BizTalk and "Oslo" ...
Ever since "Oslo" was announced the industry has been in a flat spin trying to figure out what this is ... Will it replace BizTalk? Will it be a solution to world peace? Who knew ... and for months and months a variety of posts from a variety of sources have claimed it to be different things. Microsoft has promised the first REAL look at "Oslo" at the upcoming PDC (which I can't wait to attend 
) and as we draw closer to the event we're starting to see the first real indications of what the technology holds in wait emerging from Redmond itself.
With the announcement of "BizTalk Server 2009", Microsoft also release a roadmap of where the product will be going in the next 2+ years ...
http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/roadmap.aspx
This extract from the BizTalk roadmap announcement also starts clearing the mud, for me at least, in terms of where the CSD team see "Oslo" going, in the short term at least.
BizTalk Server and "Oslo" and .NET
"Oslo" is the codename for Microsoft’s forthcoming modeling platform. Modeling is used across a wide range of domains and allows more people to participate in application design and allows developers to write applications at a much higher level of abstraction. "Oslo" delivers a new integrated platform for connecting across modeling domains, including a new "Oslo" modeling tool, an "Oslo" modeling language, and an "Oslo" repository. As we gathered feedback from BizTalk customers, they indicated they would prefer to take a disciplined, evolutionary path to adopting some of these newer platform technologies. We have thousands of customers that have deployed mission-critical applications on top of our BizTalk Server architecture; they want to decide for themselves when to move to newer versions of the platform.
Therefore, it’s an important guiding principle to our planning efforts that we preserve our customers existing investments in their BizTalk Server infrastructure. In fact, you won’t need to upgrade BizTalk Server to take advantage of "Oslo" – current BizTalk Server 2006 R2 or BizTalk Server 2009 customers can benefit from "Oslo" by being able to leverage and compose existing services into new composite applications. BizTalk Server today provides the ability to service enable LOB systems or trading partners as web services (using WCF supported protocols), which can be composed with the "Oslo" modeling technologies.
This principle applies to advances in the .NET Framework as well, such as Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). In response to customer feedback, we are committed to continued support for BizTalk Server’s XLANG orchestration technology - the existing BizTalk orchestration engine. Additional support for WF will be prioritized for the coming releases based upon customer demand and scenarios.
I am happy to see that the team from Redmond remain committed to BizTalk as a product!
Long live BizTalk Server!
