Today, Microsoft is releasing the latest coding milestone of .NET Services, a component of the Azure Services Platform. .NET Services are still in community technology preview (CTP).  

The March 2009 release further enhances support for web standards and interoperability, making it simpler for developers to connect cloud applications and services across platforms. Specifically, .NET Services now includes improved support for web standards such as REST, ATOM, SOAP, and HTTP.  This means that all developers – whether they are .NET developers or not - will now find .NET Services much easier to use because they can utilize industry standards and protocols to interface the services.

Developers can download the .NET Services SDK today via http://www.azure.com and Microsoft encourages your feedback.

.NET Services make developing loosely-coupled on-premises and cloud-based applications easier. .NET Services include a hosted service bus for connecting applications and services across network boundaries, access control for securing applications, and message orchestration. These hosted services allow customers to easily create federated applications that span resources from on-premises (private data centers) to the cloud.

The .NET Services software development kit (SDK) provides integration with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). This integration allows .NET developers to build on their existing skills in WCF and WF, allowing developers to more easily build secure and reliable applications that can interact and exchange data with other applications, independent of the underlying platform, and to enable system workflow and human workflow.

The Access Control Service is one building block service that is under the .NET Services umbrella, and this service now supports REST and ATOM for managing rules around claims transformation.

The Service Bus is the second major building block services and this now provides discoverable and durable queues, which support both SOAP and HTTP, provide reliable pull message delivery with the capability of peek lock and simple destructive reads.  Additionally, there are now discoverable and durable routers, which support SOAP 1.1, SOAP 1.2 and HTTP, and those routers provide message storage, control and delivery in unidirectional publish and subscription scenarios.  The Service Bus also supports Push delivery to HTTP endpoints and Solicit/Push delivery to Service Bus listeners through a NetOnewayRelayBinding mechanism.

Workflow is the third service and there is now a CloudServiceBusReceive activity which enables a workflow to receive Service Bus messages. Combining CloudServiceBusReceive with CloudServiceBusSend, the already existing activity, Workflow Service now offers improved integration with Service Bus.  Message-based activation allows the creation of new instances on-demand and direct communication with these instances.  Finally, there are Workflow REST-Client enhancements with the addition of PUT, DELETE, custom verbs as well as parameters and header support to the HttpSend activity.

.NET Services can be used in a standalone manner to connect services and applications. Used in conjunction with the other Azure services it provides the bridge to connect on-premises with the cloud, and with other programming platforms; it provides important interoperability functionality for the Azure Services Platform.

Developers can download the .NET Services SDK today. The latest .NET Services CTP, is available at: http://www.microsoft.com/azure/sdk.mspx

Incidentally, the Access Control Service of .NET Services can federate with third-party identity providers, allowing for the handling of identities from existing systems and from different organizations. The Access Control Service is a hosted Security Token Service (STS) for use if you need federation, but don’t want to build or buy your own solution.  The .NET Services Access Control Services can federate with third-party Secure Token Services, specifically supporting Windows Live ID, X509 certificates, user name and password, managed card, and personal card, as well as offering support for WS-* standards and REST.  With its federation capabilities, the Access Control Service can federate with Active Directory to use existing identities and enforce claims based access control. “Geneva” Server is on-premises Active Directory Server. The “Geneva” Framework is a library for building your own Security Tokens Service(s).  Microsoft Federation Gateway is one of the tokens that .NET Services Access Control Service work with to perform authentication.

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