Messaging

Messaging and Services focuses on how messaging is accomplished between senders and receivers. There are a broad array of options and patterns available for messaging between senders and receivers—from pub/sub and asynchronous to message and service interaction patterns. Services provide an evolutionary approach to building distributed software that facilitates loosely coupled integration and resilience to change. The advent of the WS-* Web Services architecture has made service-oriented software development feasible by virtue of mainstream development tools support and broad industry interoperability. While most frequently implemented using industry standard Web services, service orientation is independent of technology and architectural patterns and can be used to connect with legacy systems as well. Messaging and Services are not a new approach to software design—many of the notions behind these concepts have been around for years. A service is generally implemented as a coarse-grained, discoverable software entity that exists as a single instance and interacts with applications and other services through a loosely coupled (often asynchronous), message-based communication model. Messages tend to be based upon an agreed-upon set of semantics (such as an industry-standard Purchase Order) and serialized using an interoperable, extensible syntax (usually XML, although alternate approaches like JSON, RNC and ASN1 are sometimes used).

Visit the MSDN Messages and Services Architecture Center where you will find articles, recommended readings, opinions, and links to more information about Service Orientation.