The MS road map?

OK so we got some good information last night and for those of us not in the know, an insight to the way the BizTalk product is heading and Microsoft’s longer term strategy for their SOA/BPM/Integration offering.

Distilled from what we heard last night and from conversations with various people during and after the sessions we have the following roadmap (my take on it anyway):

1.       The long-term execution environment for services (WF and WCF) will be the new “Dublin” application server

2.       BizTalk will continue to support XLANG and be pushed as the engine of choice for enterprise BPM until Dublin becomes more mature

3.       The inclusion of UDDI and ESB 2.0 into BizTalk server points to BTS becoming the Integration Server in the MS offering – its role being of message bus and service discovery, still with the extensive range of technology adapters.

This presumably means that the general landscape is layered thus:

Modelling and service composition environment (Oslo)

Service and model execution environment (Dublin)

Messaging/Integration subsystem (BizTalk)

Outstanding questions around how and where things like BAM and the BRE will be offered are yet to be clarified. James (?) also made a good point about where MS are going to make their money; what will be free and what will cost in the new model?

And then there is the whole topic of the cloud. The MS vision seems to be that the cloud is simply one more place you can deploy you solutions, not the sole one. The execution architecture for on-premises and cloud based solutions will be such that solutions can be deployed to either or both; in fact the boundary between the two will ultimately blur to the point of disappearing altogether. With the continuing evolution of things like BizTalk services, the ESB will become very powerful and pervasive.

Now those “in the know” about Oslo and the MS strategy might either be nodding or shaking their heads at this point. Please feel free to shout “hot” or “cold”, or let us know how you think things will pan out.

From the published stuff so far, I think that's a fair indication of how things are likely to go. Certainly I think the usage model of BizTalk Server as ESB with Dublin as Service Provider (hosting WF through WCF) will become a common one - even under the BTS2009 + .NET 4.0 stack, prior to Oslo.

The capacity for processing (WF and XLANG) will surely remain part of the BTS offering, but will presumably become a quirky approach that's frowned upon, and flagged as needing refactoring.

I think the money point is a good one. Where high-end deployments are currently splitting receive/process/send tasks between BTS hosts, there's an opportunity to move the process space to a set of Dublin hosts, thereby freeing up a chunk of existing BizTalk licences for scaling up the send and the receive. If Dublin is a non-commercial addition to Windows Server 2008, that's going to be an attractive client option, but not much in that for Microsoft.

Of course, I'm no more in the know that you Matt. But PDC's soon enough and I think the output from that will give a clear indication of how warm we are.

 Ok,

I have just clarified this with the product teams and various other MCS colleagues on internal discussion lists and here are the main points,

(1) ESB v2 will NOT be a part of the core product v2009 and will not be included in the install.  (Yes, the press release etc are not very clear on this point). The install will be separate (and there are efforts to make it much simpler than it is currently)

(2) It is still considered a separate offering from Patterns & Practices (and will be on CodePlex). take a look at the P&P roadmap here

(3) There wont be the official "product support" that we see with BizTalk but there will be much more support available. More information will be available soon as to what this means in practice and what other support channels will be available for adopters/partners.

(4) The BTS product documentation will make references to the ESB Guidance to increase its visibility and 'promote' its adoption.

Hope this helps.

Regarding the other points about XLANG and WF, i think Charles Young has a great post about it. Again, thats not the official standpoint yet, however Charles makes some really good points about XLANG.

Hosting WF inside biztalk is already available as an SDK but it doesnt take over the persistence of WF in any way. BTS just acts as a host and launches workflow instances and communicates with them. There isnt any information at this point if this SDK will morph into anything bigger and also , AFAIK it isnt actually supported.

Please let me know if you have any more questions and if theres info that can be disclosed on them at this time, I'll get the answers.Of course, things should be clearer at the PDC.

Regards,

benjy