Sounds of Silence

I came back from the far east and got buried by email and meetings. Plus my stupid HP laptop is still stupid – now the both the built in wireless and the PCMCIA card slot are not working correctly so I can’t get on wireless. Amazing how quickly the ability to get online from anywhere in my house has become routine to the point where if I can’t get on wireless, I barely get online at all.

A couple of quick takes:

  • Keith blogged about giving BillG the third copy of Software Factories that came off the presses. When he came to present Software Factories to my team, he gave me copy number four. He and Jack even signed it. Cool!
  • Keith and Jack’s Software Factories presentation was a huge hit with my team. Our architects want their own copies of the book now. Pat even stole borrowed my signed copy to read over the weekend. I can’t wait to see the general response to this book.
  • I got the scores back from TechEd Malaysia and Beijing. Metropolis was the top architecture session of TechEd Malaysia and Data in SOA was the top architecture session and in the top ten of all sessions at TechEd Beijing. Gurpreet’s sessions also did very well. There are still a few worldwide TechEd’s left, but I think it’s safe to say that the new architecture track has been a big success. We’re already in planning for next year, so look out for us to build on that success.
  • I’m still pretty much at the “what good is this?” stage on WS-Transfer and WS-Enumeration. I can possibly see using WS-Enum and/or WS-Xfer’s Get action for retrieving reference data, though recent issues with RSS and bandwidth demonstrate the inefficiency of polling for changes. David Ing commented that WS-Xfer provides “semantic understanding” of actions. True, but at the cost of semantic understanding of the data. It’s much easier to change the name of the action that to change the schema of the message, yet WS-Xfer and WS-Enum’s operations are completely untyped. So I remain unconvinced of the value of these specifications.