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.

I updated my theme to reflect the brand-spanking-new Tech·Ed 2005 logo, which looks suspiciously like the now-obsolete Tech·Ed 2004 logo with different text. Luckily, there are palm trees in Orlando and San Diego.

Kidding aside, I will be at Tech·Ed next year, again deeply involved in the Architecture Track.

BTW, I ended up watching the three episodes of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! on the flight home from Tech·Ed. I made this a seperate post since I wasn’t sure how much the MSDN folks would appreciate the “foul” lanugage on Architecture Center. Amazon spells it “Bullsh*t” but I don’t get the whole changing one letter thing. I mean, if you’re offended by the word “Bullshit”, are your really going to be placated by a fucking asterisk? 😄

It’s been days, but I’m finally getting around to posting my Tech·Ed wrap-up. I had a great time as a speaker, track owner and attendee. My Data in SOA talk ended up with an 8.0 score and our track overall scored a 7.5. Not bad for our first time out!

My boss’s immediate reaction was to raise the bar for Tech·Ed 2005, which is fine by me as I have got some specific plans for an even better Architecture track next year. I learned a lot swimming in the deep end of the pool, such as:

• We could have been much better integrated with the other tracks, esp. the Dev track. Being involved in the planning from the start (Tech·Ed 05 content planning starts in earnest in the fall) should help out a bunch here, as will knowing the other track owners from this year’s event.
• We could have managed our track better. But hey, it was my first time! Things like speaker meetings, more content reviews and ensuring speakers go to training all help out here. Also, I’d like a little less churn on the management side next year. I took over co-track ownership duties when one of my teammates moved onto another team.
• I mentioned that several people commented that there should be “more code” in the track. Techie types like sessions that are heavy on the hands-on practical and code is about as hands-on practical as it gets. However, while I am on record as being an architect with a lower case “a”, I don’t think architects are just senior developers. It’s a different skill – one that I want to see broad knowledge of, but still different. Architects work primarily in models, patterns and process, not code. So for the Architecture track next year, I want to see “more models, patterns and process”, not “more code”. Watch for a focus on VS2005 Team System for Architects, Whitehorse and MSF.

What do you think should be in next year’s Architecture Track?