Safely back from the SOA and BPM Conference in Seattle with a head full of new ideas and still tired from jet lag, this is just a quick post to summarize the conference and show some of the promised pictures.

As expected it was a great conference with lots of good sessions. After a first day, full of high level keynotes giving a good preview of Microsoft’s visions for the future on several aspects of the SOA world, it all got a bit more technical on the following days. 

	The Space Needle, Seattle and Snoqualmie Falls from the tv series Twin Peaks

I saw an excellent session deep diving into the new WCF adapters for BizTalk Server 2006 R2. It was hosted by Aaron Skonnard and although it was on fast forward – an hour really isn’t much to go through WCF and the new adapter framework – it gave a good impression on how it will make BizTalk an even better backbone for a service oriented solution. The easy exposing of services through WCF combined with the strength of the technology together with BizTalk seems a really nice approach to inter service communication. I will try to post a little further on this in the coming weeks.

Another great session was on testing BizTalk solutions, held by Darren Jefford, one of the writers of the book, Professional BizTalk Server 2006. The session was really a walkthrough of best practices, and most of it can be found in that very book. It is always nice to have things repeated though and especially when it is something you just need to know on a subject most of us probably neglect – testing.

	Twede's from same series, the worlds largest building and the Seattle Sonics

Finally there were two sessions on the ESB guidance by Marty Wasznicky. I think I have already used ‘fast forward’ in this post, but that’s ok because the term really doesn’t begin to describe these two sessions. In the first one Marty had just gotten the final build of the guidance and did a complete install as a demo including running a couple of the included samples. I really must say they have gone a long way from the earlier CTP builds I have looked at and I am looking forward to getting my hands on this final build and installing it on my machine – another thing there will probably be further postings on in the future.

Finally I just wanted to include one last picture, actually from the conference of ’06 and not this year. Take a look at the guys computer – I really like the picture.