As we talk more about Interoperability on this website you will notice that there are various facets to it. From making a software available on different platforms to enabling exchange of data between two disparate applications there could be numerous interesting and complicated scenario. I would primarily be focusing on the developer aspect of Interoperability for e.g. a simplistic use of an old win32 (C++ or VC++) dll in a .NET application to a more challenging scenario of exchanging information between a .NET applications running on Windows and a Java application running on Linux. While the effort required from a developers perspective to get the scenario working may vary – it is absolutely essential that the platform and tools that the developer uses provide as much as possible support to make things easier for him by automating the plumbing part and letting them focus on core business problem.

Before i talk about how to utilize these specific interoperability features let me list some possible real scenarios of Interoperability:

Scenario 1: You have a legacy algorithm implemented years ago in VC++ and you have to use it in a new application being developed in C#. You do not have the source code of the legacy algorithm or it’s proprietary so you don’t want to talk to everyone about it to reimplement it.

Scenario 2: You have a Java application and your client sends you data in an excel file – you need to extract data from it from your application and update your database.

Scenario 3: There is a webservice written in Java and hosted on Linux and you have to consume it from a C# application running on Windows or a .NET webservice.

Scenario 4: Your client has a database hosted on Windows and you have to use that data from your web application written in PHP.

Scenario 5: You have a dll written in C# and you want to use it from a Java Application or vice versa.

Scenario 6: You have a web application written in Java running on Linux and you want provide a rich interface to it using Silverlight.

Scenario 7: Using the features of Ruby and Python in your .NET application

Scenario 8: Running some of your friends .NET code on your LINUX machine

Scenario 9: Your customer has data in SQL server and they want you to write an application in Java for their partners to access this data.

and many more…

The world of Interoperability is very interesting and here on this blog i will try and show how to implement these and other scenarios that i can think of using the developer tools and features of the platform.

stay tuned…

and btw – if you have an interesting story/experience on Interoperability to share – write to me at bijoydotsinghalATmicrosoftdotcom

In the meantime also read Abhijeet’s Blog where he is talking about various technologies used to enable Interoperability.