By God Its Out!

This is a big day. After being associated with Indigo for the better part of five years now, I am ecstatic that the whole Microsoft .NET Framework 3 RC has reached RC today!! I spoke to my friends Richard Turner and Craig McLuckie just the other day as we did a progress check on our project and WCF (Richard and my emails to each other read "YAY!!!), and I knew it was close but not this close-). They told us we were one of the leading-edge adopters of Indigo. As I have stated before, we have been using WCF now in a real production application for over a year now and went into a CTP with a large International Bank in Paris this year with WCF. I can say that this "application" is actually a whole new generation financial services SOA N-Tier platform using WCF services on top of a true domain layer with multiple database backends. We are now on Iteration 38, or is it 39?

We have been extremely pleased with WCF and it's stability, flexibility, performance and support for our SOA goals. In fact, when Don invited me on board early in the SDR program, it was based on somewhat negative experiences I had had when using COM+/ES and Transactions (I actually became legendary in the Indigo group for that "escapade" and getting Florin Lazar to debug Oracle MTS code for me and the guys never let me forget it! -)). I am honored that my feedback over the last few years was taken very seriously along with many others like Juval Lowy. I can say that what has been produced has personally made me an order of magnitude more efficient .NET Distributed Computing developer and architect. It has taken myself and my team an order of magnitude less effort to write our Services and our platform than had we used COM+/ES or ASMX or even WSE.

I plan to get .NET Framework 3 RC into our Iteration this coming week. Meanwhile, since the use of Indigo is too easy and I need more challenges-), I have been looking at the next phases of our SOA and platform, particularly in the area of automating Business Process with BPM, BPEL and most notably Windows Workflow. We have a need anyhow to design a financial workflow capability into our application. Next week, I have on tap a design of a generic work financial engine, let's call it a "Do It" Engine. In this, I plan to use WCF Queues and the netMsmq binding to feed it and provide durable queuing. I am also working with Richard to look at what our banks can do with CardSpaces and its use across our platform.

Anyhow, congratulations to all my friends over on the WCF team and all the .NET FW 3 teams!!