State of the WS-Union as of 9/2003

I am reading the article Secure, Reliable, Transacted Web Services: Architecture and Composition on MSDN. It is a comprehensive summary of the specifications comprising the current state of the Web Services technology stack. The article touches on the recently released specs for WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity (which will be published soon according to Omri Gazitt) and concludes explaining the architecture of the Web Services/SOA demo given recently by Bill Gates and IBM's Steve Mills.

I find it interesting that an article co-written by Microsoft only mentions BPEL4WS for orchestration and doesn't mention Microsoft proprietary alternative XLANG/s, which is introduced with BizTalk Server 2004. I hope this indicates that Microsoft is still fully behind the BPEL standard, but to my knowledge XLANG/s is the only natively supported orchestration language in BTS 2004.

Now I can't help but speculating if/how much Indigo will support orchestration in one form or the other ... since XLANG/s is using xsharp.exe, one might wonder if there are some managed classes somewhere that provide an orchestration framwork. Nothing in the PDC sessions points to that though.

btw. Mark Fussell pretty much confirmed my last guess :) Indigo is indeed Microsoft's next, Web services aware distributed computing platform. I am very, very glad to see that. I've been waiting for a DCOM/ServicedComponents replacement since my first solution built with ServicedComponents. It's about time one materializes ;)

Is it October yet?