Talking With William Oellermann About the Managed Services Engine

I had the opportunity to talk with William Oellermann about the Managed Services Engine (MSE).  MSE is a solution built by Microsoft's SOA Solutions Team that facilitates enterprise SOA through service virtualization.  MSE provides the ability to support versioning, abstraction, management, routing, and runtime policy enforcement for services.

Go watch my interview with William on the MSE here.

Everything you see in the video is available through the free CodePlex version, available at http://codeplex.com/servicesengine. 

In a past video interview with the guys on the Code to Live podcast, Chris Madrid showed a quick demo of how to use MSE to handle service versioning.  In this video, William Oellermann, Practice Manager for Microsoft's SOA Solution Practice, demonstrates how to use MSE to create a new endpoint and WSDL without concern for the implementation behind it, how to quickly virtualize operations into that endpoint, change the message transport from SOAP to POX, and finally how to add behaviors for policy enforcement and management.  Don't let the "manager" title fool you: William is the guy who came up with most of what you see in MSE.

There are a few things in here that are really cool to me.  I love how they use behaviors in MSE to enable integration with Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) in BizTalk and use SQL Server Reporting Services to provide relevant reports to various roles.  I also love how MSE truly enables a contract first environment without worrying about the runtime implementation before deployment.

It's not just me who is excited about the possibilities with MSE in a runtime governance role.  Jesus Rodriguez posted about why he is excited to see MSE fill some obvious gaps in Microsoft's SOA stack.  InfoQ also reported on the release of MSE, pointing out that, while Microsoft's typical answer answer to SOA is BizTalk, MSE has no dependency on any server products, it only requires Windows Server and .NET 3.0.  Even luminaries like Christian Weyer have been keeping an eye on MSE.

In my opinion, this tool should be at the top of your list to evaluate if you are at all involved with creating or managing services in your organization.  It solves so many problems typically found in enterprises such as how to handle versioning of contracts or even how to reuse operations across multiple endpoints.  As one of the comments on the MSE CodePlex site says, it solves the DLL Hell problem of service versioning.

MSE is part of Microsoft's Service Oriented Infrastructure technology group on the Microsoft SOA & Business Process solutions stack.  I love this view because it doesn't focus on products, it shows the solutions that are available as free downloads as guidance and reference applications to help you focus on solving business problems while the plumbing is largely done for you.

First, watch the interview with William and see the demo of MSE.  Then go download the free CodePlex version of MSE, available at http://codeplex.com/servicesengine.