PDC: Pre-Conference Info (XML and Web Services Pre-Con)

Like Drew and Benjamin, I attended the “.NET - The XML and Web Services Perspective“ presentation by Don Box, Tim Ewald, and Martin Gudgin.  For those hoping to hear a lot of scoop on Indigo and the future of XML in .NET, you really aren't going to hear a lot of new stuff from this presentation.  It covered XML and Web Services, and talked about the problems of matching XML as markup to XML as a deserialization of object graphs, and demonstrated some of the problems that XML and Web Services (and the .NET implementation of them) faces currently today.  Today's session showed where XML currently is... the rest of this week (I hope) will show where XML will be going.

“SOAP 1.2 is the last version the industry can handle... If the extensibility of SOAP 1.2 was not sufficient, then what makes us think that a SOAP 1.3 would be any better?“  - Don Box

Don mentioned that there will definitely never be another version of SOAP.  “If we didn't get it right between 1.1 and 1.2, what makes us think that we would solve those problems with yet another version?“ 

“The next version of the platform will speak [SOAP] 1.2 natively.“ - Don Box

Nothing very huge, and I honestly can't see anyone reading into the implications of this statement. This implies that, among other features, the SOAP 1.2 relay attribute will be implemented (which was excellently explained by the presenters using chicken as an example). 

“There will be another, more difficult, XML parser, and you will hear Mark Fussell talk about that later this week.“ - Don Box

I would hedge bets that this revolves around XQuery or something, I am looking forward to hearing what this is.