When at Mix07 I posted about Robby Ingebretsen's excellent session on the relationship between developers and designers in the WPF/Silverlight world.

Channel9 has just posted an interview with him on the same subject, well worth looking at if this is the type of project you are involved in.

I have focused on the the more developer end of SOA today. In the morning excellent sessions by Aaron Skonnard and Matt Milner on using WCF in BizTalk and best WF practices respectively, both provided an interesting set of gotta's to look out for. Check their blogs if this is an area you work in.

In the afternoon I …

Not a great day for new buzzwords to me at the SOA conference today, so just the one:

• POX - Plain Old XML, as opposed to XML data with extra META data

Since arriving in the Bellevue/Redmond area I have been struck by the lack of people. Wherever I have gone it seems like the place was built for at least twice the number that are present, whether it be the shopping centers or restaurants. I wondered was it because:

1. the others are soon to arrive
2. half the people left …

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 …

Sitting here at the back of the Kodiak room at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond is somewhat similar to the control room at JPL which I went to on my last trip to the USA.

class="image_figure image_internal image_unprocessed" …

SOA being a conference on business process is a great place to learn new words for the game of buzzword bingo,  new ones to me thus far are:

• Onboarding - to hire staff
• Toast - information provided via a gadget on the desktop

After a couple of days in the Washington state my body has caught up to a manageable time zone (somewhere east of Denver I think, but that is close enough) just in time for for the start of the Microsoft SOA 2007 conference.

The keynote for me highlighted that Microsoft see the future in the cloud, the Internet Service …