In the space of a couple years, the architecture track has swelled from a handful of sessions and a couple of panels, to a first class citizen of the overall Tech-Ed experience. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) made its presence felt from Steve Ballmer’s keynote, to the last minute chats at the conclusion of the conference, and in almost every after-hours conversation in hotel lobby lounges during the week. While Microsoft’s branding of SOA as “Connected Systems” did tend to muddy the conceptual water at times, the message is clear… hardly anyone is talking about the same thing when talking about service-oriented architectures.

Some ideological conflict seems to be centered not on the message-based architectures and patterns – which seem to be achieving defacto acceptance as the ultimate meaning of service-oriented architecture, but on the role of applications in a service-oriented architecture. For some architects, the word “application” simply means a set of rich user interfaces that tap into an underlying, asynchronous command-processing pipeline in a service-oriented utopia. This perspective rings with Sun Microsystems’ mantra, “The Network is the Computer” – in effect suggesting the service set is the application. For others, applications are applications, services are services, and that service infrastructure may connect distributed applications and make them reusable, but applications and services are inherently different and separate while still taking their respective places as essential and successive units of decomposition of the enterprise informatic wholarchy.

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