Artix & Microsoft Update

For the last two weeks I had the pleasure of working with Conor Patten from our Dublin office on some of our Microsoft initiatives. We decided that, for a change, we'd have Dublin engineering come to Colorado instead of me heading over to Dublin. This meant Conor traveled over to work out of the Colorado Springs office - my home office now. He didn't have many complaints.

Conor and I had lots to do. We mainly worked on the CSF sandbox activity which IONA has recently signed up to participate in (see CSF Network Mashups). We haven't published anything up there yet but we're working on a service that will allow ISVs to expose their CORBA based services in the CSF sandbox. It should be there in a week or so.

As well as building what is essentally a routing appliance that routes from SOAP/HTTP to CORBA IIOP, Conor and I also took a look at IONA's next generation integration with Microsoft's platform based on WCF. It's going to be pretty cool. WCF is not unlike Artix in that it is based on interceptor chains that abstract away much of the complexity of the middleware. By linking together various interceptor implementions different flavors of "middleware" can be achieved. Artix provides connectivity out of the box to legacy applications built on various middleware including CORBA, Tuxedo, MQ Series, Tibco RV and many more - including proprietary and custom technologies. And Artix runs on non-Windows platforms as well as Windows. So we can help extend the reach of WCF.

Anyway, it was a pretty geeky week as you can see. Conor and I received our geek shirts at the Microsoft Vista launch in Seattle and decided to take a picture in the Colorado snow before he headed back to Dublin to his team. (We may never live down this picture. My wife is proud and my Mac friends are threatening to disown me ;-) And no, the caption to the picture is not "I'm a Mac ... I'm a PC".

Now we need to get down to the real hard work of finishing out the sandbox project and pushing ahead on our other Microsoft related work! Fun stuff ... even for a Mac guy.