I may be at Strategic Architect Forum, but I’ve actually been coding off and on today - using WSE2 to expose web services. I hadn’t realized that SoapService supports auto generation of WSDL – pretty cool. I dug around with Reflector to figure out how it works. Turns out that SoapReceiver (parent of SoapService) exposes a method called GetDescription that returns the WSDL as an XmlDocument. The SoapReceiver version of GetDescription returns null, but the SoapService implementation uses an internal class called WsdlCreator to generate construct a ServiceDescription from SoapService type that you write. Pretty cool.

The only downside is that if you use raw SoapEnvelopes as the input and output parameter of the SoapService methods, the WsdlCreator has no way to know what schema to use for the corrisponding SOAP messages. So, it punts and represents a SoapEnvelope as sequence of xsd:any tags. 😦 If you use XML serializable types for parameters, then the WsdlCreator generates the associated schema in the WSDL. Only issue, I gave up on XML serialization a while ago.

I wish there was a way to adorn the SoapService methods with an attribute indicating the associated message schemas (with the ability to validate those messages automatically).

In addition to event activities, we also take advantage of SAF to have side meetings with customers. Yesterday, I spent an hour discussing software factories and high-performance computing with Simon Cox from the University of Southampton. Simon is one of our inaugural group of Architect MVPs. We have fourteen architect MVPs across two categories: Visual Developer – Solutions Architect and Windows Server System – Infrastructure Architect. We’ll be growing this group significantly over the rest of the fiscal year, but there are already some influential names in this group, including Roger Sessions, Paul Preiss (founder of IASA), Ingo Rammer and Clemens Vasters. Congrats to all the new Architect MVPs!

This week is Strategic Architect Forum IV where we are bring over 200 top strategic architects from around the world to Redmond for a series of presentations and breakout discussions. Norman Judah, CTO of MSFT Services, is doing the opening keynote. Other keynote speakers include Pat Helland, Software Factories’ authors Keith Short and Jack Greenfield, plus a Q&A session with BillG. Last year, we recorded all the sessions and published them as The Architecture Strategy Series. We’re still working out the specifics for this year’s content, but we will be publishing this year’s sessions as soon as we can.

One of the things that’s interesting about SAF is that we do a small number of traditional presentation sessions and a large number of discussion breakouts. For these discussion breakouts, we get around fifteen to twenty architects in a room to discuss a problem. For example, I’m doing a talk discussion breakout tomorrow on Refactoring Your Best Practices. Each breakout also has a moderator and a note taker – the goal being to record the knowledge and to track a list of action items.

In addition to SAF, we have two ancillary events going on. All of our field architect evangelists are in town with their customers, so the past two days we had training for them. I had to speak Sunday morning about our influential and community programs. We also have most of our Architecture Advisory Board in town for SAF and their twice-yearly face-to-face meeting. This is the first face-to-face meeting of MAAB since I took over the program, so I’m looking forward to meeting these folks in person.