Earlier this week I attended the Microsoft Architect Forum on the Gold Coast in Queensland, where I gave two sessions on Web Services transactions (bothflavours, of course). The first session was great, with a full quota of attendees and lots of excellent discussion on what these technologies buy you, and how you might deploy them. The second session was more subdued owing to the fact it was an earlybird session the morning after the night before - we were all a little, erm, subdued in that one :-) Nonetheless we still managed to cover a good number of interesting architectural issues surrounding Web Services and SOA.
The real highlights for me though were other people's sessions. I hugely enjoyed Martin's session on whatever he felt like talking about (with zero PowerPoints) and Len's too. Gurpreet's keynote was enlivened when it transformed into a panel session towards the end. Some troublemaker in the audience (I wonder who that could have been :-) ) asked the assembled panel the seemingly innocuous question, "What is a service?" To his credit, Len noticed who was asking the question and was heard muttering "oh oh" through Gurpreet's lapel mic...
Light the blue touch paper, stand well back.
Martin gave his explanation of what a service is, and expressed his discontentment with the hype surrounding technology which is nothing more than asynchronous messaging - fair enough. Simon then gave his assessment of a service based on the notion of how "intimate" a service is with its consumers. While Simon was sort of on the right track (loose coupling) he made the mistake of implying that objects don't do encapsulation or contracts.
Fowler-plosion!
Martin, unable to wrestle the mic back from Simon, is reduced to going apoplectic about this using gestures which was completely hilarious. Eventually Martin recovered the microphone from Simon and proceeded to go medieval on the audience (and Simon) about how we really all ought to know better :-)
Concurrently a gentleman sitting in the row ahead of me turned pityingly to me and offered to tell me what a service is, which was very considerate of him. If I ever find out who he was, I'll shout him a pint.
This was my first visit to the Gold Coast which is famed for being a party place with great beaches. Unfortunately I didn't get to see much outside of the conference venue since my days were taken up with sessions and nights with, er, socialising. I'm going to make a better effort to go sightseeing next week when I'm giving a keynote at the Microsoft China Regional Architect Forum.
BTW - Does anyone have any recommendations for tourist things to do in Beijing? And anyone know the Mandarin for "vegetarian?"