Benjamin Mitchell wrote a better summary of my "Building Proseware Inc." session at TechEd Amsterdam than I ever could.

Because ... whenever the lights go on and the mike is open, I somehow automatically switch into an adrenalin-powered auto-pilot mode that luckily works really well and since my sessions take up so much energy and "focus on the moment", I often just don't remember all the things I said once the session is over and I am cooled down. That also explains why I almost never rehearse sessions (meaning: I never ever speak to the slides until I face an audience) except when I have to coordinate with other speakers. Yet, even though most of my sessions are really ad-hoc performances, whenever I repeat a session I usually remember whatever I said last time just at the very moment when the respective topic comes up, so there's an element of routine. It is really strange how that works. That's also why I am really a bad advisor on how to do sessions the right way, because that is a very risky approach. I just write slides that provide me with a list of topics and "illustration helpers" and whatever I say just "happens". 

About Proseware: All the written comments that people submitted after the session have been collected and are being read and it's very well understood that you want to get your hands on the bits as soon as possible. One of my big takeaways from the project is that if you're Microsoft, releasing stuff that is about giving "how-to" guidance is (for more reasons you can imagine) quite a bit more complicated than just putting bits up on a download site. It's being worked on. In the meantime, I'll blog a bit about the patterns I used whenever I can allocate a timeslice.

Wednesday, July 07, 2004 7:43:29 PM UTC
You're absolutely spot on with your observation that relasing 'how-to- guidance is about more than point out a few engineering choices that can be made. For instance, just in the last few months Microsoft have released Biztalk 2004, the Shadowfax framework and then you have come in some brilliant work with Fabriq and Proseware. All these obviously should form part of the toolbox of an architect considering creating an SOA. The issue becomes the proliferation of reference implementations which exist in isolation and don't clearly indicate the architectural need they address and how they relate to other artifacts being released at the same time. An example is Shadowfax and Biztalk 2004 each having their completely different pipeline architectures. I don't remember if Proseware had a pipeline based architecture or not but I'd bet if it has one it's different to the one in Shadowfax. The problem I've seen this causing is that quite a few organisations seize on these frameworks and adopt them without being aware of their purpose purely because they are presented as 'best-practice' or reference-implementations by the folks at Microsoft - and apply them inappropriately. The confusion is that there tend to be several such implementations all being released simultaneously without much co-ordination.
I'd love to get my hands on the code for Proseware though- your talks were excellent and probably the highlight of the conference for me.
Piyush Pant
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