New .NET Services CTP Drops on July 7, 2009

Come next week, Microsoft will make available a new release of .NET Services. On July 7, 2009, the delivery of the Community Technology Preview cut off access to resources associated with the .NET Services including the .NET Services portal. According to Philippe Destoop, the enterprise architect for the Belgian and Luxembourg Developer and Platform Group of Microsoft, the update will be introduced between 9am and 3pm PST on July 7. Maintenance work involves more details than the offering of the new CTP.

“The workflow service will be removed (replaced later on). Solutions that use the workflow service will need to be modified and associated workflow service data (such as workflow types and instances) will be deleted. Users’ queue and router data will not be saved and restored. Users will need to back up queue and router data locally and restore it, restarting applications and recreating queues and routers once the service is back up. The new SDK needs to be installed,” Destoop added.

Concomitantly with the introduction of the new .NET Services CTP, Microsoft will also remove the Windows Azure .NET Workflow Service. The software giant has already warned developers taking advantage of its Windows Azure Cloud operating system in order to run and manage workflows that they will need to make changes in order to counteract the Workflow Service going offline. Microsoft explained that it was developers themselves that catalyzed this move. The reason is simple enough.

At this point in time, the .NET Services Workflow Service has Windows Workflow Foundation 3.5 at its basis. Developers simply wanted to avoid building for version 3.5 and subsequently have to transition workflows to version 4.0. Essentially, Microsoft will only go live with the Windows Azure .NET Workflow Service after .NET Framework 4 will be available.

[We've decided to] “suspend development on the WF 3.5-based codebase and to work on WF 4.0 instead, withdrawing the Workflow Service from the July CTP with the aim of reinstating it at a later date using the 4.0 workflow engine and tools. So far, everyone we’ve spoken to about this agrees that it is the right thing to do. Furthermore, customers are happy that we have listened to their feedback and are acting on it,” Destoop added.