(October 1, 2003) - The first day of the .NET track at Web Services Edge 2003 got off to a great start today with an hour-long session - given by Empowered Solutions’ John Bristowe -- on Web Service Enhancements 2.0. Web Service Enhancements - or WSE as it is commonly known - is a Microsoft implementation for .NET of the WS-I standards for Web service interoperability. As John illustrated in his session, there are also numerous enhancements in WSE to make the job of the Web services developer easier.

Allen Vermeulen followed John’s session with a keynote that can be described as nothing less than brilliant. Using the history of electricity as its key organizing principal, he led the audience through a brief survey of the state of Web service technology that kept the audience completely spellbound. The narrative was broken up by demonstrations of interesting applications that independent developers have built on top of Amazon’s Web services API.

After the keynote, the Expo Hall opened. Actional’s booth, in particular, drew my interest. Knowing that they create Web service management tools, I had to ask them: why exactly do I need to manage a .NET Web service - isn’t it pretty simple on its own? Their answer surprised me. Using their SOAPStation tools, it is possible to setup important pieces of Web service infrastructure - like encryption and interface versioning, without writing any code to support it. I had never considered it before, but I guess that it makes sense that basic functionality like this should just be provided "out of the box", rather than having to be coded from scratch every time.

After talking to Actional, I sat in on most of Brad McCabe’s afternoon session on Smart Devices in the Enterprise. If you think that you know everything that there is to know about Microsoft-based devices, think again! I learned things about the very device that I carry around with me (a T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition) that I hadn’t known before. Then, we learned a great deal about Tablet PC’s, including the two main ways to develop for them (COM or .NET) and - perhaps most importantly - the myriad benefits of Ink (the Tablet PC’s native data type for hand-drawn information).

The final session of the day was the legendary Jon Box’s class on the ASP.NET Mobile Controls. As many of you probably know, this is a topic in which I personally have a pretty extensive background. Nevertheless, I learned at least four or five new things in less than the space of an hour - including the existence of a brand new Mobile Control at the www.ASP.net site that can do runtime image translation for different devices. Most cool!

All-in-all, I think I would have to say that the first day of Web Services Edge West 2003 has been better than any other day I have ever spent at a conference. In addition to the content described above, I had a number of great conversations with other attendees. You can’t quantify those kinds of experiences, but I suspect that they are a function of bringing together a sufficient number of like-minded individuals in the same space - and there were certainly plenty of folks with Web services on their minds at WSE West 2003 today!