Another great Architect Council. Thanks to everyone for attending. Dino Chiesa did a fantastic session on Service Orientation moving from the concepts, through to design, current standards and Web services. He also talked about Interop in some detail and outlined a set of pragmatic interop strategies that don’t rely on WS but work really well.

I made Dino do the council content twice, once for customer and once for partners. Then we made him speak at an irishdev community event. Here he showed demos of some of his interop strategies. He showed a Java class compiled in the IBM JVM and also compiled using J# on the .NET side. This class could use Java serialisation and pass nicely between the two environments. Obviously it breaks the SO tenet of sharing schema and not class but as Dino kept re-iterating he's a pragmatist. In many cases we can execute effective interop in a variety of ways.

He also showed using http get to retrieve an XML document. No need for SOAP or WS etc. Again a simple pragmatic approach. I hope you enjoyed the sessions, I thought Dino was a great speaker; he loved moving around the room and took on questions on all technical topics with ease. I hope he'll come back and visit us again.

As always, your feedback on the day is welcome.