Morning Coffee 85

  • Microsoft announces Surface Computing. When can you buy one for your house? Probably not anytime soon. TechMeme has lots more.
  • The one piece of swag I want more than anything else at TechEd is an Evil Mastermind shirt.
  • Nick Allen notes that WSDL 2.0 has reached “proposed recommendation” stage. I guess having a “recommended” version of WSDL is an improvement over the “note” version. But other than having a RESTful HTTP binding in addition to the SOAP binding – and being longer – what’s new?
  • Speaking of description languages, Don Box writes about the Web Application Description Language which looks very REST-y in that it supports specifying both the URI as well as the payload format. Like Don, I agree with Erik Johnson who commented that “people attracted to REST (in whatever form) are rebelling against interface-based programming more than WS-* itself”. I have a longer post on this coming, but suffice to say I’m really souring on interface-based programming.
  • Nick Malik writes that WCF is immature because of it’s “lack of a routable, intermediable, declared message durability option”. Yeah, that’s a huge problem in my book too. It also relates to the last bullet – since durable messaging is inherently async, it doesn’t fit well into the interface-based programming model.