Lobbing WCF into the LOB with the WCF LOB Adapter SDK. Think "Improvise, adapt (WCF), overcome (LOB integration challenges)"

Microsoft Downloads - WCF LOB Adapter SDK 2013

The Microsoft© Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Line-of-Business (LOB) Adapter SDK provides for a simplified programming model on top of the WCF Channel Model by adding metadata browsing, searching and retrieving functionality, and development tools for generating and testing adapter code.

Version: 1.0

Date Published: 7/12/2013

WCF-LOB-Adapter-SDK-2013-x64.exe, 11.2 MB

WCF-LOB-Adapter-SDK-2013-x86.exe, 11.2 MB

Many large enterprises have disparate systems including legacy mainframe, databases, packaged and homegrown applications that need to be integrated with each other to provide end user solutions. The technology integration becomes more complex after companies go through Mergers and Acquisitions, which are more prevalent in case of Financial and Telecom Industry verticals. Back-end systems such as SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel, Oracle, IBM CICS, IMS, VSAM and Relational Databases are collectively known as Line-of-Business (LOB) applications. The line-of-business adapters provide legacy modernization by bridging existing back-end applications with the modern interfaces. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) provides a unified framework for building distributed applications, including creating adapters to existing applications.

The WCF LOB Adapter SDK provides for a simplified programming model on top of WCF Channel Model to enable adapter developers in creating service-oriented interfaces to existing systems and applications. The Adapter SDK surfaces a target system adapter as a WCF Binding. When used from a Windows Workflow project, the adapter can also be used to generate workflow activities.

The goal of the WCF LOB Adapter SDK is to facilitate uniform development of reusable metadata-oriented WCF-based adapters that enable enterprise applications, databases and messaging platforms to integrate with each other. The same adapter binding developed using Adapter SDK can be reused in multiple .NET applications including Custom .NET Applications, BizTalk Server 2013, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services. In addition, Adapter SDK provides a common metadata object model to expose target system metadata, for adapter consumers to browse, search and retrieve WCF contracts from the adapter.

The Adapter Consumer can use the adapter in an integration application similar to a typical WCF Service without having to learn a new programming model. Some of the high-level features provided by this SDK are as follows:

• Connection pooling for connections to the target system
• Operation/Type metadata API and WCF contract generator
• In-memory metadata cache
• Adapter Code Generation Wizard
• Tools for adapter consumers to browse/search available operations and generate WCF contract(s) with selected operations

I dig the idea behind this. It seems very real-world, to provide this kind of thing. Improvise, adapt (WCF), overcome (LOB integration challenges) ...