IBM-MS Whitepaper on SOA and Web Service Transactions

Just up on MSDN: a joint whitepaper from IBM and Microsoft on building modern web services. Includes info on SOA, web service transactions, and various WS-* specs. It does a very good job of describing SOA at a high level, as well as describing how the various specs can be composed together into a real application.

WS Workshops

The MS web services page now includes a reference to public meetings on upcoming WS specs. It also includes slides and other information from previous meetings. You have to pay your own travel expenses, but this is a great way to get your feedback to the spec teams, and also a great way to work on interop issues if you're developing against the evolving specs.

The Coolest Demo I've Seen Lately

Okay, so I don't get out much...
But yesterday I saw a presentation by Michael Kinsley, the Founding Editor of Slate, and he demo'd a feature that enables you to publish subsets from the Slate website into pages that can be read offline. Very, very cool. Try this:

1. Go to the Slate main page
2. Select Output Options from the navigation section on the left side, and choose build your own Slate from the nested menu
3. A list of all available articles will be displayed - use the checkboxes next to each item to select items for retrieval
4. The bottom border of the article list has delivery options. Click Print (or eBook, or another option.) If you choose Print, you can select formatting options (1 or 2 columns).
5. Voila! Portable Slate! Is that cool or what?

So here's my question - why doesn't Slate make a bigger deal about this? Why did I need a demo from the publisher?

Are Web Services Real?

Sam posts, questioning whether web services are used in production today. I'm consulting full-time, and much of my work is designing and building web services for a client for the past 18 months, so from my point of view they're definitely being used. Further, we have very little difficulty convincing partners to use web services for interoperation. You should definitely get out more, Sam.