Here is the link for the Chalk Talk sessions at TechEd:

http://wcf.netfx3.com/content/TechEd2006ChalkTalkSchedule.aspx

Note the FIFI session at about two-thirds of the page: it is on Wednesday at 2pm in theater CON2.

Andre Durand is blogging today about his demo at the upcoing Catalyst conference: an Infocard Server that can connect to any federation source and 'translate' this into Infocard. Kim Cameron has a few things to say about as well. Now what exactly is the current public availability of the Infocard protocols?

Here is the poster from Ping:

David Chappell made some interesting remarks on Java and NetFX during his TechEd session and on his blog. He compares the creation of SCA by IBM, BEA and some others to the creation of the .NET Framework in 2000.

I would put this somewhat differently: .NET in 2000 was a (somewhat late) reaction to the success of the Java platform. As .NET evolved, itwent - essentially - through the same issues as Java: 1.0 was essentially unusuable, 1.1 kinda worked, and 2.0 (or 1.2 in Java) is/was the first truely usable platform. In this sense, SCA is comparable to the announcement of the Longhorn pillars, at best.

In his TechEd session this morning, David was trying to compare SCA with WCF. He noted that while WCF is in its final beta stages, SCA is just starting with the definition. This is certainly true. However, there are other simplifying APIs (such as EJB3, JBI/OpenESB, WSIT) that have a similar architectural scope as WCF and are in final beta as well. I strongly recommend reading the comment section of David's blog article as well, since it contains a lot of interesting pointers.

Finally - the confusion is complete: WinFX is now NetFX. Huh?

The (likely) final name for the collection of .NET APIs formerly know as WinFX 3.0 (aka Avalon, Indigo and Workflow, but NOT WinFS) have a new name and community portal: They are now called NetFX and hosted at http://netfx3.com/, with Indigo/WCF being located at http://wcf.netfx3.com/.

I have finally come around to summarize some of the architectural ideas around FastInfoset For Indigo. You can find the initial version on my Wiki.

I will continue to update this article and also put the various presentations there. This should be a good primer for my Chalk Talk next week at TechEd in Boston.

Francois Orsini is working on JavaDB, a derivant of the Apache Derby RDBMS. In one of his recent articles he is talking about the possibility of using JavaDB for offline AJaX. This is - as far as I am concerned - a very promising step in the right direction: We all love the rich UI that AJaX can provide - the problem is only when we are offline, all those applications do not work anymore. By caching the various requests on the client and synchronizing them upon reconnect, you can make web applications into real applications. As Francois points out, this can be achieved by simply modifying the client side call behavior (check if connected -> synchronize -> use local copy).

I would have a whole bunch of applications that would be useful:

• Calendar
• Email
• Spreadsheet & Word Processing
• Bloging
  

Actually, with these four applications I could do about 60% of my work offline - as long as I have a browser that is AJaX and JavaDB enabled.

Seldom have I seen somebody less honest than Mike McCurry: His claim that the discussion around Net Neutrality is 'left' vs. 'center' and/or corporation bashing could not be much further from the truth. As many have already pointed out, Net Neutrality is about enabling markets and even more so, limiting the power that a fairly small oligolpoly (in some more rural areas even monopoly) has.

The barrier for entry into the high-speed internet provider market is quite high (next to getting your backbone going, you need to reach out to your customers, which you only really can if you get into some contractual relationship with the very few owners of the 'last mile'). If people like McCurry actually pretend that there is something like market dynamics (let alone be a free one) playing here they are either (i) dellusional or (ii) liers.

If there was real competition and the chance for new competitors to actually enter the market, I would be in full support of letting the market play it out. But this is simply not the case.

I am a big fan of electronic calendars: no paper to loose, you an copy the data anywhere, great integration with other electronic collaboration tools, etc. One of the problems I had with the Sun Calendar Srever so far was that it is really designed around being on-line all the time. It has a reasonable (but aging) web interface and that's pretty much it. There is really no good support for disconnected clients like a laptop.

Thunderbird (particularly with the Mozilla Calendar extension) on the other side has great potential to become a strong contender in the collaboration client business. Getting those two products to work together was something I was looking for in a long time.

Today, I found a small perl script by John Littell, that runs as a daemon and translates from WebDAV to the WCAP protocol that Sun Calendar Server uses.

So finally, I can use the Mozilla Calendar extension and read and write to my corporate SCS based calendar. The setup is almost trivial: you start the perl script, point your Mozilla Calendar to the daemon (e.g. http://localhost:7080/beuchelt/) and it will translate your client's WebDAV requests into WCAP commands. This is just awesome.

UPDATE: Ah, I forgot to mention this: this script also works with Apple's iCal client.

After J#, X# and some more abberations, Microsoft is now fiddeling with the idea of Script#. This is a code generation tool for JavaScript - you start with a C# class, run the ssc.exe compiler and get JavaScript from the C# source, instead of IL. He also has some integration with Visual Studio working at this point. The obvious target for Script# is the AJaX world.

I haven't quite made up my mind if I like this approach or not. It definitively seems intriguing for developers that do not (yet) have a solid understanding of UI-side development.

Ars Technica reports some good news on the net neutrality issue. At least there is now an alternative to the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act proposal available. Some members of Congress seemed to have realised the importance of this measure (maybe those that subscribe to Vonage??)

So, I am deep in FIFI right now. There will be two presentations on the project in the next couple of weeks:

SunLabs Open House 2006
June 1-2, 2006, Sun Menlo Park Campus, Bldg. 16
Track: 6
Room: 1281
Title: Project FIFI
Abstract: Fast Infoset is a ITU-T/ISO standard for effricient XML encoding. It is available for Java through the JWSDP and the Java.Net open source project. FIFI provides an implementation on Microsoft's .NET platform.
Time: June 1, 2:30-3:00pm PST


Microsoft TechEd 2006
June 11-16, 2006, Boston Convention Center
Track: Connected Systems
Code: CON-TLC307
Title: Enterprise WebServices interoperability between .Net and Java using WCF and Sun's GlassFish
Abstract: Web Services matured to address enterprise needs.
Interoperability between Java and .Net on Secure, Reliable and Binary messaging is a reality. Come and see .Net and Java interoperating in a real world enterprise scenario using Microsoft's Windows Communication Foundation and Sun's GlassFish web services stacks
Time: Breakout 13, CON Theatre 2; Wed, 14 Jun, 2:00 - 3:15 (Eastern)

Here is a nice little tweak for Visual Studio 2005:

In a debug session with the default settings, you can only see "External Code" in the call stack for the Windows/.NET code base. If you go to Tools -> Options... -> Debugging -> General, and unselect "Enable Just My Code", you can then see the entire call stack.

There is one caveat however: if you enable this option, VS gets a lot dumber about stepping into your code, so you have to set breakpoints very extensively.

At this time, most of you have probably heard about the Web Services Interoperability Toolkit for Java (a.k.a. Project Tango), which enables maximal interoperability between the upcoming Windows Communication Foundation on .NET and the Java world. If not, go see http://wsit.dev.java.net/ ASAP.

WSIT will be tightly integrated with the Glassfish Sun Application Server, which also features full FastInoset support. In fact, Glassfish will - based on the HTTP header content type - automatically switch between text+xml and application/fastinfoset.

Now, with the WCF integration that FIFI will deliver, you will be able to configure an Indigo client at deploy time (or even after) to use the by far more efficient FI encoding. And this (re)configuration will only take a change in a single line in the .config file of that client (assuming that you are using a CustomBinding in the first place ).

So, at the end of the day, you can start you deployment of SOAP and RESTful Web Services with angle brackets and as soon as you need a more efficient encoding, you switch to FI by simply setting the right config parameter in the WCF client. Can it be less painful?