Month: June 2004

Today I attended a panel discussion about Web Service architecture.
Beside all the new technologies which are shown at TechEd I mostly like these smaller sessions where interesting discussions can happen.
During the session a lot of interesting topics were adressed although not answered. What you can see are the new issues which arise when trying to set up a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
Every new technology solves some problems but at the same time raises new questions.
That’s the great thing about information technology, isn’t it?

Let me give you a short summray of the most interesting topics:

– Generic service interfaces
– Dealing with referenced and replicated data
– Different service levels, service categorisation
– Service versioning
– Service contract lifetime
– Distributing service semantics
– Universal entity modeling

I would be happy to hear your ideas about these topics.
Feel free to contact me if your are at TechEd or anywhere else.

On the second day I attended some interesting sessions.
One was about Microsoft and Open Source. Very interesting what Microsoft says about Linux, Application server, Standards and other open source products.
Althought it’s not an easy subject to speak about the atmosphere was very calm, open and polite.
I like this kind of constructive communication. Some of the comments were very enlighting.
I attended a Don Box session about several hosting containers as well. No comments.

At the end of the day I attended a session about mobile development with the Compact Framework 2.0. Very interesting.
In general the main topic in terms of development is the upcoming product release of Visual Studio.NET 2005.
It’s great to see new visual modeling support inside the development environment.
Whitehorse will inprove the way operations people, developers and architects will work together. And there will be a class designer for roundtrip engineering as well. It’s not an MDA approach, but a pragmatic modelling approach to enable developers to do round trip engineering. I’m glad to see that.
The new features of ASP.NET are very exiting as well. You will have personalization, authentication, and portal support with low effort. The languages have been improved as well. We’ll have generics and new (and easier) C++ language extensions.
On the whole a lot of improvements which will ease the development.
And the best thing is WSE2.0 now fully supports the OASIS WS-Security specification from 6.April 2004. This is the first toolkit available which can be used to create standards compliant secure Web Services.
What was first – the specification or the product? This question has not been answered yet.

TechEd 2004 Amsterdam is starting today with the preconference sessions.
By now my first impression are about Amsterdam itself. It’s an interesting location. I think the conference will surely contiune after the end of the sessions.
The event preparation seems to be as perfect as always. It’s amazing to see all the technical infrastructure. But the best is to meet all the people from around the world.
Today we had some presentations from the MCT program manager. The bar will raise again for the upcoming MCT program year in order to continue the best possible customer satisfaction hiring a Microsoft Certified Trainer. Sorry, a little bit of marketing should be allowed 😉

This year I will attend the Tech Ed 2004 in Amsterdam from 27.June until 2.July.
I’ll be proctoring the Hand on Labs and be available the Ask the Expert stand for you.
If you visit Tech Ed as well don’t hesitate to contact me.
I look forward meeting all the nice people that I met in Barcelona last year.

My daily impressions will be written directly into this blog.
I’ll try to give you as much first hand information as I can.