It was not so long ago when I made my intentions known that the .svc extension in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF, previously - Indigo) is really a clutz. It is obstrusive and really unnatural, especially when it comes to RESTful Web Services.

In a closed door meeting with the product group folks back in 2005, before WCF rolled out and way before I joined the borg, I was told that this is a issue not with WCF itself, but by its web host - Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS)

There are some attempts to hack around it but one of the best I have seen is to do URL Re-Writing: Off Jon Flanders here. You can see from the bottom of his post via Christian Weyer that this still will not work with IIS6 (damned legacies) but this will give you a good excuse to move to a Better, Leaner and Meaner IIS7, which is a complete rewrite of its predecessor. About time, I say.

Following up on this, here are some more aggregated shareable details with regards to the Compact Framework 3.5:

Not usually what I write in this blog but this is soo funny I have to link to it here:

Source: http://bp2.blogger.com/_BbE4hyafULE/Rpb7SvbYZGI/AAAAAAAAI1k/CaKbyijOKyw/s1600/bush%2BGOTA.jpg

MSFT Corp has always talked about its ecosystem with regards to its developers and partners as one of its key value propositions which it offers through its platform to its customers.

Sometimes it is humbling to have customere call on you because its other systems can only work with yours and no one else. I have totally lost track of our ISV partners who are building great vertical solutions on top of our horizontal application stack, such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) and others and that list is growing as I write this.

This is another take on it, albeit from another interesting perspective.

To keep up with the little legacy I have with the Annual Enterprise Architecture Summit in Singapore, I am speaking in this year's event as well. This year, I am honoured to be sharing the same event with John Zachman, whom most of us know, is the originator of the “Framework for Enterprise Architecture” which has received broad acceptance around the world as an integrative framework, or "periodic table" of descriptive representations for Enterprises.

I will be speaking on Enterprise Business Architecture in this event. Interestingly, from the looks of the agenda and the speakers, it looks like I am the only ONE representation coming from a technolgy principal while the rest are representatives from the industry practice. It will be interesting to see how this pans out and of course, the pressure mounts. Do come by and say "Hi" if you are interested.

For the 4th year in a row, I will, again, be speaking in Microsoft TechED 2007 Asia in KL, Malaysia. I have spoken on a good breadth of topics for the past few years. This time around, I will be focusing on 2 architectural tracks. Here are my session topics and agenda:

• Languages, Frameworks and Architectures
  New language solution frameworks are emerging to make solution development less cumbersome. For example, AJAX for building rich, interactive, internet applications, SCA for composing components into services, Ruby-on-Rails for building web applications, and Blinq for generating ASP.NET websites based on a database schema. This session will look at how these languages are evolving to include architectural constructs and where that evolution will go.

• Real World SOA with Microsoft Technologies
  In this session I will show a very interesting look, from different perspectives, on what SOA in the real-world really is. Hear about whether one of the biggest IT buzzwords  in recent years has delivered what it promised and why. We will also hear the different implementation approaches to institutionalize a good SOA practice inside your organization and let the audience decide on what approach best suits their environment.  After that, he will share what the Microsoft platform can offer, in terms of value, to help the customer achieve their end-goals.

The latter topics will be very interesting as I relooked at how "SOA" has performed in organizations and if it has really lived-up to its promises. If not, I will offer some different perspectives on how Microsoft can help in that. I had, orginally, intend to talk about Event-Driven Architecture but decided against putting my audience to sleep, literally and figuratively . As usual, I will see what I can dig up to give away during the event. Do swing by and say "Hi" and attend the sessions for an interesting look from another perspective.