This IDC Research report, sponsored by Microsoft, is based on the results of a usage/adoption study of mission-critical application platform software within large organizations. The study was conducted by IDC according to their strict research standards, and Microsoft had no influence over the selection of survey respondents, who were randomly selected based on IDC’s research methodology.

The .NET StockTrader application is an in-depth sample and benchmark application for building service-oriented applications using .NET 3.0 and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). The application is functionally equivalent to IBM's primary benchmark and capacity planning application for IBM WebSphere, called Trade 6.1. The .NET StockTrader site contains a 100-page technical benchmark report detailing the performance of WCF vs. IBM WebSphere 6.1 for the Trade workload, including Web services performance. The application also demonstrates bi-directional interoperability between .NET and IBM WebSphere/J2EE.

Microsoft .NET adoption is now exceeding J2EE adoption as the preferred development platform for large organizations. While the two technologies will continue to co-exist, in less than three years since its initial release, the .NET Framework has quickly gained critical mass according to several recent analyst reports.

This service-oriented application is an end-to-end sample created using .NET 3.0 Windows Communication Foundation and industry-standard Web services. The application includes an ASP.NET front end, as well as a .NET 3.0 Windows Presentation Foundation smart client. It demonstrates the use of WCF over multiple transport protocols and encoding standards, interoperability with J2EE platforms, and also includes comparative benchmark results.