One of the biggest advantages of the MS Pub Summit was the direct contact with the MS engineers, or program managers or whatever they call them these days! J  While sitting around discussing the possibility of an XML .Net book, Dare Obasanjo (Program Manager - WebData XML) made a funny comment about so many web standards.  His favorite one (fictitious of course – well I think anyway J ) is WS-LetsGoOutToLunch.  I thought he was being a little extreme after all I could probably count on my hands the number of Web Service Standards.  After reading this MSDN article I see what he means!  I hadn’t been to the WS-I web site recently.  I remember hearing Yasser and Scott talking at the Web Services Devcon East about securing the domain name and now look at it!

I guess Bill Gates and Steve Mills gave a symbolic demo of a Federated transaction.  I was first introduced to this concept at RSA 2002 when a similar sounding demo was showing federation with just the XML Security Standards.  This is where I saw the power of the various XML Security Standards.  But to be able to do that now with the WSE2 is amazing!  I thought the WSE2 was a temporary upgrade to the WSE a band-aide of sorts to hold us over until the next version of .Net and Webservices.  But if the WSE2 includes things like WS-Addressing for web services without IIS and the ability to format the data any way we like we are almost to .Net Enterprise Nirvana already, but I am still going to keep an eye on the WSIF.