Foreword
When Juval Löwy asked me to write the foreword for the first edition of this book, I
was working in a Community Program Manager role for the brand-new Windows
Communication Foundation (WCF) framework at Microsoft. WCF was the result of
a multiyear effort to write a unified communication framework for Windows. It was
also the result of a multiyear effort to create an interoperable messaging standards
framework centered around XML and the SOAP envelope model, with a common
model for addressing; a transport-independent abstraction for session management and
ordered delivery semantics; and a common model for message and session protection,
for federated authentication and authorization, and for many more capabilities. This
industry-wide standardization effort is still in progress with Microsoft and partners
across the industry, refining and updating this common messaging framework (sum-
marily nicknamed “WS-*”), more than 10 years after the SOAP 1.1 specification was
submitted as a note to W3C, which started this process.
As I write the foreword to the new edition, I’m filling an Architect role on the Windows
Azure AppFabric team at Microsoft. More precisely, I’m contributing to the architec-
ture of the service bus, a service offering that’s part of the Windows Azure Platform
and which Juval covers in Chapter 11 and the appendixes of this book. The way I
commonly describe the effort of building a commercial web services infrastructure, like
the service bus or its sibling service, Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control, is to
use the familiar iceberg analogy. The “above the water” features that the customers get
to interact with on the public protocol and API surface area make up a relatively small
portion of the overall effort. The rest, all the things beneath the waterline, quite closely
resembles a large-scale, mission-critical Enterprise application infrastructure—with the
special quality and challenge of running on a public cloud-based infrastructure.
When you create a Windows Azure account, your data and the provisioning jobs run
through WCF SOAP services. When you create a new service namespace in our system,
the messages flow between data centers using WCF SOAP services, creating resources
in the places where you ask for them to be created. Monitoring happens via WCF SOAP
services; diagnostics happens via WCF SOAP services; billing data collection, consol-
idation, and handoff happens using WCF SOAP services.
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