SOA and Avalon (XAML)

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I'm on my way to try and understand what Microsoft and others intend with the so called "Service Oriented" software strategy. Last week I read a whitepaper on SOA and Indigo as well as a short article by Charles Petzold on XAML. I probably won't have many responses to my questions here but I posted on Joel On Software about some frustrations.

I guess my question for Microsoft is "why not a better COM?" The .NET Framework was definitely a step in the right direction, but many of the components one got used to in COM are simply unavailable in the Framework. Instead there is "interop" capability which is much heavier and ineffecient for simple things like SQL DMO and Internet Explorer (SHDocView).

I'll link to comments I find interesting related to these posts.

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