In the ongoing MSDN Architecture Webcast Series with broad coverage of all things WCF (see the "Next Generation: .NET Framework 3.0 and Vista" section for archived and upcoming content), I am on today (8AM PST, 11AM EST, 17:00 CET), live from my kitchen table in Germany, with a remix of my "RSS, REST, POX, Sites-as-Services" talks from MIX06 and TechEd.

I've been quoted as to have said so at TechEd and I'll happily repeat it: "XML is the assembly language of Web 2.0", even though some (and likely some more) disagree. James Speer writes "Besides, Assembly Language is hard, XML isn’t." , which I have to disagree with.

True, throwing together some angle brackets isn't the hardest thing in the world, but beating things into the right shape is hard and probably even harder than in assembly. Yes, one can totally, after immersing oneself in the intricacies of Schema, write complex types and ponder for days and months about the right use of attributes and elements. It's absolutely within reach for a WSDL zealot to code up messages, portTypes and operations by hand. But please, if you think that's the right way to do things, I also demand that you write and apply your security policy in angle bracket notation from the top of your head and generate WCF config from that using svcutil instead of just throwing a binding together, because XML is so easy. Oh? Too hard? Well, it turns out that except for our developers and testers who are focusing on getting these mappings right, nobody on our product team would probably ever even want to try writing such a beast by hand for any code that sits above the deep-down guts of our stack. This isn't the fault of the specifications (or people here being ignorant), but it's a function of security being hard and the related metadata being complex. Similar things, even though the complexity isn't quite as extreme there, can be said about the other extensions to the policy framework such as WS-RM Policy or those for WS-AT.

As we're getting to the point where full range of functionality covered by WS-* specifications is due to hit the mainstream by us releasing WCF and our valued competitors releasing their respective implementations, hand-crafted contracts will become increasingly meaningless, because it's beyond the capacity of anyone whose job it is to build solutions for their customers to write complete set of contracts that not only ensures simple data interop but also protocol interop. Just as there were days that all you needed was assembly and INT21h to write a DOS program (yikes) or knowledge of "C" alongside stdio.h and fellows to write anything for everthing, things are changing now in the same way in Web Services land. Command of XSD and WSDL is no longer sufficient, all the other stuff is just as important to make things work.

Our WCF [DataContract] doesn't support attributes. That's a deliberate choice because we want to enforce simplicity and enhance interoperability of schemas. We put an abstraction over XSD and limit the control over it, because we want to simplify the stuff that goes across the wire. We certainly allow everyone to use the XmlSerializer with all of it's attribute based fine-grained control over schema, even though there are quite a few Schema constructs that even that doesn't support when building schema from such metadata. If you choose to, you can just ignore all of our serialization magic and fiddle with the XML Infoset outright and supply your own schema. However, XML and Schema are specifications that everyone and their dog wanted to get features into and Schema is hopelessly overengineered. Ever since we all (the industry, not only MS) boarded the SOAP/WS train, we're debating how to constrain the features of that monster to a reasonable subset that makes sense and the debate doesn't want to end.

James writes that he "take[s] a lot of care in terms of elements vs. attributes and mak[es] sure the structure of the XML is business-document-like", which only really makes sense if XML documents used in WS scenarios were meant for immediate human consumption, which they're not.

We want to promote a model that is simple and consistent to serialize to and from on any platform and that things like the differentiation between attributes and elements doesn't stand in the way of allowing a 1:1 mapping into alternate, non-XML serialization formats such as JSON or what-have-you (most of which don't care about that sort of differentiation).  James' statement about "business-document-like" structures is also interesting considering EDIFACT, X.12 or SWIFT, all of which only know records, fields and values, and don't care about that sort of subtle element/attribute differentation, either. (Yes, no of those might be "hip" any more, but they are implemented and power a considerable chunk of the world economy's data exchange).

By now, XML is the foundation for everything that happens on the web, and I surely don't want to have it go away. But have arrived at the point where matters have gotten so complicated that a layer of abstraction over pretty much all things XML has become a necessity for everyone who makes their money building customer solutions and not by teaching or writing about XML. In my last session at TechEd, I asked a room of about 200 people "Who of you hand-writes XSLT transforms?" 4 hands. "Who of you used to hand-write XSLT transforms?" 40+ hands. I think it's safe to assume that a bunch of those folks who have sworn off masochism and no longer hand-code XSLT are now using tools like the BizTalk Mapper or Altova's MapForce, which means that XSL/T is alive and kicking, but only downstairs in the basement. However, the abstractions that these tools provide also allow bypassing XSLT altogether and generate the transformation logic straight into compiled C++, Java, or C# code, which is what MapForce offers. WSDL is already walking down that path.

A lot of people loved the party location choice for this year's TechEd: Boston's Fenway Park. For anyone even less familiar with the sport that is so American that the Americans run the World Championship every year without even bothering to ask anybody not from North America whether they'd be willing to participate in it: Fenway Park is the home of the Boston Red Sox Baseball team.

Anyways ... I felt like an Atheist in the Vatican. Even though I've already lived in New York for two years, which might be the best place to come as an foreigner if you want to be opportunistic and adopt a local team as your favorite (however, Steve Forte, a big Mets fan would not speak to me if I'd root for the Yankees) I couldn't bring up a lot of interest for the sport and I doubt that that will change a lot in Seattle where I'll move some time this summer. The Green Monster meant nothing to me ("How can you not know about it!?"), sitting the visitor's dugout didn't do much for me, and so on. I mean, my only distant relationship to Baseball is that I am battling for a higher search rank on Live, Yahoo and Google with baseball super-star Roger Clemens.  The concert with the band Train was very cool.

Now, I hear that there are discussions about getting rid of Fenway Park for a new stadium, and given that it is obviously such a historical site, I hope it's spared the fate of my home town Mönchengladbach's Bökelbergstadion, home of my team Borussia (Wikipedia) and the site of 5 German Bundesliga championships, which was recently replaced with the (great!) new stadium Borussia-Park. (To turn things around, I wouldn't forgive Forte if he rooted for Bayern).

While I am at it: Great performance yesterday at the wild Italy-USA 1:1 World Cup game by our Borussia goalie Kasey "The Wall" Keller.

Here's the sample code from my CON423 session about selecting bindings here at TechEd.

We've just released the "Windows Communication Foundation RSS Toolkit" on our new community site. This toolkit, which comes with complete source code, illustrates how to expose ATOM and RSS feeds through WCF endpoints. I will discuss the toolkit in my session CON339, Room 107ABC, Friday 10:45am here at TechEd.

Just so that you know: In addition to the regular breakout sessions, we have a number of interactive chalk talks scheduled here at the Connected Systems Technical Learning Center in the Expo Hall. Come by.

I am back home from San Diego now. About 3 more hours of jet-lag to work on. This will be a very busy two weeks until I make a little excursion to the Pakistan Developer Conference in Karachi and then have another week to do the final preparations for TechEd Europe.

One of the three realy cool talks I'll do at TechEd Europe is called "Building Proseware" and explains the the scenario, architecture, and core implementation techniques of Proseware, an industrial-strength, robust, service-oriented example application that newtelligence has designed and implemented for Microsoft over the past 2 months.

The second talk is one that I have been looking forward to for a long time: Rafal Lukawiecki and myself are going to co-present a session. And if that weren't enough: The moderator of our little on-stage banter about services is nobody else than Pat Helland.

And lastly, I'll likely sign-off on the first public version of the FABRIQ later this week (we had been waiting for WSE 2.0 to come out), which means that Arvindra Sehmi and myself can not only repeat our FABRIQ talk in Amsterdam but have shipping bits to show this time. There will even be a hands-on lab on FABRIQ led by newtelligence instructors Achim Oellers and Jörg Freiberger. The plan is to launch the bits before the show, so watch this space for "when and where".

Overall, and as much as I like meeting all my friends in the U.S. and appreciate the efforts of the TechEd team over there, I think that for the last 4 years TechEd Europe consistently has been and will be again the better of the two TechEd events from a developer perspective. In Europe, we have TechEd and IT Forum, whereby TechEd is more developer focused and IT Forum is for the operations side of the house. Hence, TechEd Europe can go and does go a lot deeper into developer topics than TechEd US.

There's a lot of work ahead so don't be surprised if the blog falls silent again until I unleash the information avalanche on Proseware and FABRIQ.

A short background reading link list for my CTS404 session at TechEd that I'll do in Room 10 this afternoon (Monday, May 24) at 5:00pm at TechEd San Diego:

Stateless?!
(About the uselessness of the static "statelessness" of a component as an indicator for its scalability)

Dealing with distributed transaction anomalies caused by web service calls from within transactions
(I'll show an updated version of that approach) 

Just in time activation proxy pooling
(Client side "connection pooling" for Enterprise Services)

I am looking forward to the session, because it's another one that challenges established beliefs (such as "stateless"="scalable")

Want to win an XBox? You run dasBlog? Michael Earls shows you how.

[I just knew that the <%newtelligence.aspnetcontrol("TechEdBloggersFeed.ascx")%> macro would eventually be good for something ]