There is more to Seattle than the Space Needle and flying fish at Pike Place Market. At the end of the SOA conference today I persuaded Robert to embark on a tourist adventure, to brave the Seattle traffic and go to Archie McPhee “Outfitters of Popular Culture” . It should have been a 20 minute drive… hour and half later of nose to tail traffic we arrived. Now I had come across Archie McPhee years ago when my ex wife had been on the Clarion West SF writers camp, and she came back with the strangest plastic frog in fur white rabbit suit; I always wonder what the person who made it in China think of the west? ...

As with all conferences you tend to flag part way through, you start to think of the flight home and not having to sit in yet another session (no matter how interesting it sound on paper). It starts to seem all sessions are either in a cold draft or tropical atmosphere. At this point I have to say I am not looking forward to another conference next week at TechEd Barcelona, I could do with a holiday! Now I am sure some will say a conference is a holiday, but I rarely find them so, holidays do not involve PowerPoint (with maybe the exception of Triathlon training camps, but many people would say they are not holidays either) ...

I have focused on the the more developer end of SOA today. In the morning excellent sessions by Aaron Skonnard and Matt Milner on using WCF in BizTalk and best WF practices respectively, both provided an interesting set of gotta’s to look out for. Check their blogs if this is an area you work in. In the afternoon I went to a session on the Microsoft Managed Service Engine (MSE), a set of tools to allow versioning of services using in effect a WCF based proxy broker. Not a solution for every site, but in an ESB SOA world it could really save the day if you want an Agile development model, where you have to change WDSL contracts as a system evolves. My only worry would be how far it can go with the XML transforms to keep old clients working with new contracts. You still need a depreciation model which might be an issue - but even if this is the case a potentially very useful tool I am sure I will be revisiting. ...

Not a great day for new buzzwords to me at the SOA conference today, so just the one: POX - Plain Old XML, as opposed to XML data with extra META data

Since arriving in the Bellevue/Redmond area I have been struck by the lack of people. Wherever I have gone it seems like the place was built for at least twice the number that are present, whether it be the shopping centers or restaurants. I wondered was it because: the others are soon to arrive half the people left Now after traveling in to the conference for a couple of days and watching the local news I have the answer, It is option 1. - they are all stuck in traffic. ...

So my thoughts at the end of day…. Certainly a useful day, but the conference seems a little slow. The breaks seem long,the sessions short and the breakout sessions finished quite early in the day. Maybe I am just used to the crammed in format of TechEd that go on late into the evening. On the plus side this format does give a good chance to chat to other attendees, who seem very chatty and are from a wide variety of locations across the world; though nearly all white and male, an even less diverse group than at Mix UK! What does this say about the IT industry or maybe more to the point who gets to go to conferences? ...

Sitting here at the back of the Kodiak room at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond is somewhat similar to the control room at JPL which I went to on my last trip to the USA. All is can see is a sea of laptops and heads just visible over the rows of desks. It is nice to have a desk and easy access to power and Internet - all conferences should be this way. ...

SOA being a conference on business process is a great place to learn new words for the game of buzzword bingo, new ones to me thus far are: Onboarding - to hire staff Toast - information provided via a gadget on the desktop

After a couple of days in the Washington state my body has caught up to a manageable time zone (somewhere east of Denver I think, but that is close enough) just in time for for the start of the Microsoft SOA 2007 conference. The keynote for me highlighted that Microsoft see the future in the cloud, the Internet Service Bus (ISB) as opposed to silo’d Enterprise Service Buses (ESB). Now this assumes customers have gone down the SOA route already, which I would say is not the case in the SME market I work in. I still see many monolithic legacy applications where migration to SOA has not been considered yet. ...

For a while I have been suffering that when I switch on my Acer Core2 Duo Vista laptop, both cores sometimes go to 85%+ utilization, so the PC is slooooow. Usually after a few reboots it seems to clear. This can happen after a resume from hibernate and complete restart; there was no obvious pattern. Task manager only says that the load is due to the NT Kernel process - so not much help there. ...