both Java and .NET platforms, a requirement that many of Microsoft’s enterprise customers often have. The new products manage and govern Web services on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), BizTalk Server, and ASP.NET, offer improved automation of deployment, expanded auto-discovery of Web services.

New in the release is improved support for various WS policy standards. Moreover, deployment has been simplified. And ASP.NET artifacts are covered now.

”We help make sure the services in WCF will comply with those in the Java world,” he said.

He continued, ”WCF actually takes a pretty rigid approach to the [WS- Security Policy] standard. Some of the Java implementation are more lax.”

Goldsmith said the SOA Software tools can automatically up-level the capability of the Java-side services, or take over and downgrade the strictness of WCF services’ WS-Policy, WS-Security Policy and WS-addressing policy, if that is what a SOA governance policy calls for.

Exceptions to the ”.NET-mainly” trend for Azure have emerged. Earlier this year, interoperability specialist JNBridge released JNBridge Pro 6.0 with support for cross platform cloud implementations that span the .NET and Java languages. This week, Java in-memory data grid pioneer GigaSpaces announced tools that take complex Java application and integration software as-is and places it on the Windows Azure cloud platform.

Known as Cloudify for Azure, the software prepares applications by providing a Groovy-based domain-specific language for bundling deployment scripts, as well as basic out-of-the-box patterns for launching Java-on-the-cloud elements that can include the Apache server, Cassandra distributed database, the Spring framework, the XAP in memory data grid and others.

The developer can work in a familiar Java environment, which distinguishes Cloudify for Azure from first-generation clouds that required the development team to adopt the cloud provider’s language of choice. That can be a difficult aspect of what has come to be known as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

”People get the direction to move to the cloud. Then they find out it can be much harder than they thought,” said Paul Burns, Analyst, Neovise. ”If they could move their applications ‘as-is,’ it is not that hard after all.””There has been evolution in thinking about the cloud platform as a service over the last year,” said Burns. ”That is why I see GigaSpaces [for Azure] as interesting. It allows developers to keep doing what they have been doing. Cloudify for Azure helps them move those apps out to the cloud.” Meanwhile, said Burns, the software takes advantage of the Azure’s elasticity, or auto-scaling qualities.

GigaSpaces worked with the Azure platform to ensure Java developers going ‘cloudward’ would have easier deployment, too. They ”would not have to implement [for example] scalability or high-availability on their own,” said Uri Cohen, VP of Product Management, GigaSpaces.

”It is important to say that Azure was built to run .NET,” said Cohen. “If you want something that is not .NET-based, you have to do the configuration, dynamic scaling, restart of failed components and [similar tasks] yourself.” 

He said the new tools also provide better management of applications once they are up and running, adding that Cloudify for Azure was now in private beta, with a public beta due at the end of this month, and general availability anticipated by the end of the year.

GigaSpaces has evolved quite a bit since its first days. The evolution has led pretty directly to clustered cloud computing architecture.
 
”At first the company primarily focused on data caching,” said Massimo Pazzini, Analyst, Gartner. ”But it kept layering capabilities on the platform until, fundamentally, it became an application server – a container for building application logic and deploying this on a distributed grid of servers sharing the state of the application to the memory data grid.”
 
”Given that architecture, it was very natural for them to move into the cloud, which is a big, huge cluster,” he said.
 
The work with Azure is important to both GigaSpaces and Microsoft, Gartner’s Pazzini added. Much of the workload of future clouds will run on Java. And a cloud provider, be it Microsoft or Acme, has to sell CPU cycles.
 
“Microsoft has a huge infrastructure in place for Azure, and their problem is to sell the infrastructure as much as possible. They want to attract as much workload as possible,” he said.

But sometimes enterprise applications can be overdone. Grand ambition has its place, but it also invites a lot of risk, especially the risk of a failed project.

In a manner, we have seen scaled down ambitions transform the Java space. Spring and Seam and the latest version of Java EE are all about building smaller, simpler Web applications more quickly, and not trying to boil the ocean. Now, Microsoft is going the simpler-is-better route with its LightSwitch tool set, intended to rapidly build tactical applications.

This is somewhat ironic, because this is the company that wrote the book on this approach. Microsoft developer tools initially rose to prominence on the back of Visual Basic tools that were very much associated with rapid client-server application development. The application might not effectively scale, but it would prove the concept. PowerBuilder, another tool associated with that era – while kind of leaving some Visual Basic developers in the lurch. Maybe, in a way, LightSwitch is filling a gap that the .NET movement inadvertently created.

We recently spoke with Patrick Emmons, director of professional services at Adage Technologies, which builds custom software using ASP.NET for a variety of businesses. Emmons is very clear in stating that enterprise-ready is not for every situation and every person. He indicates that sometimes in a line-of-business within a large organization you have to move forward very quickly, and that, for a very young boot-strapping organization the expense of an enterprise-ready application is just overkill.  As an add-in to Visual Studio, Emmons advises, LightSwitch works just as if you were creating a project. It is a project template, but with an entirely different modeling tool for picking data sources. 

It is just in beta now, and a link to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform is in the works. This may help in scaling up future LightSwitch applications. In any case, the LightSwitch idea seems to play both to the trends of the day and to historical ones.

The name “LightSwitch” is intended to convey the notion that using it is as easy as turning on a switch.  Time will tell if it really is quite that easy – but it can be said that Microsoft and MSDN are busy providing tools that ease .NET and Azure development for a spectrum of developers – including individuals on the business side ready to try their hands at program development.

Long-time Microsoft watchers know the company rarely hits a home run its first time at bat. But software is reworked and refined until it meets the needs of a wide programming public. This can be observed in the work of its patterns&practices group. That collection of folks has worked for a number of years to cull best practices from .NET development projects. More and more good stuff is resulting. A recent  871-page book in the Thomas Erl SOA Series is completely devoted to these best .NET practices as they are applied within SOA.

Microsoft is just getting going with Azure, and their have been obvious missteps. But, with there dedicated effort to come up with a cloud computing approach that works for their customers, they do not appear to lagging anyone on the cloud front.

While Microsoft continues to work to improve performance, Somasegar said a release candidate with a “go live” license will be available some time around February 2010. With this release as a new beta checkpoint, the release data will be pushed back a few weeks, he wrote.

A recent example of this is the ADO.NET Entity Framework…

Entity Framework is a significant new take on application development for the .NET developer, but it is no slam dunk to update, especially if the .NET developer is writing to an Oracle data base. That means an opening for a data specialist such as Data Direct.

This summer the company began to offer a high-speed data access provider connecting the ADO.NET Entity Framework to Oracle DBs. Included are support for schemas, binary data types, BLOBs, XML and more.

We spoke with Jonathan Bruce, who manages DataDirect efforts for .NET and Windows platforms and SQL Engine technologies. He said there is a large coalescence beginning to happen around a single data model among Microsoft developers. That model takes the form of the Entity Framework.

“You have the central model defined now. While ADO.NET is always going to be there,
you are going to see more and more conversations around the Entity Framework as the way to get data access from the .NET platform,” he said.

Still, of course, as Bruce notes, there are always more than one way to do something like data access. One well established alternative to Enitity Framework is NHibernate, the .NET version of Hibernate.

“It is good to note the NHibernate crowd remains extremely active. I think you will see those two technologies work equally together for quite some time. And that indeed is a good thing, because competition breeds better technology,” he said. “I think they are learning from each other.”

Have we said this before? Jonathan Bruce’s blog is a great repository of data on data. Go ahead, access it!

The twentysomething COBOL coders of the 1970s are now in their late 50s and early 60s and are either retired or planning to retire.

Most of the younger generation of programmers are either in the Java world or the Microsoft world.

This would not be a problem if businesses were running exclusively on Java and .NET, but as Vecchio points out many industries, including banking and financial, are still relying on mission critical COBOL applications running in mainframe environments.

The central problem in application modernization is how to move that COBOL code into the 21st Century.

There are basically two alternatives. One is to re-write the old legacy applications in Java or a Microsoft supported language. The second alternative is to keep the legacy code but integrate it into a Java or Microsoft environment.

Among the vendors offering migration solutions, Vecchio is following the emergence this week of Alchemy Solutions, Inc., a Bend, Oregon-based subsidiary of TMV Holdings, formed as a result of the purchase of the legacy modernization products from Fujitsu Computer Systems Corp. Alchemy is now marketing the Fujitsu NetCOBOL line of products outside of Japan.

NetCOBOL provides the technology for migrating COBOL off the mainframe and into the .NET environment where it can run on less expensive commodity blade servers and interact with applications written in newer Microsoft languages, such as Visual Basic and C#.

“The Fujitsu solution that has now been spun out with Alchemy as an indpendent company is a re-hosting solution to the Windows .NET environment,” explained Gartner’s Vecchio. “It is exclusive to .NET. It utilizes Fujitsu’s NETCobol compiler for Windows. So this is a fully supported COBOL dialect in Visual Studio, on an equal footing with every other language in Visual Studio .NET”

In NetCOBOL, Fujitsu created a way to emulate IBM mainframe functionality so it can deal with the batch update paradigm of the 1970s, the Gartner analyst explained.

“They converted the app, which is still COBOL, to be a true .NET application,” he said.

This technology allows a Microsoft shop to do application modernization in a more gradual way, said Alchemy’s new chief operations officer and group president, Ron Langer.

“Our message is modernize at you migrate,” he said. “So instead of having green screens with 3270 data streams, we’re going to change the CICS to ASP.NET.”

The Alchemy approach allows Microsoft developers to work with the COBOL applications, and allows COBOL programmers to move into the Microsoft world, which he argues is easier than moving into the Java world.

“You can leverage the skills of your ASP.NET development team,” Langer said. “While bringing over existing COBOL developers. But Visual Studio and the .NET framework are a better place for the programmers that are moving off the mainframe than a Unix environment where a mixture of COBOL and Java turns out to be a difficult thing to do.

Another approach to application modernization is Attachmate’s enhancing its Verastream Host Integrator (VHI) with added WS-I compliant Web services with added FIPS-certified Crypto libraries and Native .NET client support.

This week, Jack Vaughan, SearchSOA editor-in-chief wrote about the Attachmate approach, Legacy-to-SOA modernization goes to court.