While I was writing that last post, Don Box
asked for some help spending "100 engineering dollars" at Microsoft on HTTP, XML, and REST. Now, I would rather give him some advice on spending $100 on the other side of his job (WCF, WSE, SOAP and such), but since he specifically asked for this, here goes:
-
$50 on fixing the XSD mess. Specifically, develop a well-defined subset of XSD that is useful for defining the structure of business documents (and really I think you can cover 80% of all business documents with 20% or less of the current XSD spec). Build a really cool visual tool that uses this subset of XSD to help application architects design distributed systems around business documents. Make that tool part of Visual Studio Team System. I don't want to prevent anybody from using all the XSD spec, if they really want to and can completely explain all the ramifications of UPA. I just don't want to be bothered with all that extraneous crap.
-
$45 on putting all the XML coolness of VB9 into C# 3.0. This is strictly altruism on my part. I use VB, but I have good friends who, for reasons totally inexplicable, like the whole case sensitive curly brace lifestyle.
-
$5 on tool support of
SSDL. OK, I'm cheating here. This is SOAP related, but it wouldn't cost much and maybe Tim Bray wouldn't even notice.
I really don't think any of the rest of the stuff he mentioned in his post really requires any additional investment beyond what Microsoft has already committed to.
Posted
Mar 18 2006, 06:13 PM
by
john-cavnar-johnson