If all things should go positive, I will be addressing the Malaysian Independent Developers (MIND) Usergroup Community on May 7th 2005 in Microsoft Malaysia, which is located in KLCC Petronas Twin Towers (which incidentally are the world's tallest towers)

This is the first time INETA APAC has activated any member of its Speaker Bureau out of their localhost(127.0.0.1)-application-domain (sorry for the geek slang...) I am preparing a 4-hr marathon session on nothing BUT Web Services. Some of the sessions are deep technical 400 series and it is definitely not a session for the faint-hearted nor the casual observer on a Saturday afternoon. This would definitely be an angle-bracket fest.

My proposed topic abstracts are as follows:

WS-Yesterday - History and Evolution - by William Tay

• SOAP vs others as a Distributed Computing protocol
• Service-Oriented Application Programming
  • Lessions Learnt
  • Applied Principles

WS-Today – Demystifying WSDL and Best Practices (Part 1 and 2) - by William Tay

• What is WSDL ?
• Critical role in Service-Orientation
• Core Elements and Definitions
• Discovery Views
• Best Practices
• Coming soon to a parser near you:
  • WSDL 1.2 ?
    …or is it…
  • WSDL 2.0 ?
  • WSDL concepts in Indigo

WS-Tomorrow – Service-Orientation, Indigo and you - by William Tay

• Indigo in Theory
• Core Indigo Concepts and Principles
• Indigo Messaging Model

The slides are here. Go geek out.

Lets take a look at the meaning and symbolism of the color Indigo. I will attempt to slot in my own views on how the color maps into the technology.

There was Viper (I am sure there is a play somewhere here with COBRA or izzit CORBA ?), Falcon, Wolfpack, COM+ (I dont think it has a codename), .NET Remoting and now Indigo, which happens to be Green at first.

Of course, the Development and Database tools were codenamed after places (Everett, Orcas, Yukon, Whidbey, ...) Incidentally, the belief was that the further the codenamed "place" was from Redmond, the later the shipping dates will be. I dont really know the accuracy of that though.

Of course, my interest has always been in the domains of distributed computing and I have been on Viper since Day 1 and moving along with each new evolution of distributed computing technology. I am deeply entrenched in Indigo today, which some people have argued it is more of a revolution of distributed systems in terms of its perception. I dont disagree. However, I always chose to believe that Information Technology should be deployed for the sake of Business Innovation and not just for the sake of technology. This hasnt happen before BUT I strongly believe it is set to change with the coming of age of technological (horizontal) and business (vertical) standards and Indigo is set to deliver that set of technological standards while enabling vertical standards to be built on top of it. Put it all together and you get real Service-Orientation which preaches to the idea that Business drives IT and not the other way around.

Singapore is a hotbed for a lot of great technology conferences this year. I am invited to present in quite a few of them this year. Of course, most of these presentations are very centered around XML Services, Service-Orientation and Distributed Systems. These are a couple of the events that I will be presenting in the second quarter of this year. I am looking forward to SDA.NET Conference 2005 as I will be presenting a couple of sessions on Indigo and I am also very excited to have 2 mysterious internationally-renowned speakers (whom I will disclose later) whom will be presenting alongside me as well. All 3 of us will be bringing Indigo to the plate during this event. If you are around Singapore during the 24-27th May 2005, please do not miss it.

I will update on the details of the synopsis once I have it.

 

If these events are not enough to whet your geek passion, there are a lot more great ones coming up in the second half of this year. Stay tuned to this space for more.

I dunno --- I think 1 GB is already a lot. Now, we have 2 GB !

When will the war hit the breaking point ? When it reaches 1 TB ?

As usual, I find the documentation of the Indigo CTP bits rather lacking. This is to-be-expected for any CTP Releases. Besides the declaration of attributes, Indigo makes heavy use of configuration to enable an Aspected-Oriented style of programming (AOP). This is really good as it really separates the technical goo from the functional business gunk. This is all good BUT the documentation for the configuration section (plus the schematic view) is rather lacking from the CTP documentation.

A great article by ex-MSFTee Stephen R. Walli on OnLamp.com that deals with the Perspectives on the Shared Source Initiative.

A must read for a great insight into Microsoft and its shared source initiatives and perspectives.

Finally, it is available to the public ! Go get it here. The PressPass is here.