If you're at TechEd and would like to catch up with me I'm on MSN Instant Messenger at benjamin AT benjamin DOT net.   I'm especially interested in anyone who's doing work or got thoughts on web services, Indigo or extreme programming. 

I'm also on Scott Hansleman's Microsoft Regional Director Bingo card (available from booths 49-50 in the Pavillion) so come and say hello and I'll help you win a prize. 

Roy was concerned that this represented the 'cult of the worshipping masses' and that we 'should not be handing out autographs, but software, tips, tricks and code'.  Well, happilly I can report that the goal of the Bingo game is to encourage attendees to talk to the Regional Directors.  It's sending the signal that we're here to connect with attendees and share experiences and transfer knowledge.

Meeting the RDS at TechEd is just like a .NET rocks episode but live and in person.

Here are some of my tips on how to make the most of the week at TechEd.

Make a session plan.  Know your entry and exit points.  TechEd is sold out.  Not only that, it is overbooked.  Expect to be sitting in the aisle if you aren't clear about which sessions you are going to and how to get there.  Spend some time learning the floor plan on the first day so you can get between rooms without getting lost. 

Don't stare too long watching the PowerPoint slides.  Every attendee is going to get a DVD with the slides and audio after the show (it will likely be on the web as well), so don't cram your schedule too full with sessions.  Pick the key sessions to attend, you can watch the others later.

Connect with people about the technology.  Instead of going to the breakout sessions, make sure you spend time in the Cabana areas and the Community Lounge.  The Cabana areas are small presentation areas where you can 'heckle' (well, ask questions and interact) the presenter.  The Microsoft stand in the Exhibit Hall has   many key people from the product groups at the event.  They are here to meet you, answer your questions and help you understand the technology.  Take advantage of this chance to have one on one conversations.

Speak to the Presenters, Authors or Regional Directors you see.  Don't be afraid to approach these people if you see them.  They are at the event to answer your questions and find out about your experience.  Use them. 

Focus on questions you'd like to have answered and areas of knowledge you'd like to improve.  Aside from the above, I think there's also a RIO networking area where you can go and find experts who can answer your question.  There are lots of key people from most of the Microsoft teams at the events and they are here to talk with you.   Spend some one on one time with experts rather than just sitting in the audience. 

There was a panel discussion with John Bristowe, Scott Hanselman, Joe Homnick, Joe Lindsay, Terry Mohn, Ted Neward.  the highlight for me was that there still isn't good tool support, or a good story from Microsoft, on how to manage services once they have been deployed.  Other points:

• Scott mentioned that his company provide services to 30% of all online US Banks and 50% of them rely on web services. So they are out there and being used.
• An excellent point was made there isn't good tool support (or a good story from Microsoft) on how to manage services once they are deployed. The tools to ensure that services are up and running and providing guaranteed levels of services are not here yet.
• There was some discussion about whether we should care about angle brackets or not. Scott made the point that we should focus on Infoset. John Bristowe made the point that it can be useful to understand the specs and know what is happening on the wire.
• Ted mentioned that editing WSDL is too hard and no-one at the event other than Scott had actually done it. Scott made the point that most of us had edited HTML files because we did not like the way FrontPage formatted them, so why hadn't anyone done the same with their WSDL?
• Some good points from the more business-focussed members of the panel that they are more interested in tools making developers productive than in having developers that understand the plumbing in web services.
• Discussion about what the definition of SOA is. Answers included 'components with a longer wire', 'objects with explicit boundaries', 'hooking shit together'.  I had a useful discussion aftewards with Joe Homnick that helped me see that SOA is most useful as a concept when talking with businesses about how to architect projects.  As I've mentioned before I'm still not convinced that SOA is definable, but it is based on top of good architectural concepts such as encapsulation, data hiding, loose-coupling, service discovery, messaging patterns and asynchronous processing.  So if we need to call this SOA in order to get all excited about these topics then it may be a necessary evil.
• I followed with the question 'what problems is SOA trying to solve?' answers included high-level re-use and interoperability.
• Discussion about location transparency not being a good idea. Ted suggested the original idea was really about being able to write code without having to know the location of the components, rather than hiding the fact that this was an expensive cross-network call to a component.
• Discussion about the fact that Amazon uses Web Services well but that XML over HTTP is more popular than their SOAP implementation. There was some discussion about alternatives to SOAP such as REST, but they were seen as more limited compared to SOAP. The key for me is that tool vendors need to implement great tools for SOAP so that it is easy to use as these competing approaches.
• The more business focussed members of the panel made the point that the technology is not the main thing, it's supporting business functions. For them the point of the Interoperability work is that it les them go out and buy products that they know can talk together.

Ted Neward gave the keynote at our WS-Interoperability Day even today.  Here are some of the points he made:

• It's important to learn from the past, in terms of previous distributed computing approaches, when looking at Service Oriented architecture and web services.
• One of the key things that made HTTP a ubiquitous approach to solving interoperability problems was that it was simple.  For me this highlighted the fact that it is essential that good developer programming models be developed over the top of the WS-* standards so that it's simple for developers to take advantage of the functionality without necessarily having to be a plumber. 
• It is important that vendors continue to work together and not start developing their own non-standard features.  Ted mentioned that vendors are currently being driven to ensure compatibility in order to make money from the new approaches, but once a market it established they may start fracturing away by adding their own non-standard implementations.  Dare covered this in his post detailing the SQL standards.
• Ted made the point that Objects work better when they are deployed together because they need to talk together.  Good objects are well factored and make a lot of calls.  This means that the same techniques does not extend well to situations where objects are distributed.
• The fastest call that can be made to a network is around 1000 times slower than a local in-process call.  This can raise to 10,000 times slower when the network is involved.  To illustrate what this means, Ted used the analogy that this was similar to his 20 minute commute to work taking 70 days (his math).
• SOA is just a new way to get developers to listen to the worn-out message that  'Distributed Objects Don't Work'
• Interoperable systems work best when the architecture is built from the centre out.  If you start at the .NET and work towards Java for example it's likely that you'll find you've implemented something that is incompatible.
• The problem with starting from the inside out is that WSDL, which provides the definitions, is hard to work with and you really need a tool to author it.

I flew into San Diego last night where Michele Leroux Bustamante had agreed to meet me at the airport.  The plane was an hour and a half late and I was wondering if she'd still be there or even recognise me.  Turns out I needn't have worried she'd be in the group with the three laptops and the wireless router:

That's Anant Kadiyala, Michele and Heinrich Gantenbein getting in all the preparation time they could before our interop demo.

I'm presenting a TechEd session in the Connected Systems track on how to use Web Services Enhancements 2.0 to secure web services.  TechEd looks like being a mini-WSE festival, with Aaron Skonnard doing the pre-conference on Sunday, Keith "My blog has gone" Ballinger talking up a storm on messaging over multiple machines and networks, plus loads of other applied web services talks.

In my session I'm going to cover all of the security features in WSE using as many code demonstrations as I can fit it.  I'll cover the basics such as security tokens, signing and encrypting before moving on to more advanced topics such as token issuing and establishing secure conversations.  I'll show how WSE 2.0 allows all of this to be done with code as well as policy and configuration files.  The best part is that straight afterwards you'll be able to go and do some Hands On Labs authored by Aaron Skonnard covering these topics.  How's that for in-depth educational experience?

Here's the official description

CTS302 Connected Systems: Using Web Services Enhancements v2.0 (WSE) to Secure Web Services
Wednesday, May 26 2:00 PM- 3:15 PM, Room 10
Speaker(s): Benjamin Mitchell
Track(s): Connected Systems, Developer Tools and Technologies, Security
Web Services are being used to cross application boundaries, especially between enterprises. Such interactions need to be secure. See how to use WSE v2.0 and the security protocols that it implements to secure Web service interactions within and beyond the Trust domain

For those interested in doing some background reading before the event, I strongly recommend WS-Security Drilldown in Web Services Enhancements 2.0 by Don Smith.  Rebecca Dias thinks its the best article she's read on WS-Security and I'd agree.  Also Hervey Wilson's blog mentions some truly magical features that will whet your appetite for what you could see.

Like Steve Maine, I've recently switched to RSS Bandit from SharpReader as my news aggregator of choice.  My main issues with SharpReader were:

• It used up way too much memory (300,000 K vs . 24,000 K).
• It took too long to load, the toast notifications used to hang my machine (I know I could turn them off but somehow I never got around to doing it).
• No ability to flag messages for follow up.  Being time-challenged of late I really wanted to mark records that I could post on later but couldn't (except by using the 'lock' and hunting for it later).
• No way of counting how many feeds I subscribed to (not really important, but I wanted to know - turns out it's 280).
• It ate some posts once.  Luke fixed this one pretty quick, but I find it hard to get over a data loss.

I'd tried RSS Bandit in the past but didn't think much of it.  However, now it provides a solution to most of the above problems.  It's fast, very quick to load, has great flagging and searching support and I really like the ability to use my own style sheet to view the posts (I wanted to try Newsgator with Lookout inside Outlook, but I had to install them a few times so that they'd play nice together, and then I couldn't find an easy way to choose my own reading font).  Matt Berther comments on Steve's post mentioned JetBrains (the people behind IntelliJ and ReSharper) have an Outlook plugin, OmniaMea that supports blog feeds as well as NNTP, so maybe this is my ideal.

Some things that I miss from SharpReader in RSS Bandit:

• Like Steve, I don't like the default alphabetical ordering.
• The arrow keys to move up and down between posts.
• The space bar takes me to the earliest unread message, rather than the most recent unread message.
• A strange setting where the font is always +0.25 bigger than I asked for.
• I preffered SharpReader's ability to open the browser in multiple new windows to a docked browser (maybe there's a config setting I'm yet to find).

I'm an archive kind of a guy so I'd love to find some tool to convert my SharpReader archive to RSS Bandit. 

Are you confused about how all of the WS-* specifications fit together?  Hard to get your head around the WS-Alphabet soup?   3Leaf have a great Web Services Architecture Timeline graphic that makes it easy to see how the specifications have been created over time [via Ken Brubaker]

Although there are a lot of specifications, they have been built in a composable way to support secure, reliable and transacted web services.

Martin Gudgin points to the Working Group Draft of the WS-I Basic Security Profile.  I believe that the web services security will play a major role in increasing the adoption of web services in future.  It's great to see the WS-I behind a push for greater interoperability in web services security.

Web services security enables message level security, through signing and encrypting parts of a message, so that secure communication can be established even across public networks such as the Internet.  Increasing support and compliance for this security infrastructure across platforms and development languages will lead to even greater adoption of web services.

I'm hoping that they develop test cases that can be used to prove compliance to the standard, similar to those already developed for the WS-I Basic Profile.  In preparations for this Saturday's Web Services Interoperability Day Michele Leroux Bustamante has had to assume the role of 'human interoperability tester'.

Before TechEd San Diego I'm going to be presenting a SAML token issuer sample with Michele Leroux Bustamante as part of the Web Service Interoperability Day this Saturday.  The event is a chance to actually see interoperability happening, rather than just watching PowerPoint slides.  We'll be focussing on showing real code demonstrate WS-Security (now an OASIS standard that will be implemented with the release of WSE 2.0) and WS-Policy.

Getting the demos ready has been an international collaboration.  John Bristowe has been waving the WSE/Policy 'Pom Poms'.  Chris Haddad is doing the Java implementation with OpenSAML.

After the demonstration there's a panel discussion on the state of web services standards that should be very lively.

I missed this story during the week but apparently the Australian birth rate is so low that we're facing extinction.  To stop the decline the government are offering AU$3000 to procreate!  So my wife and I could have made some money if only we'd flown back to Sydney to have Hannah.

Even though Hannah was born in the UK it turned out she wasn't eligible for a British passport since my wife and I have time-limited visas.  So it was a toss up between Hannah becoming an Australian or a German.  Turns out the Australian High Commission are quicker at issuing citizenship (now I undersatnd why!) than the Germans, and since we needed a passport in a hurry, Hannah's now an Australian.

The most challenging part was taking a photograph that met the passport criteria.  Trying to get a two year week old to open her eyes, look directly at the camera while lying against a light background with no shadows or parent hands visible was incredibly difficult.  After several attempts we were managed to get a photo so Hannah has a passport and can be successfully authenticated at Airports around the world.

I've been quiet in the blogsphere of late because of a number of changes going on in my life.  As well as a new baby I've also switched jobs as well, taking up a contract as a Program Manger with Kalido.  I'm responsible for creating a .NET version of their product APIs as well as managing the Test Team, focussing on automated testing.

Kalido create datawarehouse lifecycle management tools.  The core product, the Dynamic Information Warehouse helps large multinational companies manage complex datawarehouses in a way that can adapt to changes over time.  They were the first company I interviewed with when I arrived in London in October 2001.  I was intending to interview with many more companies, but I was so impressed with their technology that I accepted their offer.  Originally I helped develop a COM version of their product API and now I've been invited back to convert it to .NET. 

I started last week and it is great to be back in a software development company.  I love the challenge of shipping products given limited time and resources.