Is anyone able to indicate if this project (Managed Service Engine) has been abandoned?
I need to make a decision on whether or not to use this as part of my enterprises service virtualisation plans. I see a number of competing solutions from Microsoft at the moment like AppFabric Server, Olso and custom WCF, but none offer the level of governance like the MSE enables.
I do not want to be known as the guy that choose poorly in a year from now when the unified solution appears.
If MSE is no longer under development, do you think that by adopting it anyway, solutions built in it will be portable to the replacement product?
I was recently on a project where using MSE was investigated. The investigation took place in Q1 of 2011. After speaking with Microsoft representatives and a former member of the MSE team, we found that Microsoft is no longer putting any effort into MSE. It was never a supported project anyways. Thankfully the decision was made not to use MSE in the production runtime environment.
Prior to that project I was on a different project with a different client where MSE was used for a brief period of time. Brief for a reason. We found MSE very difficult to use, both from a UI standpoint, which is pretty much unusable for any large number of services, and from a limitations standpoint. MSE does have some very cool features, like giving you the ability to virtualize endpoints, but it's not worth it IMO.
Since it acts as the broker, it becomes a bottleneck and a single point of failure. There isn't any good way to migrate configurations (which are hell to begin with) from environment to environment, and if you screw one up, you could end up restoring your database. Also, since MSE is acting as the broker, you lose the WCF capability of transactions (which is a big problem).
Additionally, the MSE website states that MSE has reached end of life and suggests alternatives. It also states that there will be no further releases and discourages its use in production:
"The December 2009 CTP Release was the final release of the MSE. (...) In closing, we want to direct you to section 3.(E) of the License Agreement regarding the support clause. As a CTP release we do not recommend this be used in production or provide support."
All said, though it gives you some cool features, I would suggest that you do not use it. What governance capabilities are you looking for?