Frameworks

Line-of-Business Dev in 2011

With all the activity around mobile and Web technologies, it's easy to think that Microsoft might take its eye off the ball in the area of line-of-business (LOB) development. However, according to Rob Sanfilippo, analyst for research firm Directions on Microsoft, business developers actually have a lot to look forward to in 2011.

BizTalk 2010, launched in October, provides new ways to expose LOB functionality beyond the firewall via Windows Azure AppFabric Connect.

"This service can reduce the development burden by allowing Windows Workflow Foundation activities to be dropped into a workflow designer and tied into LOB applications through BizTalk adapters," Sanfilippo wrote in an e-mail interview. "Workflows can be hosted and managed with less effort now using Windows Server AppFabric hosting."

The upcoming SQL Azure Reporting Services will also enable remote access to LOB data stored in the cloud or on-premises.

Office 2010 Business Connectivity Services (BCS) also earned mention. Sanfilippo said the new Duet Enterprise product, which links SAP LOB applications to Office via SharePoint BCS, illustrates how BCS can link diverse data sources. "Duet itself is not new, but its use of BCS is, and since Duet Enterprise could find a decently sized customer base, it will be a notable step toward legitimizing the BCS technology," Sanfilippo wrote.

One technology we might see less of in 2011, according to Sanfilippo, is Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). "With the introduction of out-of-browser support in Silverlight 3, WPF may have lost a lot of its remaining loyalists."

What are your dev plans for 2011? E-mail me at [email protected].

About the Author

Michael Desmond is an editor and writer for 1105 Media's Enterprise Computing Group.

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • GitHub Previews Agentic AI in VS Code Copilot

    GitHub announced a raft of improvements to its Copilot AI in the Visual Studio Code editor, including a new "agent mode" in preview that lets developers use the AI technology to write code faster and more accurately.

  • Copilot Engineering in the Cloud with Azure and GitHub

    Who better to lead a full-day deep dive into this tech than two experts from GitHub, which introduced the original "AI pair programmer" and spawned the ubiquitous Copilot moniker?

  • Uno Platform Wants Microsoft to Improve .NET WebAssembly in Two Ways

    Uno Platform, a third-party dev tooling specialist that caters to .NET developers, published a report on the state of WebAssembly, addressing some shortcomings in the .NET implementation it would like to see Microsoft address.

  • Random Neighborhoods Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the random neighborhoods regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other ML regression techniques, advantages are that it can handle both large and small datasets, and the results are highly interpretable.

  • As Some Orgs Restrict DeepSeek AI Usage, Microsoft Offers Models and Dev Guidance

    While some organizations are restricting employee usage of the new open source DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company due to data collection concerns, Microsoft has taken a different approach.

Subscribe on YouTube

Upcoming Training Events