Asia Pacific Strategic Architect Forum 2005

This week I'm in Australia (Gold Coast) for the Asia Pacific Architect Forum, a yearly gathering to talk about Microsoft's roadmap, directions and products - in relation to software architecture.

This morning kicked off with a keynote by Martin Fowler on Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.  There are few people I know who can speak for 90 minutes and hold an audience's attention with just a single PowerPoint slide.  Although I prefer more visual pointers during talks, Martin really pulled this off and did a great talk.

I'm up tomorrow morning (at 8.15am, the day after the party - urgh) to talk about Microsoft and Interoperability.  I've put together a new presentation that takes the messaging from Bill's email last week and builds it into the concepts and products that we have.  The "finale" of my 90 minute slot will be a demo in Avalon that aggregates data from a number of services.  The demo environment is limping along on 4 x simultaneously-running Virtual PCs on my laptop.  Let's just hope this holds up for the presentation… <g>