"We expect the investments ILOG has made in its latest release of Rules for .NET, particularly its tight integration with WCF and the .NET Framework, will benefit Microsoft customers who are trying to promote cross-boundary collaboration leveraging BRMS and SOA on Microsoft platforms," said Burley Kawasaki, Director in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft, as ILOG today announced ILOG Rules for .NET 3.0.

"IT departments need the right tools to fully leverage the benefits of SOA and composite applications to continue to bridge the gap between business and IT," Kawasaki added.

Debuting with this new release, ILOG Rules for .NET 3.0 has a modular architecture similar to its sister product, ILOG JRules, for the Java platform. These modules include a dedicated rule authoring environment for business users called Rule Solutions for Office.

Other key benefits and features, said the company in an announcement,  include the following:

• Portable Rule Editing Environment for Business users
• Rule Solutions for Office and Rule Team Server for Microsoft SharePoint Services combined to promote a document-centric approach to rule management, leveraging new features found only in Microsoft Office 2007.
• Out-of-the-box SOA deployment using Rule Execution Server for .NET -- Traditionally, SOA investments have been expensive. However, ILOG Rules for .NET 3.0 lowers the costs of a typical SOA deployment by supporting "point-and-click" deployment, end-point management and standard approaches to project integration.
• Enhanced Rule Management for Business Analysts -- Business analysts can more easily collaborate with developers working on a common set of rules in their familiar environment.
• Enhanced performance with RetePlus and FastPath available for the first time on the Microsoft .NET Framework platform
• In this version, ILOG is introducing RetePlus and sequential execution with FastPath for .NET platform.
  ILOG Rules for .NET 3.0 is available immediately. For more information please visit: http://www.ilog.com/products/rulesnet/.