Creating Service Contracts for Service Oriented Applications

An increasing number of businesses are providing and consuming "services" to build distributed applications. These services could be within their own organization or from another business. In some respects providing or consuming a service is no different than calling a method in an object. However, because of the distributed nature of services the "contract", which defines how one interacts with the service, becomes extremely important. A service contract describes the structure of messages and ordering constraints over messages for the service. The contract is the basis for protecting the integrity of the service.

The session will cover the major considerations for designing schema for service contracts. The focus will be on why good schema design is important and what aspects must be considered. The differences from n-tier non-distributed applications will also be discussed. The basic capabilities of schema design will be covered. Familiarity with XML and XML schema is helpful, but not a prerequisite.