As Tim Sneath spotted, I did another YAWP (Yet Another WSE Presentation) to the
.NET Exchange User Group at Microsoft UK campus in Reading last night. I'm doing a number of presentations around the UK in the next month (though I think
John Bristowe's record of 20 YAWPs a year is safe), details on
my presentations page. Here are
my slides and some of my
demos.
Web services are being adopted in the wild
There certainly is a lot of material to cover in web services from the specifications to the implementation, so we only briefly touched on Indigo. There were 30 or so developers there. Starting with the mandatory 'polling' questions I was surprised that around 60% of them had used web services already. Of that group about a third had added some form of security (HTTPS, VPN or internal network). There were some good questions in the group ('Can I use WS-Security in a PHP application? Will Microsoft compete with Tibco and the EAI vendors with Indigo and/or BizTalk? Has Don Box stopped using the term GXA?)
Blogs are a great way to learn about Web Services
I mentioned that blogging is a great way of tracking what's happening web services. I showed how:
How to get started reading blogs
First download a news aggregator like SharpReader or RSSBandit then download my modified OPML file. It contains many Microsoft bloggers as well as other web service related blogs (including those on Matt Powell's list).
I also promised a link to the code that downloads all of the PDC powerpoint presentations.