This morning during the Microsoft Architects Forum, I followed a presentation given by Simon Guest on Interop & Integration, where Simon talked about the difference between Web Service stacks between Microsoft products and our competing vendor products; following WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 and WS-* interoperability guidance. If you check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/building/interop you'll basically find all the material Simon presented, but Simon also gave us a heads up on what's coming up soon including more interop content for vertical industries using web services and more technical content around WS-Security and guidance for RSA, BEA and others; plus other cool stuff. Also if you've interested in more material on interop, you'll probably want to check out Simon's book on .NET and J2EE interop.

Later on in the day there was an interesting talk by Pat Helland on some new messaging transaction features coming up in SQLServer 2005, and every time Pat speaks on something like transaction processing (which he knows intimately) you are always assured of a very 'lively presentation' that leaves you with a clear sense of "gee, why didn't I think of that?".

What was more interesting perhaps was a follow-up session Pat pulled together for a joint discussion by the Indigo, BizTalk and SQL Server team Program / Product Managers on 'messaging'; with folks like Don Box from Indigo. So when it comes to 'messaging' and Microsoft - we basically had all the key Redmond 'minds' at one time in the room. It was nice to see how far we've come from function calls, through components and now how we're clearly heading for SOA & services (loose coupling, async communications, independent deployment, managed communications, ...) It is nice to see how the various product teams are thinking about the broad subject of messaging across all the product lines with things like: Indigo providing the new Service Programming Model and Channel Architecture, BizTalk with integration and business process server, ... and the discussion also had a couple of implementation scenarios thrown in for good measure for the teams to validate.