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Keith Pleas Blog

Keith's palimpsest

March 2004 - Posts

  • Web Services? Not for this client...

    Ted Neward mentioned an article in CIO Today about customers waiting for Web services. In it, a Forrester Research analyst said that “right now, there is a genuine sense that we are not quite where we need to be with regards to having a complete stack of Web-service standards.” Well...

    A couple of weeks ago a financial institution in the mid-West called me. They wanted to talk about moving their very large classic VB codebase to .NET. I asked if they'd looked at Web services, and the response was “yes, but that's not for us: we need something now and it's going to be a couple of years before Web services are available.”

    So, what did they want? Well, they were specifically interested in redeveloping their software systems to communicate with their hundreds of partners around the US. They wanted to “exchange data using XML, and use the Internet”. Too bad Web services weren't available today. <sigh>

  • patterns & practices Summit

    I try not to over-promote myself (I'm sure there are others who would disagree, perhaps violently <g>) but - in the words of a friend who forwarded me this link, this is like “shooting fish in a barrel”. Kent Tegels posted in his SqlJunkies blog about the upcoming “patterns & practice Summit”, asking “Anybody going? presenting? blogging about? Got Details?”

    OK, I'm going. Heck, I'm also the guy putting this together on Microsoft campus (Redmond and the UK now, east coast in the fall). So, yeah, I'm also presenting. <g> As is Chris Kinsman, Rocky Lhotka, Billy Hollis, Bill Evjen, Ted Neward, Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin, Fernando Guerrero. Plus we're having some great Microsoft speakers including their new star acquistion, Ward Cunningham (which reminds me, I need to get his details posted on the site). We're also doing it a month later in the UK where we're also having stars such as Rafal Lukawiecki (the gonzo speaker who at TechEd Europe last year had 4 of the top 5 session scores), Mike Platt, and Arvindra Sehmi.

    Content? Well, it's probably an understatement to say we have a very close relationship with the current and planned content coming from the Microsoft patterns & practices effort.

    Hey, can it get any better than that?

    It's not like I've been hiding this event under a tarp. What makes this particularly ironic is I just got done speaking at DevDays in Seattle. Microsoft Developer Evangelist Jim Blizzard hosted a speaker kickback party at Jillian's where I played pool with Junkies co-founder Doug Seven against a couple of Microsoft's local corporate customers (we let them win <vbg>). And Doug didn't know about the event. And the corporate guys didn't know about it. And even Jim was a little vague about the details. Heck we were on the MSDN home page for a week (um, anybody visit that site?) and starting next week we'll be featured on the “patterns & practices” home page. Plus we've been prominent on GotDotNet. Geeze, what does it take to get a little respect? <g>

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