I’ve spent some time over the past couple of months helping Microsoft with RESTful issues for two (soon to be three, I hope) different groups there. One of those is the WCF team, and Omri has just reported on some of it. I’m not sure how much of my input (if any) made it into that release, or if it’s all set for the next release, but there you have it; WCF does REST.

It was quite enjoyable to sit around the table (conference room and sushi table alike!) with Don and Steve in the context of trying to answer the question “How can Microsoft best support RESTful service developers?”, and not have to dwell much on the SOA/WS-vs-REST thing. Lots of love all round. 8-)

I’ll point to the other projects as soon as I know they’ve gone public.

Update; if it wasn’t clear, this was a consulting arrangement through my company, Coactus.

Update 2; the second project has been announced. Here’s more; doesn’t that XML just scream “Yaron”? 8-)

I’ll be hanging out in Sunnyvale Jan 21-23, with the morning of the Friday (21st), and the whole day Saturday, free.

Who wants to get together?

One thing’s for sure, I’ll be in the mood for a serious sushi outing. Ottawa’s got to be the worst place on Planet Earth for it; no sushi-only establishments, and of the better Japanese restaurants, they don’t do omakase, and the sushi’s only barely passable!

Update; I suppose I should update this to say that Totoya is the first decent Sushi place I’ve found in Ottawa. It’s a bit on the expensive side, but their fish is by far the best I’ve had in town, and rivals meals I’ve had in Tokyo and Vancouver. Sushi 88 is nice as well; good variety and quite affordable, but not quite as tasty as Totoya.

Dave Winer says;

SOAP and XML-RPC were started to make it easy to build applications that viewed the Internet as if it were a LAN.

which is 100% true, and at the same time, 100% the wrong thing to do. The Internet is not a LAN. On a LAN, there’s one administrative/trust domain, and on the Internet there’s, well, a whole lot more than one. Computing in those two domains – LAN and Internet – is not the same thing, and therefore requires different solutions (though arguably it could be said that the LAN is a special case of the Internet, where number of trust domains = 1, so what works for the Internet could also work on a LAN – but the converse obviously doesn’t hold).

And for the record Dave, I write software, thank you very much (and so does Paul). Not as much as I used to, but I still do, and still enjoy it (especially now that I’ve switched to Python from Java). It’s all too easy to put down a detractor rather than trying to understand what they have to say, I suppose.