After exhausting every question I could think of with James Newkirk, I walked over the black shag pile carpet to the Indigo area of the Microsoft pavilion.  Jim Johnson saw me hovering and asked me if I had any questions.  I said I was a WSE afficianado and wanted to join the wave and learn more about Indigo.

Jim is an architect working on the transactions within Indigo.  Jim is a really nice guy and took me through the WS-specs (Jim was on the working groups that wrote them) that relate to transactions:

• WS-Coordination - the foundation of the transaction 'stack'.  It's concerned with associating an activity identifier with a set of messages.
• WS-AtomicTransactions - This defines a protocol that allows existing transaction systems (think MS and IBM) to wrap their proprietary protocols in an interoperable way.  We talked about how exposing transaction locks outside service boundaries was not something that you want to do very often.  Jim pointed out that within an organisation's boundaries it is useful to be able to achieve two-phase commit using web services protocols.
• WS-BusinessActivity - this is the long running compensating transactions.

We spoke about how these specifications were going to be made available to developers.  It turns out the object model to manipulate these transactions will ship around Whidbey and some of the low level implementation would ship with Indigo.  Don mentioned these topics in his talk this afternoon.

Jim was an incredibly interesting and open guy.  He spoke with a lot of passion about what he's currently interested in - making transactions available automatically to all managed objects.  He had a great, almost Socratic way of talking about topics, for example "Imagine a world where transactions took a millionth of a second", "Imagine a world without catch statements, or where there was no clean up necessary within the catch statement".  Each time he let me try and think through what things meant or what would be possible.  It was so fascinating that I completely forgot about lunch.

We also spoke about more general career topics.  He believed it was important to find a question that you could think deeply about, then find a group of people who are doing it and finally have a passion for shipping software.  I really enjoyed the opportunity to talk with Jim.