With BizTalk 2006 R2 rounding the corner into the home leg, the folks in the CSD (Connected Systems Division - Biztalk, .NET, WCF, WF) have been very busy!! :)

We're looking down the telescope at BizTalk 'vNext'.

It's current name is 'BizTalk Internet Services' which offers a bunch of services for the 'cloud' (aka internet based wcf services). My personal favourite is the relay service.

Alot of functionality that previously existed in BizTalk has been pushed down into the .NET framework 3.x/4.x (WCF Services etc.)....allowing the BizTalk team to focus on some really cool new BizTalk features.

Here's an email I got earlier from Marjan from MS.

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As you may have heard, for the past year the Connected Systems Division has been incubating a set of building-block services that will shape the next generation of application development.  On Tuesday the 24^th, we will open the incubation of BizTalk Services to the public by inviting developers from all over the world to use the services and provide feedback. 

BizTalk Services will be available via labs.biztalk.net.  (UPDATE: OPENS 24th Tues - US TIME)

What are BizTalk Services?

These services, which have been in internal incubation for the past year, represent hosted versions of some technologies developed in the Connected Systems Division.  Included in this set of services are:

o Message routing – think of this as firewall friendly B2B messaging (Available now)

o Simple publish/subscribe event brokering – Pub/Sub at Internet scale (Coming soon)

o Simple federated identity and access control  (Available now)

o Workflow processes – Simple templates for cross-organization integration and the orchestration of business processes interacting with multiple services (Coming soon)

(Just had to stick 'The cloud' image in :)