Microsoft features Open Source in TechEd keynote
Yes, you heard right. A few minutes ago in Orlando at TechEd IT 2008, Bob Muglia’s keynote included a demo of StockTrader 2.0, an SOA sample application consisting of a client application, a business process service layer, and an order processing service in order to place sample stock trades. Gregory Leake of Microsoft showed the application, with each of the three components built in .NET 3.5, and then I came on stage, representing WSO2, and we swapped out the WPF smart client for a PHP application based on the WSO2 Web Services Framework for PHP. Then we swapped out the back end order processing service for a Java version hosted in the WSO2 Web Services Application Server. After each swap we placed a successful trade.
Watch the keynote here.
The demo featured the cross-platform interoperability between .NET, Java-based solutions, and unmanaged code solutions such as the PHP application. The Web Services used were completely secured with message-level security (WS-Security), and everything of course worked quite seamlessly.
You can download the WSO2 StockTrader 2.0 application as well, including PHP versions of the business service and the order processing service.
The good news in putting this demo together is that the wire-level interop worked pretty spectacularly out-of-the-box, just as the demo promotes. The actual interop between the three major development platforms in use today (CLR-based languages, JVM-based languages, and unmanaged code based at some level in C) is impressive, and while there is more work to do to complete and verify interop deeply across Security, Reliability, Transactions, and Policies, it really seems like the goal of making this stuff both universal and "just plumbing" is approaching pretty rapidly.
On another note - yesterday we were speculating backstage whether a keynote at a major Microsoft event had ever featured an Open Source partner on stage. None of us could think of any off the top of our heads. Can you? Were we the first?
Update: 10PM. Here’s the press release. And a news article, with a nice (and accurate!) quote from me. 
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Sorry, you are three years late ;-). Sun and Microsoft demonstrated interoperability of their WS-* based management stacks at the Microsoft Management Summit back in 2005:
http://http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/steve/2005/04-20ManagementSummit.mspx
Is the Sun managment stack open source? I didn’t know that. If so, it would indeed beat us by a few years!
This is clearly not the first time WS-* based interoperability has been done, or shown. One of the new things here is that we tried to illustrate the breadth WS-* interop is acheiving - particularly into PHP and other environments that require a C-based stack of equivalent capability to the Java stack. The Apache Axis2/C component that drove the PHP application also powers C and C++ applications, embedded devices and appliances, and popular languages not implemented in managed code such as PHP and Perl. And more languages are being given a quality native experience with these capabilities rapidly.
The Apache Web Services projects are being used in very diverse environments, and power many of the Web Services capabilities in non-open source offerings as well. We think it’s a good sign of the interop possibilities to show these frameworks interoperating smoothly with .NET when using advanced capabilities.
Yes, the mangement stack is developed here:
https://wiseman.dev.java.net/
It is part of Metro:
https://metro.dev.java.net/