Last week I was at the MS SOA & BP conference on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, the overall theme of the conference focused on the ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) and ISB (Internet Service Bus) powered by BizTalk server and biztalk.net respectively. Another theme was the focus on modeling, allowing developers to focus more on business problems and less on the plumbing.
The keynote
The keynote focused on the next wave of products for building Service Oriented Applications, called "Oslo", focused on modeling business processes and exposing them on the service bus. This modeling is currently done by different people using different tools, but the next version of Visual Studio will allow business analysts, architects, developers and operations to work on the different views of the same model using the same tool (Visual Studio).
The products included in "Oslo" are:
Other sessions
Steve Swartz and Clemens Vasters had 4 great sessions (SA 208, SA 209, SA 310, SA 309), using the demo shown during the keynote about event planning, they show how they build it using modeling and the biztalk.net ISB. Since the same sessions are planned for TechEd Europe, the slides or the video should be on the web soon.
Don Smith showed the next version of the Web Service software factory called the modeling edition (Session FT 206). This release allows you to model your WCF services with a tool similar to the current class diagram and generate code based on that, instead of the previous versions, that generated code first. More info and the download on the Service Factory homepage on Codeplex.
Other interesting sessions were the overview session on Biztalk 2006 R2 (FT 309) and several deep dive sessions about WCF adapters (FT 400), testing Biztalk solutions (FT 306) and error handling (FT 201).
Channel 9 coverage
ARCast.TV - App Of The Future: The Internet Service Bus (Part 1 of 2)ARCast.TV - App Of The Future: The Internet Service Bus (Part 2 of 2)ARCast.TV - SOA Business Process Conference Day 1 RecapARCast.TV - SOA and Business Process Conference Day 2 RecapARCast.TV - SOA and Business Process Conference Recap - Day 3