What are the .NET Services?

Question

Announced today at PDC. Initially made up of a Service Bus, the Workflow Service, and the Access Control Service. What are they? Why would I use them?

Answer 1

I've looked at it a little. There's a few posts that convey a lot of meaning, I feel. This new wave of technologies really does look as 'big as NT' as is being reported in some circles.

In it's simplest form, map the current Microsoft server services for such solutions and imagine them hosted on Microsoft's data centres. So we have

• Biztalk service bus / services-> .Net Service Bus
• Windows Workflow -> Workflow Services
• SQL Server -> SQL Services
• Active Directory Service -> Access Control Service

(NOTE: these are approximations to illustrate rather than direct mappings)

Now initially it's not that your current Biztalk wired code can move into the cloud directly, but service contracts are being made avialable to run your own code against Sql, say, running on Microsoft kit. (remember we're talking to the cloud so all APIs will naturally be exposed via web services).

So software is finally moving to a subscription model perhaps - whilst pricing is not available, it's being promoted as a Pay-As-You-Go scheme.

Official links: - MSDN - Windows Azure - VS 2008 Tools (includes project templates)

Answer 2

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/John-Shewchuk-and-Dennis-Pilarinos-Inside-NET-Services/