Speaking of folks that I got to work with last year, I had the opportunity to work with Alberto Arias on a major WF project in the UK (the first Fortune 500 WF project in production, I believe).  Earlier this fiscal year, Alberto crossed the pond and took a job over in the Connected Systems Division.

He's been working on activities for BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) for awhile now, and while chatting with him tonight, he told me that with today's announcement on Paul Andrews blog, it was now cool to talk about the BPEL support externally. He and I then booted up Meeting Space in Vista (if you've not used it, check it out, it's quite cool), and he stepped me through how it works. 

Having spent alot of time with customers and partners last year, I regularly heard requests for BPEL support. The implementation is very clean, very straightforward, with capabilities to import and export BPEL. BPEL 1.1 wil be supported in the March CTP, and 2.0 will be supported after it is ratified by OASIS.  I think people are going to be happy with it, it's very cool stuff - hats off to Alberto and team! 

As you're likely aware, we've had a new RC1 release of Vista, and along with it a RC1 release of .NET Framework 3.0. 

I've gone ahead an updated the code for several chapters from the book WCF: Hands On to be compatibile with RC1 changes

You can find the code for Chapter 6 on Legacy Integration. In addition to ComPlus and MSMQ which were in the book, I've also added another sample that shows how to call WCF from COM. This allows you to empower legacy applications written in Visual Basic, vbscript, Lotus Notes to now consume WCF services.

You can find the updated samples here:

As you're likely aware, we've had a new RC1 release of Vista, and along with it a RC1 release of .NET Framework 3.0. 

I've gone ahead an updated the code for several chapters from the book WCF: Hands On to be compatibile with RC1 changes

You can find the code for Chapter 5 on Reliable Sessions, Transactions, and Queues here:

As you're likely aware, we've had a new RC1 release of Vista, and along with it a RC1 release of .NET Framework 3.0. 

I've gone ahead an updated the code for several chapters from the book WCF: Hands On to be compatibile with RC1 changes

You can find the code for Chapter 7 on interoperability here:

Code.zip (295.39 KB)

Some people have asked for a consolidated file with all of the updates for our book, Windows Communication Foundation: Hands On!

You can get the full set of samples here:

http://www.marcmercuri.com/Downloads/junectpupdate.zip

The title of this blog is “Living in a World of Connected Systems“. It does not say “Living in a World of Connected Systems Written Exclusively on the Microsoft Platform“.  Why?

First, the title would go from long to annoyingly long. More importantly, if you're in the Enterprise space you know it's a heterogenous environment.  If you've seen me speak, I talk more about how to interop with what you've got and explicitly don't preach 'rip and replace' your existing stacks.

Several of the companies I work with have ,at one point or another, made some investments in Java. When we chat about architecture, number one on their list of topics to discuss is interop.

If you're doing work in both .NET and Java today, and you want to do more interop - there's a video clip I want you to check out.

 Watch this video from the JavaOne 2006 keynote here.  (Annoyingly, you'll need RealPlayer, find that here).

The video shows WCF/Java interop, with Sun showcasing what was called Project Tango (aka Web Services Interoperability Toolkit), which in their words is described as

“Web Services Interoperability Technology (WSIT) is an open-source implementation of next generation Web services technologies that deliver interoperability between Java EE and .Net to help you build, deploy, and maintain Composite Applications for your Service Oriented Architecture. Built upon JAX-WS (Java API for XML Web Services), this implementation will be made available as the "Web Services Interoperability Technology (WSIT)" and is focused on four main categories: Messaging, Metadata, Security, and Quality-of-Service (QoS). “

I had the opportunity to present a session “WCF and WF in Financial Services: Notes from the Field” yesterday to a great crowd at the Financial Services Dev Con in New York.

For those who have seen my sessions on MSDN, those have focused on getting people up to speed on the two technologies. This session presented very brief overviews of the technologies (3 slides for each) and then delved into real-world scenarios where people were using them, complete with demos.

This session focused primarily on scenarios where Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation could provide the ability to enhance what was already in place, enable new scenarios around connectivity and workflow, and overall take advantage of the features of WCF and WF regardless of where they're at today.

I've uploaded the deck and the presentations here http://www.marcmercuri.com/Downloads/FinServDevCon.zip, and the good news is that other than the one COM interop demo for Lotus, every demo here can be run on your own machine. In cases where there's a use of Domino server - you get to take advantage of the domino services set up on the public web by my colleague, Gary Devendorf.  For the Java examples, I used the basic samples that came with Java Enterprise Studio 8 which is now a free download.  A note for VS developers - the Java environment may look similiar to VS, but it's different. To make it easy to run, the only thing you need to do is install, load the sun blueprint sample, and change the URL to point to the WCF service.

The demos posted include:

• Taking an existing, unsecure web service (in this case using Lotus Notes Domino as a source), placing a WCF front end on it, and exposing a WS-* service beyond the firewall.  The benefit here is obviously security, and the ability to extend what you may have in place already to accomodate external customers.
• Taking a Windows Workflow Foundation, exposing it as a web service, and consuming it via an existing java application.
• An example of using a UI driven by workflow
• Using the workflow engine provided as part of workflow foundation inside of Excel.
• Using WF to coordinate multiple services. This includes a standard ASMX service, as well as Domino web service located remotely.
• An example of the flexibility provided by data contracts. The demo consisted of a service and client based on version one of a data contract, and the data contract is then modified to support a new data element (a URL for an RSS Feed). Even though the data contract has changed, the client continues to work.

Anyone going to the Advisor Media conference at the JW Marriot in Vegas (April 9 - 13th)?

My teammate and Notes guy extroardinaire, Gary Devendorf, has invited me to participate in a number of sessions in the Notes2.NET track. I'll be bringing with me some interesting demos and presentations on how to utilize two of the great technologies inside of WinFX - WCF and WF - with Lotus Notes and Domino.

I'll be involed in the following sessions -

Schedule: 04/10/2006 11:15 AM
What is .NET?
Marc Mercuri & Gary Devendorf
Explore the parallels and similarities between .NET technology and Lotus Notes/Domino -- you may be surprised. In this session, you'll learn the fundamentals of .NET, presented in Notes/Domino terms. You'll look at .NET's vocabulary and workings. Finally, a .NET session aimed at the Notes/Domino developer. You don't want to miss this one.

Schedule: 04/10/2006 04:45 PM
Integrating Lotus Domino and Visual Studio .NET Web Services
Gary Devendorf & Marc Mercuri
You can host Web services on a Domino 7 server. But did you know you can also host them on Domino 6 or 5? Also, hosting Web services is only half the story. You must have a Web service client to make a Web service useful. In this session, you'll see how to create and host a Domino Web service. And you'll learn how to create a VS.NET Web service client to use your Web service. You won't believe how easy this is!

Schedule: 04/11/2006 11:15 AM
Integrate Domino Objects and Managed .NET Code Using COM
Gary Devendorf & Marc Mercuri
The Domino objects expose functionality of Lotus Notes/Domino applications to LotusScript, Java, COM, and more. In this session you'll see how you can call the Domino objects from .NET applications using Visual Studio.NET. Also, you'll see examples of LotusScript calling Managed code

Schedule: 04/12/2006 08:00 AM
Microsoft Workflow Linked to Lotus Notes
Marc Mercuri
You know about Lotus Notes workflow, but did you know that Microsoft has a new technology for workflow called Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)? See how WF works and how you can use it from Lotus Notes. You'll even see how to link a Notes workflow to a Windows workflow -- this is all new! You'll see VB.NET and LotusScript in the examples.

For those that know me, I come from an Enterprise background, and know there's a big need out there for info on how to do interop.  With Notes and Domino in particular there are some great opportunities to leverage .NET, Windows Communication Foundation, and Windows Workflow Foundation to provide great functionality and new opportunities to your existing applications.

I'll be in town the whole week, if you want to talk about how to leverage WCF, WF, or InfoCard in your projects, I'm happy to chat with folks 1:1 - just contact me via email to set something up (mmercuri@microsoft.com)

I recently did a session with my colleague Gary Devendorf on using Lotus Notes and WCF.

Check out the video for this here:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032285633&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

I'll also be presenting with Gary at the Notes 2.NET conference in Las Vegas (April). Details on specific sessions will be posted shortly. If you're a Notes person looking to develop in .NET - definately check out Gary's blog as well. (See blog roll to right)

I was recently talking to a colleague, and he mentioned he had an Enterprise customer with clients running Windows 2000 Professional, knew WCF wasn't supported on that platform, and asked what he could recommend they use until they upgrade their clients to XP or Windows Vista. Variations of this question came up a couple of times while on the road these past couple of weeks, and I wanted to share my response in hopes it could help others with the same query.

WCF and WF do require .NET framework 2.0 be installed on the machine, and the official systems supported for *installation* are Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003  and eventually Longhorn Server. That being said, it is totally reasonable for you to install/use WF and WCF on a server using Windows Server 2003 and then expose services (either through WCF or a Workflow exposed as a WCF Service), which can be consumed by non-WCF clients on downlevel OS'.

The first question to ask yourself is this - do you have the ability to deploy .NET Framework 2.0 to the systems where your client will be installed? The next question is - do your services need to be secured at the message level or will security at the transport level suffice?

If you can deploy .NET framework 2.0, look at creating clients using Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET framework.  If transport level security will suffice, encrypt the channel using SSL.  If message level security is required, utilize WSE 3 which will be wire compatible with WCF.

Now, if your target audience will have framework 1.1 installed and you are not empowered to install .NET framework 2.0, you're not left out.

Remember that WCF and WF can be exposed as Basic Profile 1.0 compliant web services, which can be consumed by any software on any platform that can understand Basic Profile 1.0.  On Windows Server 2000 / Windows 2000, there are a number of options here.

We’ve had SOAP/web service support on Win2K for some time, so this is reasonable.  The great thing is, because you can expose multiple endpoints, you build a service today that exposed BP 1.0 services, and add additional endpoints (all external to the application) in the config file. This allows you to simultaneously provide support for older clients, as well as the opportunity to service employees and partners with newer/different clients with WS-* secured services, TCP, etc.

In addition, remember that WCF (and Workflows exposed as a WCF service) can also be utilize MSMQ. This provides another opportunity to utilize an application on a Windows 2000 system. Here you could write messages to MSMQ through System.Messaging (or via other means – even VB6!), again with the service on Windows Server 2003, supporting downlevel (win2k) clients.

Also, if you have existing COM+ applications, you can expose these as well. (again using WCF/WF exposed on Windows Server 2003, with clients consuming them downlevel).

 Finally, remember that you can compile WCF/WF code down to an assembly and make those assemblies visible to COM (via interop).  If you have a legacy app and it’s residing on any of the supported applications, you can consume WCF services using something as simple as com based scripting (works great for customers running things like Lotus Notes, early versions of Offices, even VB6 apps!).

Naturally, these items mentioned for 1.1 framework are also compat on 2.0 version of the framework.

You can start to see the power of this unified model combined with the framework opens a number of possibilities.