DEVC35 - Web Services Interoperability

I have just finished presenting cabana session DEVC35 at TechEd. Despite an early start and a party at the zoo last night (which I didn't go to!), the session was well attended, peaking at around 50 people. Due to the layout of the area however, a microphone would have really helped!

I covered a few things: The landscape of Web Services players today. IBM, BEA, Apache, webMethods, Systinet etc., where they are and how I see them moving forward. The WS-I was a great topic of conversation, and I was pleased to note that the majority of attendees were aware of the WS-I and their responsibilities in this area. 

For my demo I showed WSIM - Web Services Interoperability Matrix - this is an internal series of tests that I've been working on for a few weeks to investigate interoperability between various platforms and make recommendations where necessary. The setup today is a total of 360 unit tests (Nunit and jUnit) that run from .NET Fx 1.1 to other Web service implementations and vice versa. The tests show how primitives, arrays, complex objects, arrays of complex objects and exceptions can be successfully passed between two platforms - highlighting what works out of the box, and what recommendations we can make for certain scenarios. Each of the tests are built based on messages, starting from a series of XSDs and working outwards.

If you are still at TechEd, I'll be showing a cut down version of this at my next session, WIN325 at 1.30pm today. Otherwise, look for the first results and code from this on MSDN coming later in June.