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>