H2/2003, moving up one notch on the WS stack.

Yesterday, all the travel madness of H1/2003 which begun in January has officially ended. I have a couple of weeks at the office ahead of me and that's, even if it may sound odd, a fantastic thing. The first half of the year and quite a bit of last year too, I spent most of my research time working deep down in the public and not-so-public extensibility points of Enterprise Services and Web Services, trying to understand the exact details of how they work, figuring out how to inject more and tweak existing functionality and whether certain development patterns such as AOP could enhance the development experience and productivity of my clients (and all of you out there who are reading my blog). I've been in 21 countries in this first half of the year alone and at about 40 different events, talking about what I found working with these technologies on some more and some less serious projects and doing that and speaking to people I learned a lot and I also think that I helped to inspire quite a few people's thinking.

Now it's time to move on and focus on the bigger picture. Starting with version 2.0 of Microsoft Web Service Enhancements that's due out by end of this summer, Web Services will finally become less Web and more Services. The WSE 2.0 stack will break the tie between HTTP and SOAP by enabling other transports and they'll add support for some of the most important WS-* specs such as WS-Policy, WS-Addressing and related specs. The now released UDDI services in Windows Server 2003 put a serious local UDDI registry at my fingertips. BizTalk Server 2004's new orchestration engine looks awesome. There's a lot of talk about Service Oriented Architectures, but too less to see and touch for everyone to believe that this stuff is real. I think that's a good job description for H2/2003. My UDDI provider key: 7f0baedf-3f0d-4de1-b5e7-c35f668964d5