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At the U Connect Conference for supply-chain management, Microsoft Corp. today announced deeper investments in business process management by disclosing plans to ship Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2006 R2. The capabilities in the new release of BizTalk Server will enable customers to extend the reach of their business processes. Scheduled to be available to customers in the first half of 2007, BizTalk Server 2006 R2 will add native support for electronic data interchange (EDI) and AS2, as well as a new set of services for developing and managing radio frequency identification (RFID) solutions. Early previews of the technology will be made available to customers and partners that can participate in the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 technology adoption program (TAP) at http://connect.microsoft.com.
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 will broaden its support for platform technologies such as the 2007 Microsoft Office system and Windows Vista™, including core WinFX® technologies such as Windows® Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation. Furthermore, BizTalk Server 2006 R2 will provide an adapter framework on top of Windows Communication Foundation to help customers build customized adapters to better support interoperability between applications. Together, these new capabilities will enable customers to increase the reach of their existing business processes to address a host of current and emerging business problems, particularly in the area of end-to-end supply chain and retail operations.
Darryl K. Taft at eWeek:
Following up on its recent release of the first preview of Sparkle, its designer tool for creating applications for Windows Vista and the Web, the company is currently at work building designers for other core infrastructure pillars of its platform.
In an interview at the VSLive conference here, S. “Soma” Somasegar, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of developer tools, said the company is following up its Expression suite of designer tools with new designer tools for both its future Web services platform—WCF (Windows Communication Foundation), also known as Indigo—and the upcoming WWF (Windows Workflow Foundation).
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“The thing people should know is these designers make their lives as developers easier. Let’s say I’m on the bleeding edge and I want to write an application today for ‘Avalon’ and Indigo and Workflow Foundation. I can do that today with Visual Studio 2005. Life may be a little bit hard because I have to write that code as opposed to the designer emitting code.”
And that’s the whole point – to make it easier to develop applications using all the slick new technology.
Yesterday’s announcement of the “Go-Live” licences for Windows Communication Foundation (WCF, formerly Indigo) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) overshadowed the January Community Technical Preview (CTP) of WinFX. All the pieces of the CTP (excluding the “Go-Live” licenses) are now online for public download and nicely summarized by Ryan Storgaard here.
Worthy of special note is the optional Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” Community Technology Preview – Development Tools for WinFX which includes “Cider,” a visual designer for the new Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly Avalon). Orcas, of course, is the next version of Visual Studio which will only be available sometime after WinFX ships with Vista and for prior operating systems.
It looks like there is more information to come, but here’s the Q&A:
Microsoft today marked a milestone on the path toward completing the Windows Vista programming model, WinFX, by announcing the availability of Go Live licenses for Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation technologies. Along with the WinFX January Community Technology Preview (CTP), these new resources are meant to give millions of .NET developers a leg up on next-generation application design. All three releases are available now from the MSDN Download Center.
It’s followed by the actual Q&A with Ari Bixhorn, Microsoft Director of Web Services Strategy. If you aren’t familiar with “Go-Live” licenses, they allow Microsoft customers to “go live” with Microsoft beta software in production environments and get minimal support. Not for the faint of heart even if the software has to be mostly complete for the licenses to be offered. As for the versions of WinFX, WCF (previously Indigo), and WWF promised, I haven’t seen them yet but I would presume they are for Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1 (or R2) and not Vista.
Update 6:40 PM: All of the releases are indeed just for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. The WinFX release (labeled January CTP) doesn’t have a Go-Live license, but the new WCF and WWF versions (labeled Beta 2) do have available Go-Live licenses as described here. Microsoft has apparently detached them from the overall WinFX distributable. Since the Go-Live license doesn’t allow licensees to distribute the code, any deployments have to be entirely internal to the licensing company.
Mary Jo Foley at Microsoft Watch has details on new features and the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, aka Avalon) hasn’t been forgotten, but a Go-Live license is NOT being offered:
Microsoft is not releasing a Go-Live license for Windows Presentation Foundation because this software does not require the type of scalability testing necessary for the other two technologies, according to Microsoft.
Note that Microsoft also has a full support but limited participation Technology Adoption Program (TAP) for customers who want to try running pre-release software in production.
