Microsoft SOA and BPM Conference: Day 4

Tags: Windows Communication Foundation, BizTalk, Microsoft, SOA

Last week was the conference, this week it's back to work and wow am I ever paying for spending the week away from the office. Nonetheless, the blogging must go on...

What is Federation?
During an interesting discussion about integration design patterns by an architect from Software Architects, inc. something interesting came up. He asked the audience to define 'Federation' and a couple of answers flew back but most people had trouble defining it. He provided what I believe is a very succinct definition that I will be happy to borrow and use from now on. Thanks, Mr. Architect! :)

Federation is the unification of self governing entities.

The new WCF Adapter
With the release of BizTalk 2006 R2 (tentatively scheduled for mid 2007) there will be direct support for the new Windows Communication Framework (part of .NET 3.0). From the looks of things this adapter will rapidly become our most commonly used adapter. This to me is yet more proof that WCF will have a dramatic impact on how we build applications.

WCF adapter features

• Transactional message send/receive


• Uses ws-* headers for routing/processing


• Numerous security scenarios


• In-proc hosting of non-http (netTCP, netNamedPipes, netMSMQ) endpoints

Business Rules
A very interesting seminar was held discussing business rules within your enterprise. Where to store them and how to express them. There was lots of good stuff with the usual justifications for separating business logic from code. I thought there were a couple of points in particular that were worth recording.

Deciding factors on where to keep rules

• Volatility


• Ownership

Reasons to manage Business Rules separately

• Accessibility


• Flexibility


• Manageability

Web Services Software Factory
On a final note, there was a great seminar presented by the Patterns and Practices team which showed us some of the great work they are doing around standardizing Web Services application development. I strongly encourage everyone to go and check it out at the Web Service Software Factory Community page.

Benefits of using a software factory

• Quality


• Consistency


• Performance

That's it for the conference reporting. It was a great educational experience and I feel privileged to have attended. Hopefully, next year we have the opportunity to go again!