Building Service Orientated Applications using Windows Communication Foundation

SOA is a big business buzzword tossed into conversations at board meetings and at executive briefings. At this level, however, SOA really refers to connecting disparate systems across application, department, corporate, and even industry boundaries. This is the “Big” SOA concept, and this is the realm of the enterprise architect.

This is the space of multimillion rand Service Bus applications, SAP systems and other wonderful products. But the fact still remains that a chain is a strong as its weakest link, if the systems hooked up to the top of the range Service Bus are not rock solid and can not be trusted to produce the correct results all the time, then the some of the true potential of the investment is lost.

The path to “Big” SOA begins with a solid base and the ideas presented in this paper will provide you with the tools you need to achieve this.

As businesses struggle to reap the rewards of their investment in a SOA approach, the importance of “Little” SOA is becoming lost in the marketing hype and scramble by vendors to sell you their version of service orientation.

This paper offers practical advice for building Service Orientated Applications, using service oriented programming (SO) as an approach, that shows that every component can be a service while still maintaining the technical requirements that modern applications are required to exhibit and in most cases surpassing what many application frameworks offer to date.

By building a solid “Little” SOA base, the platform is set at an enterprise level to realise the composition and reuse that is the value proposition of SOA, as without a “Little” SOA that is properly portioned, rock solid and composeable, attempts to realise more will fail.

I hope to share some of the best practices, techniques and tools that I have learned from the last two years of applying WCF to the construction of service orientated applications and also to provide an insight to application architects on how to achieve the non functional specifications that many projects only play lip service to.

The paper can be found at:
http://www.box.net/shared/3oce5tvf8f