Just came from Don Box's session on "Meta Data Soup: Contracts, Models and Types". Without fail, this was one of Don's classic presentations; few slides with ever fewer words on the slides punctutated with a little colorful illustration as Don makes his points, but as audience you always get the 2 or 4 basic messages he's out to convey.

What struck me from Don's talk were a few things. First, he's getting (or rediscovering?) modeling religion and not just IT programming modeling but he's attempting to climb the stack up to the business domain with modeling although I think what he's still to do is change viewpoint from IT to InfoWorker and a whole new world's going to suddenly open to him. Next, Don had really good words about the value of RDF; again he's an XML bigot and with some new modeling religion he can see that RDF (or something like RDF) is a richer 'XML programming model' to express higher form relationships - really he's knocking on 'behavior'. Something else Don was plugging, and I can't remember how many times he mentioned it was BizTalk; as "those guys really have had it for years now". Don was giving the new Domain Languages / Whitehorse work in Visual Studio some good air time, but I think he plugged BTS even more.

One light note of humor, Don's talk was interupted in the middle the Podcast crew (about 5 of them) who came running in from the back of the room with cameras out recording, They came up on stage and provided a bit of light entertainment 'interviewing' Don - if that's possible, so check with today's Podcasts and you might see a little what I saw.

What was really nice though, was to see Don's thinking start to go above the technology infrastructure plumbing space and up level the discussions many of us are having - of showing how business and IT need to align, and how IT can create better value to the core business mission.

/Dave