Last week, I was happy to spend a few days serving as .NET track chair for the Web Services Edge 2005 conference in Boston. It was the fourth time I had served in this capacity, and the conference continued its proud tradition of improving on itself year-after-year.

For me the conference began with the presentation of a brand new talk about Microsoft's SPOT platform. As one of just 10 "outsiders" working directly with Microsoft to create its upcoming PC Channel SDK for SmartWatch devices, this is a topic I'm going to talk about a lot in the coming months.

The rest of the sessions in the .NET track were the best ever. Microsoft regional directors Julia Lerman and Carl Franklin joined industry experts Michael Stiefel, Tim Kinslow, and Magenic's own Raj Das in presenting on topics that ranged from servers to clients and everything in between. Attendance at these sessions benefited from the decision not to run sessions concurrently because of the early expo hall hours and keynotes.

The two keynotes (of three) that I attended were the best I've seen at the show. Matt Ackley's explanation of eBay's plans to improve the openness and availability of its platform via SDK offerings was one of the most enlightened and honest to be had. Ari Bixhorn's presentation on Indigo, and what it will mean to those of us developing on the .NET platform, was entertaining and awe-inspiring as he demonstrated a full-featured medical software application currently being developed by Eclipsys (the company where our CLI editor, John Gomez, is CTO).

View Ari Bixhorn's "Indigo" Keynote at Web Services Edge 2005 (Live on SYS-CON.TV) 

In the expo hall, the excitement generated by SYS-CON's new SYS-CON TV (www.sys-con.tv) offering was undeniable. Throughout the day, industry luminaries stepped up to the microphone to be interviewed by our group publisher Jeremy Geelan and the video and audio of the whole conversation was streamed out live to the whole world over the Internet.

Although the Application Server Shootout had morphed into a panel discussion, I was relieved to see that all the major application server vendors all agreed to participate. The more the merrier, I say. 

View Leading Enterprise Computing Vendors Duking It Out In "App Server Shoot-Out 2005" (Live on SYS-CON.TV)

In closing, I must pay special homage to Patrick Hynds' "Spy vs Spy" security demonstration. Patrick is this magazine's security editor and will be heading up next month's Security Focus issue. Based on the overwhelmingly positive response to his security demo at Web Services Edge this year, I feel confident in saying that next month's issue will be one you won't want to miss!