RSSMicrosoft makes good on interoperability pledge
Not all of their pledges, perhaps, it's a bit early yet to see what the ultimate outcome will be from their surprise February announcement committing to better relations with the open source community. There continues to be a great deal of skepticism that the announcement was anything other than a PR ploy to avert further anti-trust judgements (which, if true, seems likely to fail).
But part of the commitment the company made was to more broadly publish its internal protocol documentation for its high-volume corporate products, and as of today they've begun to do just that.
That aspect of the company's commitment received little attention, and deservedly so; as code guru Joel Spolsky has noted (I don't have the citation handy), the ability to make use of cryptic legacy software documentation to replace or improve enterprise products is frequently over-rated by eager programmers who don't seem to realize that Microsoft's legions of coders actually have to work pretty hard and long to get the stuff working in the first place. Nonetheless, the availability of the communication protocols should prove a boon to enterprise IT departments and CIOs working hard to get all the various chunks of their pet SOA projects talking to each other.
