Tonight was my first bloggers dinner and quite a night.  I was the first one to sign up and the last one to arrive as Chris Anderson worked out.  What was most surprising was that other than Chris, Don and Ian 'I have no blog comments because I hand-coded my blog myself' Griffiths, I only met a few other bloggers (Chris has a better list).  A lot of blow-in blog readers!  But all are welcome and everyone's company was appreciated.

By the time I rolled up the only chair left was next to Don himself.  Luckily I'd boned up on things to talk about (John 'Policy' Bristowe also primed with a couple of last questions via instant messenge) and managed to garner the following:

• I started off with asking how do you communicate semantic intent with policy?  Don's response was: you don't.  You do it out of band with the telephone.  It's what humans are for.  There are a lot of people trying to apply formal methods to determine the structural correctness of the messages, but the intent is something that humans will work out.
• WS-Addressing.  I raised my beef about it being all well an good to have an opaque string as the address, but where was the protocol binding.  Apparently Indigo is going to use the simple URL style scheme, so a tcp address will look like tcp://domainname etc.
• The important of the Endpoint references is to provide a SOAP cookie style mechanism without having to get into the URL hackery such as query strings.
• Someone said "it just felt unusual to send text-based messages around - isn't that slow?".  Don's response was that the first time he had sex it felt weird, the next time better and now he couldn't imagine it any other way.
• What's different between the M4 and M5 releases of Indigo (Clemens seems to know a lot about this)?  Apparently the programming model has been refactored toto make it more unified and simpler (great news here).  The System.MessageBus.Servicess library has changed significantly because what was there was just not as good as it could have been.  I hope this means better terminology than DatagramPortTypeAttribute and DialogPortTypeAttribute, which always seemed a bit complex to me.
• What's the best way to approach Indigo today?  If you want to learn about indigo today in a way that will pay of in the future, don't worry too much about the high level details.  If you work from the wire level back up it will be most useful (this is least likely to change). 
• The focus with V1 of Indigo is proving that they can get great performance with messaging.
• We discussed Clemens' idea that because Indigo uses a streaming reader over the message body, it may be possible that on intermediary/endpoint may start sending onto another intermediary/endpoint before the full message is received.  Don mentioned that there's no reason to think that the message may ever finish.  Queue zen-like moment of poignant reflection and silence.  'Sort of like one giant Congo-line of a message throughout the Internet' I said.  Don didn't say it but I felt him think 'Yes, Grashopper'.
• We spoke about the fact that my pregnant wife who has always been worried about the size of my head, thought that Don was the only person I have on my PDC photowall that had a larger head than me.  Don said his head was larger than mine in more ways than one.  We agreed that his head was impressive, but he was leaning forward in the photo and clearly his head was not awesomely large (at least physically).
• I suggested Don try the Cinnamon Club for dinner.  We had the Axxiant Xmas dinner there and it was very good (though it was late and I had been drinking ... ).

Afterwards some of us moved off to the pub ...