Now we're talking! For me, at least, this afternoon felt like the PDC was really starting to take off. I found the P&P session to be very interesting, even though it started out bad with a power outage in parts of LA. This time was used for Q&A until the power came back.

The afternoon was used to cover topics like designing service interfaces, with schema and wsdl or with code first, Web Service Security Patterns and Composite UI Application Block and finally a real world scenario represented by an architecture of a Life Insurance company. For the contract focused session they started out with an architectural/design level and then finished it of by showing a prototype of a GAT-based tool for creating contracts according to (by P&P) the recommended design approach. Worth noticing is that they don't say that contract first development is equal to creating the schema first, but just as well by creating interfaces and data structure in code. But it's really important to focus on the external schema and not on the internal implementation. The GAT tool looked good, and will probably become even better. GAT is something that I really should be looking into more.

The Web Service Security Patterns will be an important and good resource for all developers needing to secure Web Services with decisions matrices, finally leading to implementation examples. This implementation will probably also be available in the GAT tool mentioned above.

The Composite UI Application Block looks really interesting with some great abstractions and use of patterns for smart clients. Sure I think that they could go even further in some areas (or maybe I just haven't had the possibility to dig into enough yet), but it's a good start that finally kicks off. I mean they built MMC for management like seven years ago. Why haven't they done something similar for business application user interface before?

I will try to get some more time to do some one-to-one chatting with some of the folks in P&P later this week.