This month in Florida is going to be my 2nd TechEd ever and I’m sure the best by far. The number of things I get to do is staggering:

• I get to work the Telerik booth for my first big show. We’ll be launching not one but two completely new Telerik products. Fun!
  
• Since the Telerik Ultimate Collection has been nominated for the Best of TechEd, I get to give a dead-run 15-minute demo to the judges with fellow Teleriker Michael Crump.
  
• Also with Michael, I’ll be giving the 30-minute “Telerik + Blend: Better Together” talk in the Microsoft Visual Studio booth showing off how 3rd party controls work inside the newest Blend for building Metro style apps on Windows 8.
  
• The first chapter of the Metro/JS book I’m writing with another fellow Teleriker Brandon Statrom is being printed and bound in a limited quantity for the show. Stop by and get your signed copy!
  
• I get to be one of the Speaker Idol judges every day at lunch.
  
• I’m sure there’s at least one podcast recording in there, too, somewhere…

I honestly can’t remember when I’ve looked forward to a conference more. I’ll see you there!

There are lots of great data talks at PDC 2010, all of which are available for online viewing:

• Code First Development with Entity Framework
  Jeff Derstadt, Tim Laverty
  Thursday, 2:00 PM-3:00 PM (GMT-7)
  
• Creating Custom OData Services: Inside Some of The Top OData Services
  Pablo Castro
  Thursday, 3:15 PM-4:15 PM (GMT-7)
  
• Enabling New Scenarios and Applications with Data in the Cloud
  Dave Campbell
  Thursday, 4:30 PM-5:30 PM (GMT-7)
  
• Building Scale-Out Database Solutions on SQL Azure
  Lev Novik
  Friday, 2:00 PM-3:00 PM (GMT-7)
  
• Building Offline Applications using the Sync Framework and SQL Azure
  Nina Hu
  On Demand
  

Enjoy!

DSL Developers Conference
applied topics in domain specific languages

April 16-17, 2009, Microsoft Campus, Redmond, WA

 

Spirit of the Developer’s Conference

The goal of the DSL Developer’s Conference is to cut away all the unessential conference baggage and concentrate on why we’re spending time at a conference in the first place — the talks by industry experts and experienced practitioners. By doing so, we can keep your wasted time to a minimum. In fact, if you don’t go away with your head hurting from all the new ideas you’ve heard, we’ve haven’t done our job!

Summary

What	2 days of practical, applied DSL sessions from industry experts and practitioners
When	April 16th, 1pm-6pm (registration at noon), April 17th, 9am-6pm
Where	Microsoft Research Building 99, Room 1919 14820 NE 36th Street Redmond, WA 98052 USA (on the other side of 520 from main campus) If you’re flying, you want to target the Seattle-Tacoma Int’l Airport (SEA).
Cost	$0 for 1.5 days of sessions (half the bargain at twice the cost!)

Sadly, It’s Over

But you can see the videos and download the slides here!

There were countless blog posts and tweets.

Fabulous conference, folks. Best DevCon ever!

Site

This site, and all its contents, are copyright © 2001-2009, Chris Sells and Microsoft, Corp. All rights reserved. Please contact csells@microsoft.com with any comments or suggestions.

This year’s DevCon for DSLs has 25% more attendees than any other previous DevCon. In this economy, I’m amazed by this.

And it’s not just people from the US or even the Pacific Northwest. Not only do we have people from all over the country, but folks are coming from Canada, the UK, Scotland, France, South America and one attendee, Tomas Petricek, a student at Charles University, is coming from the Czech Republic.

Luckily, as we slide into home, there are still a scant few seats left if you’d like to register, but be quick before they’re all gone!

I so miss this conference. Why don’t I do this more often?!

Apparently even more people have registered for the DSL DevCon than I thought. If you’ve sent a registration notice and having heard back from me, then you aren’t registered. Please register again or email me directly: csells@microsoft.com.

Magnus Christerson, the Vice President of Product Management from Intentional Software Corp, founded by Charles Simonyi, is giving the very last talk at the DSL DevCon, so make sure to stick around!

Also, seats are filling up FAST, faster than any of the other DevCons. Make sure to register now if you’re coming! And don’t forget, it’s free!

Apparently there is quite a bit of pent up demand for this conference, as there were more than 50 session proposals for only 12 slots and we’ve already filled half the seats with just pre-registrations.

Sessions include an M deep dive by Paul Vick, DSLs in Groovy by Guillaume Laforge, DSLs in Eclipse by Markus Voelter, a functional vs. dynamic DSLs smackdown by Ted Neward, a DSL for Pixel Effects from Adobe and last, but certainly not least, giving the keynote for the entire conference, the undisputed Duke of DSLs himself, Maaaaaartin Foooooowler-er-er-er!

Come to Lang.NET and stay for the DSL DevCon or just come to the DevCon, but whatever you do, sign up for the FREE DSL DevCon right now! All 5 of the other DevCons have sold out and I expect this one to be no different.

There’s been such a flood of DSL DevCon talk proposals that I’ve had a hard time keeping up (although feel free to let those nice folks in Eclipse, XML, Java and Unix land if you know who they are!).

Also, there’s been a huge amount of interest in attending the conference itself and some folks even worry that the conference will sell out before they can register (the first five DevCons have all sold out and those cost money!), so they’ve been asking me to put ’em on a list. I’m still working out the logistics with the nice Lang.NET folks, but if you’d like to pre-register for the DSL DevCon, drop me a line and I’ll put you on the list. It will be my job to make sure that anyone that pre-registers gets to go.

Tell a friend!

Are you interested in presenting a 45-minute talk on some Domain Specific Language (DSL) related topic? It doesn’t matter which platform or OS you’re targeting. It also doesn’t matter whether you’re an author, a vendor, a professional speaker or a developer in the trenches (in fact, I tend to be biased toward the latter). We’re after interesting and unique applications of DSL technology and if you’re doing good work in that area, then I need you to send me a session topic and 2-4 sentence abstract along with a little bit about yourself.

I’ll be taking submissions ’til February 9th, 2009, but don’t delay. Passion and a burning story to tell count twice as much as anything else.

And don’t be shy about spreading this announcement around! I’ve got good coverage in the .NET and Windows communities, but don’t know very many folks in the Java or Unix or hardcore modeling worlds, so if you’re in that world, let those guys know! Thanks.

The DSL DevCon itself will be in Redmond, WA on the Microsoft campus April 16-17, 2009, right after the Lang.NET conference. Lang.NET will be focused on general-purpose languages, whereas the DSL DevCon will focus on domain-specific languages. The idea is that if you want to attend one or the other or both, that’s totally fine. We’ll have 2.5 days of Lang.NET on April 14-16 and then 1.5 days of DSL DevCon content.

Oh, and the cost for both conferences is the same: $0.

We’re only accepting 150 attendees to either conference. Every one of the five previous DevCons have sold out, so when we open registration, you’ll want to be quick about getting your name on the list.

Submit your DSL-related talk idea!

This year, we’re thinking very hard about putting the Lang.NET conference and the DSL DevCon at the same venue (the research center on the Microsoft Redmond campus) in the same week. The idea is that people interested in general-purpose language design and development can come to Lang.NET and the people interested in domain-specific languages can come to the DSL DevCon and for folks interested in both, the DSL DevCon will start right after Lang.NET, so folks can stay a little longer and come to both. Also, the conference chairs on both conferences will make sure to keep the content unique across the two conferences.

 

We think that’s a good way to make sure the conferences complement each other and helps keep people’s schedules sane and their travel costs lower. However, I have two questions for you:

 

1.      Traditionally, Lang.NET is 3 days and a DevCon is 2 days. Because of the overlap of the content (languages), we were wondering if folks thought it would be a good idea to do 2.5 days of Lang.NET and 1.5 days of DSL DevCon this year instead, doing both conferences in 4 days instead of 5. What do you think?

2.      If we linked these two events like this, will you attend just Lang.NET, just DSL DevCon or both?

 

Post your comments on this blog entry. Vote early, vote often!

I’m thinking it’s time for another DevCon. I know it’s been a while since the last one (in fact, I hear there was some kind of petition to have another one? : ), so we’re long past due.

This one will be on all things data-driven, model-based and/or DSL enhanced. I’m thinking March or April of 2009.  Who’s interested?

I’m thinking about doing a DevCon before the end of the year (likely October) in a pleasant environment (likely the Skamania Lodge) on a topic that’s *not* XML or Web Services based (we’ve done that topic to death). The soul of the DevCon will remain the same, i.e. to cut away all the unessential conference baggage and concentrate on why we’re spending time at a conference in the first place — the talks by industry experts and experienced practitioners.

If I organized such an event, would anyone come?

Please return to your regularly scheduled programming.

P.S. I imagine the DevCon come back in time, but it may well be a while…

125 attendees and speakers from 6 countries (US, Canada, England, Malaysia, Netherlands and Peru), 21 states and 60 companies, ranging from vendors to expert practitioners and even a few poor souls trying to learn XML. 24 hours of talks and events spread over two days. 44 bloggers and 247 blog entries about the event itself (not including warm-up to the event or my own blog entries), nearly all of which were over-whelmingly positive, including one eWeek piece and one entry from Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems that called me “a charming, welcoming, amusing guy.” (I didn’t pay him a cent, I swear! : )

 

In general, day 1 was dark and brooding, shouldering the brunt of the vendors who knew the technology inside and out and were feeling the pain of the downsides that they felt were holding them back. Day 2 was filled with hopeful stories of practitioners able to take what the vendors have given them, mix it with for their own secret sauce and really make it shine.

 

My very most favorite talk was Whitney Kemmey from the DOD with his unexpectedly captivating look at mixing XML with 10-year old technology and his endless submarine pictures, although Jeff Barr from Amazon continues to mesmerize me every time he takes the podium. Also, I really dug Doug Purdy’s enthusiasm and forthrightness. Oh, and when Neetu Rajpal shut down Don for derailing her talk, I fell in love.

 

Inexplicably, the DevCon seems to just get better and better. I blame it on the community willing to listen to a variety of sources to hear what’s really going on, some of it good and some of it that needs some work, whether it’s from professional speakers or nervous amateurs, for-profit vendors or seasoned practitioners. Thanks for letting me participate.

Here. Holy cow! I knew people liked the DevCon, but I’ve never seen a blogging response like this. I’ve found 44 separate bloggers and 247 posts related to the event itself (not counting the warm-up to the event). That’s almost 6 posts/blogger or 2 posts/attendee! Good lord, but these were a prolific bunch…

Here. I got so tons of positive feedback during the DevCon about the talks, the venue, the format, etc, for which I thanked each person sincerely. However, the huge number of DevCon-related posts on the web, including a reporter’s piece on DevSource, was overwhelming.

At 4:13:02pm, the Applied XML Developer’s Conference has sold out (again). Eric Hayes, the VP of Development from You Software, Inc. was the last lucky attendee. Welcome, Eric!

Wahoo!

As is always the case, tons of things are coming together at the last moment for the 5th DevCon:

• Received Tim Ewald’s flight arrangements so that I can pick him up on the way to the conference
• Don “XML” is going to make sure that Tim Bray gets to the Portland Nerd Dinner and to the conference in time for his keynote address
• T-shirts on their way
• Proceedings printed and in my garage
• Maps printed so that I can find my way (haven’t been there in years and years)
• Brothers Sells excited about the extra days off from school so that they can hang at the Skamania Lodge (although I’m pretty sure they’re expecting to be able to play their Gameboys the entire time : )
• Microphones, podium, projector and project screens arranged for speakers
• Wireless Internet access and power arranged for attendees (and speakers)
• All but a handful of seats filled in our expanded space (8 seats left)
• Rory giving away a free conference registration on his site

Wahoo!

Tim wonders whether he should let the ’softies attending and speaking at the Applied XML Developer’s Conference have it or not. I say, give us both barrels, Tim!

Here.

Don sent his new talk abstract my way this morning:

″WS-Why? This talk will make sense of why various WS-* specs came to life and which ones every developer should ignore. Naturally, the size of this set is non-zero, however, it is not the entire universe. Hopefully, the audience will be left with a mental model for what to ignore going forward as the WS-* machine continues to move forward.”

Personally, I’ve always wondered about the history of the avalanche of WS-* specs and to hear it from an irreverent horse’s mouth should be tons o’ fun.

Rory is giving away one seat to the Applied XML Developer’s Conference. He’s asking three questions before Friday and drawing from anyone that can answer all three. Question 1 and question 2 have already been posted.

There are still a hand full of seats left if you’re like to purchase one.

Here. If you’re going to be checking into the Skamania Lodge for the DevCon by 7pm on Tuesday, 10/19, please join us for the Anticipation Reception for all attendees and speakers. If you decide to hang with the Portland Nerd Dinner crowd instead that night, I’ll understand. : )

Here.

Don got a last minute bug to write on a completely different topic. I just got the slides this morning and they’re different than anything I’ve ever seen from Don (which is saying a lot). The new title of the talk is “ws-islands” and while I have no abstract as yet, I’m still very much looking forward to the talk for the psychedelic effects of the slides alone (I asked him to be careful not to cause seizures in the audience).

There are just a few seats left, so register now or be prepared to sit this one out.

I can’t get Sam to reply to my emails, so I’m hoping he’ll see this post: Sam, can I get the status of your DevCon slides? They were due Monday. Thank you.

Here. If you haven’t made your hotel reservation for the Applied XML Developer’s Conference, Oct. 20-21 at the Skamania Lodge in Stevenson, Washington (40 minutes from Portland Int’l airport), you’ll want to do that today as the rooms we’ve been holding are about to be released to the general public. Also, if you haven’t registered for the conference, you’ll want to register now, as we’ve only got a few seats left.

Here.

After only 5 weeks of registrations, the Applied XML Developer’s Conference has sold out. With 4 weeks of registrations left to go, we’ve gone back to the venue for extra space. It’s not much extra space, though, so if you want a seat, you should register expeditiously.

Here. Neetu Rajpal, a PM on the SQL Server team, has agreed to give us an overview of what’s new in XML for .NET 2.0 and in design-time support for Visual Studio 2005 at the Applied XML Developer’s Conference, October 20-21 at the Skamania Lodge in Stevenson, Washington. While I was away enjoying America’s version of a nude beach, we’ve surged to 80% full, so register soon.

Here. This is the 5th DevCon that I’ve thrown and I’ve never seen it fill up this quickly. We’re already half-way full after only a week of registrations. If you want a seat, you should get one quickly.

Here. Whoa. I guess there was some pent up demand for the Applied XML Dev.Conf., because after a weekend of registrations, we’re already 1/3rd full. Don’t wait to register.

Here.

Every year it gets harder to pick speakers for the DevCon. This year, I had 4x the number of submissions for which I had available slots. So, while it’s hard for me to pick, it makes for a fabulous line up for attendees:

For speakers, we’ve got keynotes from Tim Bray (co-inventor of XML) and Tim Ewald. We’ve also got Don Box, Sam Ruby, Jeff Barr (of Amazon.com), Keith Brown, Scott Hanselman, Chris Anderson, Doug Purdy, Ted Neward, Rich Salz and more.

For subjects, we’ll hear about the present and future of the blogging community, how MSDN plans to expose it’s huge store of content via web services, Schematron, XSLT2, web services versioning, how 3rd parties are making use of Amazon.com’s services for profit and how the Navy is using XML to test their missile systems.

For venue, we’ve got the site of my first technical talk ever, Skamania Lodge, a beautiful resort just 40 minutes from the Portland Int’l Airport. And since the conference is Wed-Thu (10/20-21), bring the family and extend your stay over the weekend!

All of the previous 4 DevCons have sold out, so you should register quickly (and don’t forget to make your hotel reservations, too)!

For all the conference and hotel details, click here.

If you haven’t yet submitted your abstract to the Applied XML Developer’s Conferences, don’t wait much longer; I’m only accepting submissions ’til the end of June, 2004.

I’ve already gotten a ton of abstracts, including submissions from folks like Sam Rub, Tim Bray, Tim Ewald and Don Box, but that doesn’t mean that your talk won’t bubble up to the top; as much as I like to have the polished speakers, I like even more to have the folks from the trenches.

According to current thinking, the conference is likely to be 9/30 - 10/1 within an hour of the Portland Airport, although details are still being finalized.

Submit your abstract today!

Here.

I was recently asked to characterize the attendees of a typical DevCon and this is what I said:

The attendees of a DevCon are the top of the pyramid developers that not only try new things all the time, but also make design and architecture decisions for their employers and customers. Also, all of the speakers, i.e. experts in their fields, practitioners, vendor architects, etc, are also attendees, and it’s wonderful to see them heckling each other.

The environment of a DevCon is one big room with everyone in it, so it’s a shared experience front-to-back. As soon as any talk is over (I keep them at 45 minutes to get the maximum number of new ideas into people’s heads), the buzz between people starts and only stops when I introduce the next speaker (loudly : ).

A DevCon is a wonderful mix of movers and shakers, vendors, enthusiasts, architects, practitioners and and a conference with an atmosphere and a set of attendees unlike any other that I’ve attended.

Don suggested that I change the topic of DevCon5 to XAML or some other topic. So far, the DevCons have run the course of topics from ATL to Web Services and then to Applied XML/Web Services.

My primary concern when throwing a DevCon is that there is a sufficient user base of the technology that it’s more than a vendor show. Even the original ATL DevCon only had a few MS employees and one MS talk. The rest of it were practitioners and experts from outside the big house and that makes for a better conference, imo.

So, as much as I love Longhorn and Avalon specifically and see them at topics for future DevCons, the technology’s not ready yet. Most of the real Avalon experts are MS employees and while there are some notable exceptions, we’re just not at a critical mass of folks yet for a XAML DevCon.

Are you interested in presenting a 45-minute talk on some applied XML or Web Services topic? It doesn’t matter which platform or OS you’re targeting. It also doesn’t matter whether you’re an author or vendor or professional speaker or a developer in the trenches (in fact, I tend to be biased towards the latter). We’re after interesting and unique applications of XML and Web Services technology and if you’re doing good work in that area, then I need you to send me a session topic and 2-4 sentence abstract along with a little bit about yourself.

I’ll be taking submissions ’til the end of June, but don’t delay. Passion and a burning story to tell count twice as much as anything else.

And don’t be shy about spreading this announcement around! I’ve got good coverage in the .NET and Windows communities, but don’t know very many folks in the Java or Unix or hardcore XML worlds, so if you’re in that world, let those guys know! Thanks.

BTW, the conference itself is likely to be in Oregon during the 2nd or 3rd week of September, 2004, but we’re still working the details out. One of the fun things that we’re thinking about this year is to have the Dev.Conf. in Sunriver, Oregon, a resort and spa town in central Oregon where sun is plentiful and rain is scarce. There are no major airports there, so we’d provide bus transportation from Portland, OR for anyone that wanted it. It’d be a 3.5 hour road trip. What do folks think about that?

Here. “Some XML applications don’t require validation to function properly but others absolutely require it in one form or another to avoid disasters. Aaron Skonnard discusses when validation is a MUST, then presents different implementation techniques for tackling the problem.”

Here. “Some XML applications don’t require validation to function properly but others absolutely require it in one form or another to avoid disasters. Aaron Skonnard discusses when validation is a MUST, then presents different implementation techniques for tackling the problem.”

Here. Either I was way behind on part 1, or I’m way ahead on part 2, but here it is. Enjoy.

Here. Part 1 of Don’s day #2 keynote from the Applied XML Developer’s Conference.

Here. If you didn’t get to come to the Applied XML Developer’s Conference, you missed a fun show. The conference page (linked to this item) has the materials and a list of blogs that I know of that posted conference commentary.

Here.

Here.

Here.

Dave Winer’s Keynote:

• Users care about you software working, not *how* it works
• Users don’t want to be controlled
• As developers, “we’re very impressed with the complexity that we can understand”

Don Box:

• “No one that gets laid actually replaces the CPU in their computers anymore. And, since they don’t get laid, they can’t reproduce and natural selection will take it’s toll. Likewise, objects are not meant for field replacement.”
• Building on abstractions means that the abstraction needs to be kept constant
• the wire is god. schemas are relative to your needs. the same XML instance doc can be many different schemas in a pipeline
• I missed why the abstractions in a service-oriented architecture are somehow better than those in an object-oriented architecture, except that maybe SOA abstractions are courser grained, but that can be true of OOA, too, can’t it?

Brian Jepson:

• WAP is just another XML format to product that exposes your data to WAP-enabled devices, e.g. phones
• Very cool to watch Brian control his presentation via his cell phone (nothing to do with XML, but very cool never the less). He was using a Mac and didn’t know if a niche OS like Windows had apps that did such things (although he did find this that might work)

Don “XML”:

• In NJ, they teach middle school kids HTML, XML and PowerPoint (holy cow!)
• Lots of folks asking questions, evidently interested in SVG and/or declarative-based UI models

Patrick Logan:

• Patrick gave his talk sitting down, which didn’t help him keep the audience’s attention

Ted Neward:

• EJB 2.1 for web services looks pretty easy
• “Swing sucks. People are using WinForms to access J2EE web services.”
• “Sun has drunk very deeply of the idea that web services are just CORBA.Next” aka Sun views web services as just another RPC, which means that they use rcp/encoded instead of doc/literal

David Ing:

• Don’t take “rules” from speakers at conferences. You can be entertained by such talks, but you need to make your own decisions

KeithBa:

• Keith starts right where I love — in the code. What better way to show the new programming model and features of WSE 2.0 than to jump right to the code? Fabulous
• And not only did he do a fabulous job writing code to demo WSE 2.0, he did it by building a heckle application that the audience loved (and took full advantage of : ). You are a master, Keith
• And! His application is a great example of the need for the flexible model that WSE 2.0 provides and he brings it right back around how his amusing, seemingly trivial app is really not suited for an RPC-style (which we should eschew anyway). Nice
• And then Dave Winer jumps in to accuse him of saying that there is no such thing as asynch; there is only polling. Keith is way over the top nice about it and the audience disagrees with Dave pretty much as a whole

Speaker Panel:

• tons of controversy; end result is that XML solves a huge number of problems and there’s no reason to do “this vs. that” because XML allows everyone to co-exist and interop (although programming may be needed to gain the latter)

Ken Levy:

• First time showing these plans in public (off of a 2am build)
• Showed off cool new XML editor integrated into VS.NET:
  • showed red squiggles and helpful error messages about invalid XML
  • can select text and have it wrapped in XML comments, CDATA blocks, etc.
• showed integration of errors using DTD files, i.e. checking elements that don’t have appropriate attributes as defined by the DTD, etc.
  • will reformat your XML
  • may provide outline view for drilling into large XML docs
  • lots of intellisense based on XML/DTD/XSD tools
• can create schema from a DTD inside of VS.NET
• can infer schema from an XML instance
• will enable custom mappings of XML namespaces to corresponding visual editors, e.g. showed an example of editing SVG: first view is the rendering of SVG; second view was code. If you change the code while you’re also looking at the SVG view, the SVG view is updated on the fly
• showed interactive XSLT debugger
• will be releasing these tools on the XML Tools page for use w/ VS.NET 2003 in the fall (tentatively)
• send Ken Levy the things that you’d like to see in the XML tools space

Jeff Barr

• Amazon is able to turn around small features very quickly and that’s the corporate culture
• they spent $300M on distribution centers and $900M on technology
• when folks were scraping the web, Amazon could have broken those apps, but realized that the folks doing the scraping were building legitimate apps with that data that was good for Amazon, so instead of crushing those folks, they tried to not change the format of the pages w/o a good reason (in spite of the added cost of supporting robot traffic)
• to support the largest number of customers, they support rich SOAP interface and a REST interface
• return “light” and “heavy” data, depending on how much info developers want
• business model for users seems to be picking an unused domain, setting up a site selling something specific, e.g. power tools, then building the whole site using the data and purchasing/shipping services of the Amazon web services. Wow
• the associate program is hugely successful for Amazon in terms of revenue generation
• the protocol is loose so that developers have a wide range of choices of what they want to do with it, e.g. if Amazon doesn’t have all of the information being requested, they return what they have instead of failing, letting the developer decide if they want to use the info that Amazon provides or fail on their own
• Amazon versioning: new versions get new URLs. Old versions use new code internally, but return same old data format from same old URL
• for keeping their own data up to date, Amazon also publishes a set of services for sellers to update their data and will soon be exposing a service for sellers to create new ASINs (Amazon product IDs) for their own products
• 80% of the requests are for raw XML/REST (with or without transformation)
• as things get more complex, SOAP will take over

Steve Loughran:

• bottom line: SOAP is ready for use in embedded systems (although things can get better and likely will)

Tarlochan Cheema:

• the motivation for the sets of web services that microsoft.com is about to expose is for better communication with partners, e.g. avoiding shipping CD-ROMs around, as well as providing real programmatic interfaces for folks that are scraping data from microsoft.com, e.g. top downloads
• the way that MS stayed at lots of 9s of reliability is with writing good code, of course, but mostly with heavy use of caching

Tim Ewald:

• XML schema shouldn’t be used for nominal typing; it should be used for structural typing
• different parts of an XML pipeline can have different XML schemas to check different things

Chris Dix:

• “Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time. Steven Wright”
• Since you can embed non-SVG data and script into SVG, these are the elements needed for stand-alone, cross-platform “intelligent” data that can provide it’s own UI

Aaron Skonnard:

• “Scott (my code monkey) and I are still in the running for the $1M playing DevelopMentor Survivor. We kicked Don off the island first because he was the strongest and Tim second because he was the smartest.”
• XSD isn’t enough to check real business rules
• XPath is more flexible
• Can write a .NET SoapExtension like this:

[WebService]
[AssertNamespaceBinding(“t”,“urn:geometry/“)]
public class Geometry {
  [WebMethod]
  [Assert(“//t:length > //t:width”, “Length must be greater than width”)]
  [Assert(“(//t:length div //t:width) = 2”, “Length must be double the width”)]
  public double CalcArea(double length, double width){
    return length * width;
  }
}

• Even cooler, because the constraints are part of the .NET metadata of the method, when the docs and the WSDL is generated from the Geometry web service, the constraints can be pushed in as well, making the constraints available to the developer

Here.

Here. Rory Blyth seems to be keeping track of who he’s eating with and who he meets in the rest room, so clearly, a must read. : )

Here. Don’s blogging the Applied XML Developer’s Conference.

Here. I’m posting this using the wireless access from the room where the Applied XML Developer’s Conference will be going on tomorrow (testing from the back to make sure it works). If I wanted to, I could plug into the readily available power as well. Very spiffy. If you’d like to participate in the conference, head over to the conference home page for the link to the message board and post to your heart’s content.

Here. With Dave Winer on the side of RSS [1]giving the Day 1 Keynote and Sam Ruby on the side of Echo [2] speaking the very next day, the Applied XML Developer’s Conference is bound to be a rip-roaring good time. I can’t wait. : ) [1] http://intertwingly.net/blog/ [2] http://www.scripting.com

Here. Today is the deadline for the Applied XML Developers’s Conference and almost half of the slides are in already. I like to leave things ’til the last minute so that the conference always has the speakers freshest thinking. Of course, one of the perks of running a conference is that you get a peak at things early. These talks look really fun. Can’t wait to see them presented.

Here. If you’re waiting ’til the last minute to register for the Applied XML Developer’s Conference, you’ll want to lock in soon. There’s less than 10 seats available, so registering now would be good.

Here. The message board for the Applied XML Developer’s Conference is heating up a bit. I set it up for the audience to be able to communicate during the presentations, but folks are already using it to coordinate Dev.Conf.-related activites. Enjoy.

Here. Colin Bryar, Director of Amazon.com Web Services & Associates, will be giving an in depth talk at the Applied XML Developer’s Conference on the how and why of web services at Amazon.com, one of the world’s most well-known and most heavily used engines for driving revenue for 3rd parties (as well as for Amazon.com itself).

Here. Microsoft’s suite of XML tools will grow considerably in the Whidbey timeframe. MS is showing off their initial ideas at the Applied XML Developer’s Conference to gather feedback. Don’t miss it!

Here. I’ve been buried in Applied XML DevCon talk proposals, but I’d really love it if some more non-Windows talks would make it my way. Tomorrow’s the deadline. Tell your friends!

Here. In addition to the *mountain* of abstracts I’ve gotten (more than any DevCon to date), several bloggers have had things to say about the upcoming DevCon: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/4/30/133950/971#xmlroadtrip (includes a poll for his abstracts) http://www.larkware.com/Articles/TheDailyGrind62.html http://aspnetweblog.com/posts/6141.aspx http://dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com/archives/003064.shtml http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/dbox/default.aspx#nn2003-04-28T06:42:55Z

Here. Tentatively schedule for July 10-11 in greater Portland, OR, the Applied XML DevCon needs your talks. If you want to speak on XML applied in novel forms, e.g. web services, interop, extensibility, Google hacks, replacement for more traditional data formats, RSS, hardware integration, blogging, or in any other fun, cool, fast or amazing way, let me know! I’m looking for sessions on things that you’re actually doing or planning on doing with XML. Strict theoreticians need not apply. Send abstracts before 5/7 to csells@microsoft.com If you can think of another place, e.g. mailing list or blog, that would be appropriate for this announcement, please send it along.

Here. Can’t be at the DevCon? Check out Brian Jepson’s talk-by-talk coverage on his blog. I’m sorry if you can’t be there, though. We’re having a blast!

Here. Register now for the Web Services DevCon, October 10-11 in greater Boston, featuring Don Box, Tim Ewald and keynote speaker Sam Ruby. In addition to amazing talks by Microsoft’s Web Services Program Manager, Keith Ballinger, and IBM Distinguished Engineer, Noah Mendelsohn, as well as wizened practitioners from HP, Macromedia and the W3C, all attendees receive exclusive SellsBrothers t-shirts available nowhere else. Register now!

Here. Stoyan Damov, the Grand Prize winner in the “Spend A Day With .NET” Coding Contest, won a free trip to the Web Services DevCon [1], Oct. 10-11 in greater Boston. His Microsoft Knowledge Base Viewer application provides “what’s new” functionality for KB articles in the technology areas of your choice, along with caching and plain-text/HTML viewing. And he built it in a single day with .NET! [1] http://www.sellsbrothers.com/conference

Here. Spend a Day With .NET coding something cool, send it to submission@sellsbrothers.com and the winner wins a free pass to the Web Services DevCon! Other prizes include a year subscription to MSDN Universal, a signed box copy of VS.NET and a half-day consulting. Follow the link for details.

Here. The final line-up of Web Services DevCon East speakers for October 10-11 in Bedford, Mass has been posted. The quality of the talks was so high that we had to forgo one of Don’s proposals to get in all the good stuff. If you can only go to one web services conference this year, this is the one that’ll pack it in nice and tight!

The video recordings of the Web Services DevCon are now available. Enjoy!