Diving into the Nerd's level of SOA

When we, architects, business process modelers, and system designers, finally got our concepts in place, and when the SOA governance is instituted, the runtime platforms are installed in development, test and production environments, and the steering committee says "go", then we call them in: The Nerds!

These "Nerds" deserve all the respect, because they are the talented ones who are able to change all our paperwork to smoothly running systems. Even the best and most ingenious architecture is worth nothing without someone who can build it and make it reality.

I came across a book with the subtitle "Build SOA applications on the Microsoft platform in this hands-on guide". That made sense to me. The main title sounds "WCF Multi-tier Services Development with LINQ". So I concluded WCF and LINQ must be the Microsoft platform to build SOA's. I started reading, because I was curious how the deep level developers are able to get our architectural SOA models to live.

WCF stands for Windows Communication Foundation and LINQ stands for Language Integrated Query. Both are heavily (no, totally!) bound to the .NET Framework. In fact this book are two books, one about WCF and one about LINQ. Don't blame me for this conclusion, I am an architect and architects look by nature for separation into demarcated components.

Reading the book I found out that WCF is Microsoft's unified model for building service-oriented applications on the Microsoft .NET Framework and covers an umbrella technology for web services, remoting, and messaging. With WCF programmers are able to surround the written business logic with web services technology like SOAP and WSDL, supporting WS-*, in combination with end-point definition (addressing), contract definitions (service-, operation-, message-, data- and fault-contracts) and asynchronous messaging and queuing.

I also found out that LINQ is used to access the persistent-data layer directly from natively embedded program statements in the source-code. LINQ is a set of features in Visual Studio that extends query capabilities to the language syntax of C# and Visual Basic. So you just code your SQL-queries as smart local statements in C# or Visual Basic and the compiler or interpreter converts these statements to real SQL-queries to access the SQL-aware data layer.

Well, I must say that - as a retired programming-geek - I really enjoined browsing this book. And I am definitely sure that contemporary C#-programmers can gain great insights in using WCF to build SOA-applications and to use LINQ to access the underlaying databases by reading this book. The book really offers a good and pragmatic hands-on guide with code and screen-layout examples. A valuable head start for every .NET developer in the current SOA-era!

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