I spent 5 of the last 7 days speaking at the Web Services DevCon and Win-Dev.

The DevCon was a blast, with tons of great talks. The crowd favorite was Clemens Vasters' presentation - he showcased all the things you could do with the extensibility hooks built into ASP.NET's WebMethods plumbing, and how well you can integrate it with the rest of the Windows platform (i.e., COM+, WMI, etc.). It rocked. I also really liked Noah's talk, which provided the kind of insight into XML Schema that you can only get from someone who was deeply involved in the creation of that very important language. For excellent DevCon coverage, see Brian Jepson's blog. Also check out the comments form the evals.

My DevCon sample code is available here.

Win-Dev was great too. There were a ton of old friends around, and Chris Sells Aaron Skonnard, Craig Andera and Fritz Onion all stayed at the house. I did a bunch of fun plumbing talks, but the highlight for me was really the keynote. I've been talking at Win-Dev for many years, so it was fun to headline. I talked about the state of Web services, open issues, and some of the ways I've been thinking about using Web services at MSDN. It got a good response, especially from Chris, who I inspired (see my next post, above).

My WinDev sample code is available here.