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Software giant Microsoft has given the world a fleeting glimpse at its service-oriented architecture strategy.

The company revealed yesterday that it has made a series of technical investments in order to help empower developers to exploit SOA. It has given these investments the codename ‘Oslo’.

Microsoft’s SOA strategy will play out through five different routes, the company said.

At the server level, its BizTalk server will "provide a core foundation for distributed and highly scalable SOA and BPM solution."

It will sell a bundle of pre-wrapped web services called BizTalk Services “1” that will include identity management, messaging and workflow functionality, with which developers will be able to compile composite applications.

The .NET framework will “further enable” model-driven development – an important tenet of SOA – as will the next version of Microsoft’s development tool kit VisualStudio.

“There will also be investments in aligning the metadata repositories across the Server and Tools product sets” said a company statement.

Microsoft’s vision for SOA sees the organisational borders that currently delineate applications dissolve to make way for a more collaborative, services-based Internet application platform.

“‘Oslo’ will enable a new class of applications that are connected and streamlined — from design through deployment — reducing complexity, aligning the enterprise and Internet, and simplifying interoperability and management,” said Robert Wahbe, corporate vice president of the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft.

Dwight B. Davis, VP at analyst company Ovum, commented that there it still much to be explained surrounding Microsoft's SOA strategy. "Oslo represents a step forward in clarifying Microsoft's plans for service enablement and process-led, model-driven development, but remains very much an aspirational roadmap at this point," he said.

"Furthermore, Microsoft risks confusing customers and partners by failing to draw clear lines between its current vision and the services and model-driven initiatives that have preceded it, including the Dynamic Systems Initiative and Dynamic IT,” Davis added.

Also this week, Microsoft released a preview version of its Managed Services Engine (MSE) to its CodePlex development community.

“Managed Services Engine (MSE) is one approach to facilitating Enterprise SOA through service virtualization,” reads a statement on the Codeplex website. “[It] fully enables service virtualization through a Service Repository, which helps organizations deploy services faster, coordinate change management, and maximize the reuse of various service elements.”

To date, Microsoft has made comparatively little noise about SOA – a computing paradigm that its competitors in the business application space have talked up incessantly. But that does not mean it has not committed to its underlying principles, or that it lacks the technology to SOA-enable its customers.

Quite the opposite, in fact: Scattered across its diverse range of server, application, systems management and development software are most of the components for a complete SOA. That is not something that many technology vendors can boast, however frequently they use the buzzword.

Further reading

No surprises in Microsoft's web application strategy

SOA Wars As the leading software vendors jockey to become the premier provider of service-oriented architecture services, Information Age assesses their relative merits.

Find more stories in the SOA & Development Briefing Room