The final bits for 'Orcas' or .NET Framework 3.5 are now available for download! I must say this was a relatively quick, feature packed release for us.

Get it here.

For the Connected Framework team in which I work in, we concentrated on 4 major themes for this release:

*Make WCF into a great platform with support for all common web formats. This includes work we did for ASP.NET AJAX, XML and JSON encoders, syndication support with RSS and ATOM, and first class REST support

*Integrate Workflow and WCF. I must say as one of the folks running our community/customer program within the team right now, I see this as the #1 reason why customers are moving to Orcas. Being able to build services using workflows & make them long running and durable; and exposing workflows as services are both pretty powerful features.

*Finish WS-* work. We completed the standardization process for WS-Security, WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Transactions and WS-Policy.

*Provide tooling! This was one of the other big customer asks. When we shipped 3.0, we had add on packages for VS (as CTPs) for WCF tooling. With Orcas, this is now release quality and part of VS.

We look forward to adoption of the 3.5 platform!!

Paul Andrew and co. have just released BizTalk extensions for WF. This is a really cool piece of technology as people have been asking whether to use BizTalk Server or Windows Workflow Foundation when they want to implement a business process. This SDK allows you to avoid that choice by using both WF and BizTalk together :)

If you use WF, you can now build an orchestration and deploy it to BizTalk Server and the workflow can now use BizTalk features such as adapters, management infrastructure etc. If you use BizTalk, you can now try out the new workflow programming model while still continuing to use the enterprise features in BizTalk Server. Best of both worlds! Thanks Paul and co.

This past week, we announced "Oslo" at the SOA-BP conference in Redmond. Oslo is the code name for a group of technical investments we're making over the next couple of years to simplify designing, building and managing composite applications. This is what I've been working on since we shipped WCF and WF in the .NET Framework 3.0. I'm specifically working on the Rules features we're adding in the next version of the .NET Framework and on the Activities we will ship in the .NET Framework.

Read more about Oslo here.