Very interesting thoughts in deed. Sometimes a little sensationalism is required to generate some “thinking out of the box”. We are all going to need a little extra TOOTB to help guide us through the SOA wave. All sarcasm aside, I think the thought process generated by the exercise speaks volumes to the real problem at hand these days with understanding SOA approaches, and that is what is an application.

I often get challenged about my personal thoughts about where web services fit inside a given application. Because my oversimplified answer is they don't; they belong on the edge just like any other managed interface into an application. “By focusing on our application as the center of any architecture, we can standardize the way we think about all external entities.” Man, do you mind if I quote this often?

I blogged a little further about my thoughts on the article here: http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/sstewart/archive/2004/12/15/37258.aspx

I believe that any DataLayer must be a simple code block, that they allow operations against DB.

That code block would not have to know on the Business Entities. Single to specialize it is to execute the operations (Store Procedures and SQL Sentences) against the engine DB (SQL, Oracle, DB2, etc.), with which this setting.

Finally, I invite to you to download the DataLayer.Primitives Public Version.

This is very cool Data Layer :)

DataLayer.Primitives - Readme!
http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1389

Cheers,

Javier Luna
http://guydotnetxmlwebservices.blogspot.com/