Microsoft SOA/BPM Roadmap leads to Oslo
The vision
I am currently attending the our 5th annual SOA & Business Process Conference where we unveiled the future direction of our SOA and business process platform with the public announcement of Oslo. Oslo is a set of technology investments across our Application Platform for building service oriented and model driven applications. We will begin talking about some of these broad investment themes and priorities of our strategic vision at the conference, which stretch well beyond 2009. Oslo is the first specific and tangible step that customers will see from Microsoft towards this vision.
What product and technology components will be delivered?
The first version of “Oslo” will be delivered through the next versions of our application platform products:
1 Framework: The .NET Framework “4” release will make further investments in model-driven development as part of our Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Workflow Foundation (WF) technologies. This will be the logical successor to the .NET Framework 3.5 release happening later this calendar year.
2 Server: This release will continue to evolve our BizTalk family of products as the distributed platform for highly scalable SOA and BPM solutions. BizTalk Server “6” will build deeply on top of both WCF and WF as its core foundation, and deliver the capability to develop, manage and deploy composite applications.
5. Services: Extending the early BizTalk Services incubation (currently available at labs.biztalk.net), the BizTalk Services “1” release will deliver a commercial release of hosted services that enable cross-organizational composite application scenarios. This includes expanded capabilities around hosted messaging, identity and workflow capabilities. This initiative is AKA the Internet Service Bus.
4. Tools: These investments will advance the application lifecycle management capabilities of Visual Studio Team System and provide support for an expanded range of roles. Furthermore, Visual Studio “10” will provide deep support for model-driven design and deployment of composite applications.
§ Repository: There will also be investments aligning the metadata repositories across the Server and Tools product sets. System Center “5”, Visual Studio “10” and BizTalk Server “6” will utilize a common repository technology for managing, versioning, and deploying models.
What are the major benefits delivered by “Oslo”?
1. Integrates With What You Already Have: “Oslo” lets you build upon the existing and familiar investments you’re already made in skills/technology on top of the Microsoft SOA platform, while simultaneously opening up a rich new set of capabilities. “Oslo” enhances and aligns BizTalk Server and the .NET Framework and provides significant enhancements across a range of SOA infrastructure services like federated identity, messaging, and long running activities. “Oslo” also enables simplified service enablement and composition of your existing legacy or packaged applications through rich interoperability support delivered through adapters, Web services and Web 2.0 protocols.
2. Provides a Unified platform for Software + Services: “Oslo” further extends the benefits of services into the cloud, by delivering an enterprise-class, unified platform for building both SOA and SaaS applications. This enables our enterprise customers to more easily build composite applications that federate across organizational boundaries, take advantage of new cloud-based services, and provide the flexibility to deploy applications in house, 3rd party hosted, or Microsoft hosted environments.
3. Connects the End-to-End Application Lifecycle: The technical investments that make up “Oslo”, in conjunction with Visual Studio Team System, helps to further connect business and IT stakeholders across the full application lifecycle, by giving new ways to easily develop, deploy, manage and scale applications using integrated tools and application models. This enables managing end-to-end composite applications as a whole system rather than individual pieces. “Oslo” products and technologies will integrate with and enhance Microsoft lifecycle tooling in Visual Studio Team System, System Center and BizTalk Server.
Advances the Software Development Process: “Oslo” helps provide even greater levels of agility and productivity to both business and IT by taking deep advantage of visual modeling tools and models raise the level of abstraction across the system. “Oslo” will greatly simplify the development of composite applications that can be more easily changed, because the underlying model is the application
These product investments are part of a multi-release investment that will help advance the Dynamic IT initiative – specifically in the areas of ‘services-enabled’ and ‘model-driven’. Read interviews with our business and technical leaders in a Virtual Press Room.
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