After a long week trouble-shooting last minute issues between .NET, WSE 2.0, BEA Workshop 8.1, Apache Axis and SourceID...we pulled off our Web services event without a hitch! What does that mean? Well...for one, all the demos worked. This is significant because although we each had our own test plans hitting remote and local endpoints...the first we were able to get together and test on the actual machines for the demo was Friday when each speaker arrived to San Diego. Here's how Friday played out:

• Heinrich arrives at San Diego airport at 1pm, we head to my technology palace to hook our machines up to the NAT router and have his BEA code hit the token issuer on my machine (which would be Ben's machine later that night), and the Axis web service on Chris' remote server.
• Anant meets Heinrich and myself at UCSD to test the configuration at the event venue, and we switch to Anant running the Axis service. This didn't quite work (configuration was fragile, too many settings to modify each time we moved service endpoints) so I left them (and my machine) to figure it out while I was off to pick Ben up at the airport
• Ben's plane is late, I call Anant and Heinrich, they come to the airport so we can trouble-shoot the configuration issues while we wait. We can't afford to lose time...it's already 7pm
• Ben arrives and immediately spots us. We were sitting at the airport, connected machines via router, people staring (what the?)...as they walked by. It's 8:30pm
• We head back to my place, call for pizza on the way, Adam Cogan waiting on us (he wanted to see our demo...give us feedback). We work on configuration with Ben's machine, then proceed to run through the demos and discussions. By 2am we were ready...a few hours of sleep later and we were setting up at UCSD!

Ted Neward gave an incredible keynote, not only educating us on interesting historical facts while explaining that we are destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over again if we don't approach SOA, Web services and enterprise component architectures incorporating lessons learned from the failure of past architectures such as CORBA and DCOM. He is a phenomenal speaker, and great philosopher, and what I really like about Ted is that he backs up every statement he makes with cold hard facts and reasoning.

We ended up spending some time describing Web services, and what the purpose of WS-Security and WS-Policy were, before we got to demos...however the audience truly seemed to appreciate the overview, as much as they enjoyed the demonstrations to follow. I'll get some links up soon that make reference to resources. In the meantime, some detailed discussions of the event went are already up on John and Benjamin's respective blogs. Benjamin writes about the panel discussion that followed the code demonstrations. He also summarized Ted's keynote.

I plan to summarize some of the interesting things I noticed while trouble-shooting the code as our human interoperability tester...stay tuned...