MSDN tv is great. Over there you can watch very interesting presentations on very interesting material. The image quality is good enough to read what is being typed. The sound is so-so, you have to turn up the volume quite a bit to understand what the speaker is saying. Any questions from the audience are just a mumble in the background. Anyway, not as bad as some other sites where the sound is distorted, just be fast enough to turn down the volume at the end before the end tune will (sound-)blast(-er) you away.
In case you havn't seen Don Box yet : it's really great. Talking on services Don stresses that a service consumer wants to know as little about the (web) service as possible. The world view of consumers is not that of a hard-core programmer like you and me and consuming services should not be described to them as making an RPC call where, thanks to the richness of XSD schema, the parameters to a call can be typed as precise as int or a long. Not quite the subtleties the average service consumer is interested in.
Have you seen Keith Ballinger in his presentation on WSE 2.0 ? Keith does like RPC and shows wonderful things you can do with it. One of the most interesting parts in his story is where he describes RPC like sending a message and expecting a response message almost immediately. When this response starts taking longer the consumer can invoke the service asynchronously and wait in the background for the service to complete. But what if it takes days before a response is ready ? In comes the message queue. The request message (RPC call requesting a result) is posted in the queue. Compare it to sending an email message to the outbox. When will the the reply message arrive ? Maybe a reply is not even needed. The notion of a procedure call has disappeared, the only thing left is a request in the form of a message. This message will be read by some piece of software, which will send a reply when necessary.
You can download the WSE 2.0 as a "technology preview". I am going to toy with it; it looks a little like the building bricks for parts of Indigo. Well... the closest you can get at the moment.
Blog on,
Peter