With apparently no fanfare, the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (or BPEL) spec has been reved to 1.1. You can get it online from MSDN, IBM developerWorks and BEA dev2dev. For those who haven’t seen BPEL, it: “BPEL4WS represents a convergence of the ideas in the XLANG and WSFL specifications.” XLANG is the language that powers Microsoft BizTalk Server.
In other personal programming news, even though I’m in a Phoenix hotel, I didn’t work on my weblog infrastructure. I’m waiting to see what comes next from blogX. With Chris and Don working on it, my time is better spent in other places. I did build a tool to download my weblog entries and store them in a single XML file on my local system. Even converts from HTML to XHTML via SgmlReader. So I’m ready to migrate to something else.
Since I’m not building blog tools, I spent my hotel evening last night with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). The more I play with this product, the more impressed I am with it. One of the features of WSS is the ability to be notified via email when something changes (a doc, a folder, a list, etc). Of course, those of us in the blogsphere would rather have an RSS feed to tell when something changed. So I built an RSS feed generator for WSS. I will post it after it undergoes some basic smoke testing (I sent it to Matt to see if he could get it to work). Since Office SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) is built on the same technology, it should work there as well (I asked Matt, who has an SPS up and running, to try this out too).
Finally, welcome Robert Scoble to MSFT. Interesting to see that he credits his weblog for helping him get hired. Glad to have you on board!