Microsoft SOA Conference - end of day 1

So my thoughts at the end of day....

Certainly a useful day, but the conference seems a little slow. The breaks seem long,the sessions short and the breakout sessions finished quite early in the day. Maybe I am just used to the crammed in format of TechEd that go on late into the evening.

On the plus side this format does give a good chance to chat to other attendees, who seem very chatty and are from a wide variety of locations across the world; though nearly all white and male, an even less diverse group than at Mix UK! What does this say about the IT industry or maybe more to the point who gets to go to conferences?

I did see a great session this afternoon from David Chappell comparing .NET to J2EE.I think I saw in effect the equivalent session he did at JavaOne in year 2000 back when Black Marble was a Java house. The key point remains the same - the choice of underlying platform once made is very hard to change, even within the J2EE family of vendors. All platforms have good and bad features so a company has to make a bet on which platform will meet their needs now and allow them develop in the future. I personally can't get away from view that a single vendor solution (i.e. .NET) allow better internal consistency and easy of development but still allows external improbability via ws* standards (or the ISB in the future). But I would say that wouldn't I as I work for a Microsoft Gold Partner!

In the Q&A session at the end of the day it was interesting to hear the Microsoft take on companies using the cloud as the ISB, which as I posted this morning was my concern. Their view is to think of Exchange as the model, Microsoft could host it, other third parties can host it or a corporate may host their own. In many cases it is will only be a routing service and so will not actually be storing data (which could be encrypted anyway). This should go a long way to aiding acceptance.

But enough for today, off to the ask the experts reception now.