I am desperately behind on all the wonderful things I want to blog about.  I feel a major sense of relief now that the PDC is over with and Indigo is disclosed.  My dialogs will be far more fluent moving forward as a result of this.  As a Microsoft employee the strongest anticipation is felt right before the PDC, more so than the anticipation of a product release, think of it like the world cup or the Olympics.  It was awesome to see that the blogging developer community was also duly excited.  Thanks for your support!  We really appreciated it.

Before I start summarize my experience at the PDC, I wanted to give you a heads up on some of the great work the Industry players participating in the Web services workshops are doing.

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft and 6 other vendors participated in a face-to-face interoperability workshop for Reliable Messaging. The feedback was that it was a resounding success. There is a discussion group for folks to continue dialog on the specs and the scenarios that were tested. A series of companies, including MS, IBM , and Systinet, have endpoints posted and there are more on the way.

At the Gates/Mills event in NY last September, Bill Gates stated that Microsoft intends to submit completed specifications to a standards-setting organization, and that Microsoft is committed to license this necessary technology on a royalty-free basis. To ensure that this promise can be delivered, all workshop participants need to make a similar commitment for their contributions.

The excitement around the WS-* specifications is growing. Customers want to see implementations of these specifications become a reality. I have already been in dialog with large enterprise customers who have actually implemented early versions of the WS-ReliableMessaging specification. They see the value in this technology and are willing to put $$s into implementing their own frameworks early.

The workshop process and feedback process is proving invaluable to polish these specifications before being submitted to a standards body.

I can’t wait to see the progress made in a year’s time.  Interoperability is critical for companies to build SOAs that will bring their IT departments into the next series of decades of computing.