I've been silent the last few months on WSE topics, the reason is actually simple: at the turn of the year I changed roles (was he pushed or did he jump?) to work on Active Directory Federation Server (ADFS) and InfoCard.
ADFS will ship as part of the Windows Server 2003 R2 release and implements the WS-Federation Passive Profile, over time ADFS will evolve to become a full-blown WS-Federation / WS-Trust Security Token Service. InfoCard, a system for managing your identities, will be part of Indigo.
Whilst I'm a little sad to have left WSE behind, I'm sure that Mark will do a good job of herding the cats for the next release.
Words from the man himself (actually, he's half the man he used to be as you can see here):
After many years of work on Web services and WSE, I’ve decided to move on. Starting next week, I’ll be working on the Windows Media Player team. I’ve appreciated working with many of you and can’t describe how great it feels to have so many cool people using this product. I wish you all the best in your future endeavors.
I have mixed feelings on this one, Keith and I were the first people on the WSE team back in the days when many people expected all we'd deliver would be some samples and Indigo was going to be shipping tomorrow anyway. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, including a couple of full product releases of WSE, and I'm a little sad that he's moving on. Still, let's be realistic, 2 1/2 years working with me is enough for anyone :-)
Omri asked me why I hadn't blogged the WSE 2.0 release and this lead to the discovery of a dead feed on my site - of course, deleting the file has triggered HTTP 404 responses for some people. The correct feed URL's are given by the banners on the left side of the main page.
I have a bunch of these books but its been a while since I read them. A lot of my books live at home, the rest have been trapped in moving boxes at work - I got so tired of packing and unpacking them for office moves that I just left them boxed up.
I'm working my way through "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" right now and waiting for my copy of "Enterprise Integration Patterns" to arrive.
...is so frustrating. I have a long list of topics that I'd like to talk more about but find that too many have a conflict with my work.
Often its something that hasn't seen the light of day yet and I can't do any kind of public disclosure. For example, we've made a few changes in later builds of WSE 2.0 and I'd love to talk more about them.
On other occasions, it's topics that we haven't made decisions on; pieces of the product that we don't like and are wondering how to improve, or feature ideas for the next release.
This probably explains why some Microsoftie blogs are content-free and others just die. It seems like a great idea at the time, then you realise you can't actually say too much.
I'm busy feeding lengths of Cat5e down the walls of my house and hooking up 100Mbit switches. It's going to be so nice to go fast again.
It doesn't build. Haven't found anyone at work who seems interested in fixing it. Not a happy bunny.
It turned out to be cheaper to get a simple hosting deal than to run my blog from my server at home, particularly considering my data transfer limits. I took the opportunity to switch over to Moveable Type. The hosting service was also kind enough to add some extra DNS entries for me. Pretty sweet for $4.95 a month.
Keith and I are worried about Omri. We have decided to get him this. We hope that when he has it, he won't need to talk about all the other ones.
[Sorry, it's an insider joke that I can't resist.]
Concorde goes out of service this month. For me, it never quite made the impact that I hoped for; flights these days are more cramped, more delayed and more painful than they've ever been in the past. I don't think there's been much progress over the last 20 years, at least not from the customers perspective. I just say "No" to getting on a plane.
David Stutz has a short article on software as pliable building material. Whilst not a specific goal for WSE, we certainly made a conscious decision to open up the product so that it could be used in lots of different ways. You can use it as a complete solution, just pull out the core (the Pipeline) or bite off useful bits and pieces (it's X509 support or it's DIME support). We've had some good success with this approach as it's allowed us to tackle customer problems that more rigid products would have struggled with. Of course, we're lucky in that we don't have to play by the same rules as most other products since we have a shorter support period and can make breaking changes across major releases; more "platform" oriented products have to think a lot more carefully in this area as any decision will haunt them for 7 years.