Service Enablement

Developers face the challenge of building services that interoperate across organizational and platform boundaries, and connect to existing line-of- business (LOB) systems. At the same time, these services and LOB systems evolve independently of each other, making connecting applications and services a constant challenge.

To simplify this problem for partners and customers, Microsoft has created a common framework based on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) – the WCF Line-of-Business Adapter Software Development Kit (WCF LOB Adapter SDK). With the WCF LOB Adapter SDK, developers now have a consistent and repeatable way to build LOB Adapters for the .NET platform. For developers and partners, this means a common adapter that can be used across the entire .NET platform, not just a single endpoint like SharePoint or BizTalk Server.

The WCF LOB Adapter SDK ships with a rich set of development tools to automate and simplify adapter development in a consistent and repeatable manner:

For Adapter Developers

• Adapter Development Code Generation Wizard
• Visual Studio 2005 Integration (IntelliSense, context-sensitive help)
• Runtime Components (LOB System Connection Pooling, Metadata Cashe Lookup)

For Adapter Consumers

• Add Adapter Service Reference Visual Studio Plug-In
• Consumer Adapter Service BizTalk Project Add-In

SOA Enablement with BizTalk Server

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 allows programs running on Windows to call IBM Customer Information Control System (CICS) or Information Management System (IMS) programs on IBM Mainframe as well as the inverse. IMS or CICS programs can also call a program running on Windows Server. Utilizing BizTalk Adapters for Hosts Systems and Host Integration Server, RPG and Cobol programs on IBM Midrange systems can also be accessed and exposed as XML Web Services.

This allows business transactions to be composed of programs running on both Windows Server and the mainframe, which is especially valuable during periods of partial migration.

Using these interoperability capabilities, services can be exposed to enable a service oriented architecture that runs on Windows Server and serve as proxies to mainframe transaction programs or collections of transactions. All EBCDIC-ASCII conversation and XML formation and decomposition is performed on Windows using processor cycles and memory that are dramatically less expensive than if this processing were done on the mainframe directly.

Related Resources

The Web Service Software Factory (also known as the Service Factory) is an integrated collection of tools, patterns, source code and prescriptive guidance. It is designed to help you quickly and consistently construct Web services that adhere to well known architecture and design patterns. If you are an architect or developer responsible for building service-based applications, the patterns & practices team would like to invite you to learn how the Service Factory can help your future service development activities. The Service Factory provides guidance that addresses many of the challenges associated with building ASP.NET (ASMX) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Web services and the components of a distributed application. These challenges include:

• Designing ASMX and WCF messages and service interfaces.
• Applying exception shielding and exception handling.
• Designing business entities in the domain model.
• Translating messages to and from business entities.
• Designing, building, and invoking the data access layer.
• Validating the conformance of service implementation, configuration, and security using code analysis.
• Planning for the migration to WCF.
• Applying security to WCF services.
• Applying message validation.