Presenting at DevTeach in May

I recently found out that the abstract I submitted for DevTeach, held in Toronto May 12-16, 2008 was accepted. I am very excited about it, both about presenting and attending because I think it is shaping up to be an excellent conference. My talk, called ``The Convergence of SOA, REST and BPM``, is in the Architecture Track (See here http://www.devteach.com/Session.aspx#91 for all the talks in this track).

I`ll try to blog more about what to expect from the talk as I figure it out better myself, but suffice it to say that these 3 pillars of contemporary software architecture are finally coming together for me, at least enough for me to want to talk about it with others :)

REST is Gathering Momentum in and Around Microsoft

Wow, all in a matter of a very short time, we see:

1.) Visual Studio "Orcas" CTP released with improved REST support for WCF (as part of .NET 3.5). Although the talk seems to be that you will have to wait for the next drop for the real meat of these improvements.

2.) Tim Ewald, Former Microsoftie who remains close with some of the Microsoft Inner circle, announces that he finally "gets REST".
http://pluralsight.com/blogs/tewald/archive/2007/04/26/46984.aspx

3.) And then, the icing on the cake, a CTP release of RESTful Data Services codenamed "Astoria" http://astoria.mslivelabs.com/Default.aspx. Here is a sample URI accessing some data from the Encarta Database:
http://astoria.sandbox.live.com/encarta/encarta.rse/Areas [ 6 ] /Articles

All in all it looks somewhat promising but what's with the non-standard URI's like "../Areas [ 6 ] /.."? I sure hope they fix that and change it to "../Areas/6/.." as it should be.

Looks like some of the people in and around the "Big House" are finally getting REST!