The Azure cloud commuting strategy mainly relies on having a number of REST (Representational State Transfer) based WCF services hosted in the cloud serving up various resources. Simply put, a REST based WCF service is a WCF service that supports just the HTTP transport and resources are addressed entirely through Uris and data transfer occurs without an additional SOAP messaging layer. Clients can use LINQ to talk to these services and resources can be returned in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format in addition to XML, which reduces the processing steps on a web page (which is normally JavaScript). The new M language (part of OSLO) is also designed to easily talk to these services. There is a neat text editor tool Intellipad (currently available) that can be used to quickly test the services (mainly HTTP GET statements). A free WCF REST Starter Kit is available for download at www.tinyurl.com/wcfRESTsk.
Several built-in services for the cloud, will be delivered such as the Access Control Service (supports OpenID allows for integration with multiple applications such as Yahoo, Google etc. using a single digital internet identity), the .NET Service Bus – or as they called it – the Enterprise Service Bus in the cloud- that punches through Firewalls/NATS, hosts workflows, provides messaging (pub/sub, multicast), allows queuing…
