help.net

Microsoft has been showing a demo of a Unix application, called Tides, ported to Windows with Services For Unix. The "trick" of getting web services to talk to the app is pretty simple: build an ordinary web service which exposes the methods you care to expose, but the actual implementation of those methods invokes the ported app and captures the output, massaging it appropriately for presentation to the client.

I plan to post something on this on my blog within the next week; I'm tired of waiting for me and my team to get our act together and put up something official on microsoft.com. I can at least expose the interesting stuff now while we figure out if we do a kb article or some other formal communication mechanism.

Thanks for kicking me in the butt. (I'm the guy that wrote the demo in the first place using COM instead of web services. I borrowed a half-day from a colleague on the Framework team to build the C#/Web Services version right around the time 1.0 shipped.)