A while ago, Chris spouted on the then-trend of all of his friends coming to work for MSFT. He himself joined up six month after writing that entry. Now, there seem to be a bunch of new consulting companies sprouting up. ThinkTecture, PluralSight (thanks for the shirt Keith!), Barracuda.NET and Wangdera just to name a few. Most of these seem to feature DevelopMentor alumni. Will we see newly-minted MSFT alumni join this trend? I know one – my friend Jeff left MSFT to start his own consulting firm Secure Justice Solutions, focusing on integrated justice information systems. One isn’t a trend, but it’s interesting to watch as the economy slowly improves.

Note, unlike Chris, who observed a trend only to become a part of it a few short months later, we won’t be seeing any “DevHawk Consulting” nonsense around here. I’m having *way* too much fun doing what I’m doing w/ Architecture Strategy. Besides, I get to torment work with Pat.

Update: In the comments, Avery pointed out that Rob Howard has left MSFT to create a company called »telligent systems.

I’m guessing someone blogged it last week (I gave up on catching up on blogs since I was almost three weeks behind), but there’s now a free home edition of xmlspy. Many of the cool features, including the schema editor, are available. However, the web services support, primarily the WSDL editor, remain only a part of the enterprise edition.

I keep wondering if someone in the community will build a WSDL editor with VSIP, esp. one that supports WSDL 1.1 and 2.0. I know CapeClear has their WSDL editor, but I find the explorer style view much less usable than the xmlspy-style graphical view.