Software as a service

I cut my teeth in .NET working with a fellow by the name of Garland Brown on a project where we wrapped Microsoft’s internal Siebel implementation as a web service.

.NET Undocument writes an interesting history of the road to Getting Web Services:

The notion of “software as a service” has gradually become a coherent and unifying story throughout Microsoft. I see it in the .NET framework support for web services and ClickOnce, in Indigo’s attempts to unify the various Windows communications approaches into a simple, common services-based API, in Avalon’s borrowing of UI patterns (deployment, inductive UI, markup, navigation) from the Web. I sense it in Office 12’s continued movement towards XML and network-centric computing, and in Microsoft’s recent embrace of RSS. I can only extrapolate this to the rest of Microsoft’s divisions.

It was fun times and some of the most rewarding work I’ve done in my career at Microsoft working on a project we call “The Factory”. Months and years afterwards we went around the country talking about Web Services in the Enterprise long before SOA and Enteprise Service Bus were the rage.

Fun times.