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So, you are a .Net developer, and you gone and built some services for your enterprise applications.  You’ve spent the time building and deploying the services. You might have written them using ASP.Net, or you went all out and built them “the right way” with WCF.  But for some reason, you are not seeing the return on investment.  Sure, your applications are more modular, and reusable, but it takes a bit more work building the services, and other applications don’t seem to be taking advantage of the services you built.  And if they are using your services, now you have to monitor them, and make sure that any changes you make will not break the other applications that use your services.

There are a couple of things they don’t warn you about when hyping service orientation:

• Service Configuration – If you are using WCF, a MEX endpoint will only take you so far, and WCF doesn’t make it easy to share configuration across services, easily.  .Net 4.0 is a step in the right direction, but it is still only shares bindings and behaviors within a machine.
• Service Discoverability – You might have built a great service, but unless other applications (or developers) know about your service, they can’t use it.
• Service Monitoring – Now that the service is out there, how do you know how often it is being used, and which operations are the most popular.  Microsoft has AppFabric, but it only goes so far, and you are not ready to make the jump to AppFabric.
• Service Testing – Once your service becomes wildly used, how do you go about making sure that your changes, especially changes to configuration, do not break the clients using your services.

Successful services depend on these 4 aspects of Service Orientation, but they depend on more than just developers.  Architects, other developers, testers, and operation support want visibility into them.

So, to take full advantage of all the hard work you put into your services you need a repository to store all this info.  And not just any repository, but one that is extremely easy to use and find the information within it.  If you are an old time service developer, you might have heard about this thing call UDDI – Universal Data Discovery and Integration.  It was supposed to be the way the find out and use services, but it has proven to be incredibly complex and hard to use.  So, no one really used it.  A much easier solution would be an REST (Resource State Transfer) based service solution.  REST service tend to be much easier to use, because they are HTTP based, but because there are so many different flavors of REST implementations, discovery (querying) the data within tended to be custom for each implementation.  That is until Microsoft released OpenData (OData) as an open specification.  With OData, it becomes just as easy to query a repository as it is to consume it.

SO-Aware does this all for you.  You can think of it as 3 separate repositories all exposed using the RESTful OData protocol. It contains:

• Service Configuration Repository: this is where you store all your metadata about your service.  If you have a WCF service, this is where your WSDL and your bindings and behaviors are stored.  If it is an ODate service, you can put all your OData service documents here.  Or if you are using a custom ASP.Net REST service implementation, you can put the details about your service here.
• Service Monitoring Repository: If you are using a WCF service, all the usage information about your service is stored here.
• Service Testing Repository: We all need to make sure to test our services.  This is where you can store the service tests, and the test results.

Sounds great, but what’s in it for you, the developer?  Well, the we all know that WCF configuration isn’t easy.  Sure, Microsoft has made it a little easier with 4.0, but you still need to fight the WCF Configuration Editor to get the Service configuration correct, and once you do that, do you really remember how to update it when you need to?  And how do you tell the  operation folks to maintain it, and deploy the configurations to the service farm?  Well that is where putting the configuration into a repository really pays off.  With SO-Aware, you get a custom Service Host Factory, which will automatically pull the latest service configuration out of the repository for you, and reconfigures the service automatically.  Need to make a change to the config, no more updating the config locally, and then trying to put a change control request into operations, or hoping that operations updates the configuration correctly, and then deploy it to all the servers.  No more trying to keep the compliance documentation in sync with what is deployed on the services.  Instead, those very same changes can be made via the SO-Aware portal, using templates built buy WCF experts, making it so much easier to maintain your WCF configurations.

And what is even better than configuring the service?  Well that would be configuring all the clients, too.  With SO-Aware, the consumers of your services have it just as easy as you do (even easier, since odds are they know even less about WCF).  They can point their client proxies to the SO-Aware repository and automatically configure the client side WCF configuration.  Now, there is no reason for .Net developers to be afraid of consuming WCF services.  The configuration just happens for them, and they don’t even have to know about how to do it, or how to update it when it changes.  All they need is what version of the service they wish to use, and it gets automatically configured for them.

Now that you have your services built and deployed (even to the test environment), as a good enterprise developer, you need to test the services, especially the binding and behavior configuration changes.  Well, SO-Aware has you covered there, too.  You can put your service tests into the SO-Aware Service Testing Repository via the Management Portal.  Since the configuration is in the repository, and SO-Aware is written in .Net, you can sure that your Service Testing tool works with whatever bindings and behaviors you used, no matter how customized you got them.  This is where most generic Service Testing tools fall down.  They either only support the simplest of WS-* specifications, or don’t align with the versions implemented in WCF.  With SO-Aware that isn’t the case, so you don’t have to do things like expose unsecured endpoints to work with your service testing tool.  And to make things even easier, to execute your test, since SO-Aware is RESTful, all you have to do is an http get on the url for the test, and it will execute it for you.  So, integrating into whatever testing framework or build management tool is a breeze.

So, we have configuration and testing covered, now onto Service Monitoring.  Do you have SLAs?  Or maybe you just want to know how often your service is called, and which operations are used the most.  Or maybe you have a rogue request coming in and you want to record the request and response.  Because your services are configured to use the SO-Aware Service Host Factory to get the configuration from the repository, it can also monitor the service and asynchronously publish that information to the SO-Aware Monitoring Repository.  You can then review all this data in the SO-Aware Management Portal.

Now you are asking yourself, this tool sounds great, but I’m not sure if my company will be willing to purchase something like this.  Maybe you’ve run across other Service Governance applications, and you got a little sticker shock.  Or, maybe you just don’t know how valuable a tool like this would be in your enterprise, so you want to try it out in production for a while first.  It really doesn’t matter, because Tellago Studios has a number of Microsoft MVPs, and we know how valuable the .Net developer community is.  So, we are giving away the Express Edition of SO-Aware.  With the Express Edition, you have a fully functioning product, that can be used in production.  It isn’t a trial version.  The only limit on the Express Edition is that you can only register five services.  That, it is it.  Well, there is one more thing.  If you do use SO-Aware Express Edition in your organization, we would love to get feedback on the product from you.  Your feedback will only serve to make future version a better product.

To get your free SO-Aware Express Edition, please fill out the Express Edition Registration Form and we will email you an activation key along with details on how to get and install the SO-Aware Express Edition.

So, you are a .Net developer, and you gone and built some services for your enterprise applications.  You’ve spent the time building and deploying the services. You might have written them using ASP.Net, or you went all out and built them “the right way” with WCF.  But for some reason, you are not seeing the return on investment.  Sure, your applications are more modular, and reusable, but it takes a bit more work building the services, and other applications don’t seem to be taking advantage of the services you built.  And if they are using your services, now you have to monitor them, and make sure that any changes you make will not break the other applications that use your services.

There are a couple of things they don’t warn you about when hyping service orientation:

• Service Configuration – If you are using WCF, a MEX endpoint will only take you so far, and WCF doesn’t make it easy to share configuration across services, easily.  .Net 4.0 is a step in the right direction, but it is still only shares bindings and behaviors within a machine.
• Service Discoverability – You might have built a great service, but unless other applications (or developers) know about your service, they can’t use it.
• Service Monitoring – Now that the service is out there, how do you know how often it is being used, and which operations are the most popular.  Microsoft has AppFabric, but it only goes so far, and you are not ready to make the jump to AppFabric.
• Service Testing – Once your service becomes wildly used, how do you go about making sure that your changes, especially changes to configuration, do not break the clients using your services.

Successful services depend on these 4 aspects of Service Orientation, but they depend on more than just developers.  Architects, other developers, testers, and operation support want visibility into them.

So, to take full advantage of all the hard work you put into your services you need a repository to store all this info.  And not just any repository, but one that is extremely easy to use and find the information within it.  If you are an old time service developer, you might have heard about this thing call UDDI – Universal Data Discovery and Integration.  It was supposed to be the way the find out and use services, but it has proven to be incredibly complex and hard to use.  So, no one really used it.  A much easier solution would be an REST (Resource State Transfer) based service solution.  REST service tend to be much easier to use, because they are HTTP based, but because there are so many different flavors of REST implementations, discovery (querying) the data within tended to be custom for each implementation.  That is until Microsoft released OpenData (OData) as an open specification.  With OData, it becomes just as easy to query a repository as it is to consume it.

SO-Aware does this all for you.  You can think of it as 3 separate repositories all exposed using the RESTful OData protocol. It contains:

• Service Configuration Repository: this is where you store all your metadata about your service.  If you have a WCF service, this is where your WSDL and your bindings and behaviors are stored.  If it is an ODate service, you can put all your OData service documents here.  Or if you are using a custom ASP.Net REST service implementation, you can put the details about your service here.
• Service Monitoring Repository: If you are using a WCF service, all the usage information about your service is stored here.
• Service Testing Repository: We all need to make sure to test our services.  This is where you can store the service tests, and the test results.

Sounds great, but what’s in it for you, the developer?  Well, the we all know that WCF configuration isn’t easy.  Sure, Microsoft has made it a little easier with 4.0, but you still need to fight the WCF Configuration Editor to get the Service configuration correct, and once you do that, do you really remember how to update it when you need to?  And how do you tell the  operation folks to maintain it, and deploy the configurations to the service farm?  Well that is where putting the configuration into a repository really pays off.  With SO-Aware, you get a custom Service Host Factory, which will automatically pull the latest service configuration out of the repository for you, and reconfigures the service automatically.  Need to make a change to the config, no more updating the config locally, and then trying to put a change control request into operations, or hoping that operations updates the configuration correctly, and then deploy it to all the servers.  No more trying to keep the compliance documentation in sync with what is deployed on the services.  Instead, those very same changes can be made via the SO-Aware portal, using templates built buy WCF experts, making it so much easier to maintain your WCF configurations.

And what is even better than configuring the service?  Well that would be configuring all the clients, too.  With SO-Aware, the consumers of your services have it just as easy as you do (even easier, since odds are they know even less about WCF).  They can point their client proxies to the SO-Aware repository and automatically configure the client side WCF configuration.  Now, there is no reason for .Net developers to be afraid of consuming WCF services.  The configuration just happens for them, and they don’t even have to know about how to do it, or how to update it when it changes.  All they need is what version of the service they wish to use, and it gets automatically configured for them.

Now that you have your services built and deployed (even to the test environment), as a good enterprise developer, you need to test the services, especially the binding and behavior configuration changes.  Well, SO-Aware has you covered there, too.  You can put your service tests into the SO-Aware Service Testing Repository via the Management Portal.  Since the configuration is in the repository, and SO-Aware is written in .Net, you can sure that your Service Testing tool works with whatever bindings and behaviors you used, no matter how customized you got them.  This is where most generic Service Testing tools fall down.  They either only support the simplest of WS-* specifications, or don’t align with the versions implemented in WCF.  With SO-Aware that isn’t the case, so you don’t have to do things like expose unsecured endpoints to work with your service testing tool.  And to make things even easier, to execute your test, since SO-Aware is RESTful, all you have to do is an http get on the url for the test, and it will execute it for you.  So, integrating into whatever testing framework or build management tool is a breeze.

So, we have configuration and testing covered, now onto Service Monitoring.  Do you have SLAs?  Or maybe you just want to know how often your service is called, and which operations are used the most.  Or maybe you have a rogue request coming in and you want to record the request and response.  Because your services are configured to use the SO-Aware Service Host Factory to get the configuration from the repository, it can also monitor the service and asynchronously publish that information to the SO-Aware Monitoring Repository.  You can then review all this data in the SO-Aware Management Portal.

Now you are asking yourself, this tool sounds great, but I’m not sure if my company will be willing to purchase something like this.  Maybe you’ve run across other Service Governance applications, and you got a little sticker shock.  Or, maybe you just don’t know how valuable a tool like this would be in your enterprise, so you want to try it out in production for a while first.  It really doesn’t matter, because Tellago Studios has a number of Microsoft MVPs, and we know how valuable the .Net developer community is.  So, we are giving away the Express Edition of SO-Aware.  With the Express Edition, you have a fully functioning product, that can be used in production.  It isn’t a trial version.  The only limit on the Express Edition is that you can only register five services.  That, it is it.  Well, there is one more thing.  If you do use SO-Aware Express Edition in your organization, we would love to get feedback on the product from you.  Your feedback will only serve to make future version a better product.

To get your free SO-Aware Express Edition, please fill out the Express Edition Registration Form and we will email you an activation key along with details on how to get and install the SO-Aware Express Edition.

This weekend is the WCF Firestarter in New York City.  Registration to attend in person is SOLD OUT and we’re looking forward to a full house in the Big Apple on Saturday!  You can see the event agenda at Peter Laudati’s blog, as well as at MSDN Events. 

Firestarter events have been quite popular wherever Microsoft has hosted them around the country. Are you NOT in New York this weekend and feeling a little left out?  Don’t worry… we know there are plenty of folks who don’t live in the New York area!  That’s why we’re going to be broadcasting the WCF Firestarter event LIVE on Saturday via webcast!

Registration is now open for the online simulcast of the WCF Firestarter.  You can log in on Saturday morning (9am US east coast time) to watch, listen, and even interact with the presenters!  The event will be broadcasting via Live Meeting (so make sure you install the client ahead of time), which will feature a live video stream, as well as a Q&A chat tool where you can ask the presenters questions.  You can also follow and participate in the conversation on Twitter using the tag: #WCFFS.

This weekend is the WCF Firestarter in New York City.  Registration to attend in person is SOLD OUT and we’re looking forward to a full house in the Big Apple on Saturday!  You can see the event agenda at Peter Laudati’s blog, as well as at MSDN Events. 

Firestarter events have been quite popular wherever Microsoft has hosted them around the country. Are you NOT in New York this weekend and feeling a little left out?  Don’t worry… we know there are plenty of folks who don’t live in the New York area!  That’s why we’re going to be broadcasting the WCF Firestarter event LIVE on Saturday via webcast!

Registration is now open for the online simulcast of the WCF Firestarter.  You can log in on Saturday morning (9am US east coast time) to watch, listen, and even interact with the presenters!  The event will be broadcasting via Live Meeting (so make sure you install the client ahead of time), which will feature a live video stream, as well as a Q&A chat tool where you can ask the presenters questions.  You can also follow and participate in the conversation on Twitter using the tag: #WCFFS.