WSE3, MVP Summit, ASPInsiders devlab and the AJAX book

Just finished a harrowing stint doing some WSE3 work with a client that had to get up and running in 5 days. I haven't had time to scratch myself (well, just a little scratch, but not those deep scratches that really satisfy).

WSE3 is great, but the documentation sucks and is hard to wade through when you have a hairy issue to resolve. Its quite often as simple as a few method calls, but whats the order of those method calls, where in the sequence of events should they be called, what needs to be initialised prior to the calls etc.. Its still a little black magic for me. Thankfully, people like Mitch Denny and Martin Grannell (smart guys I work with at readify) are around to pick their brains. BTW, the WSE3 WS-Policy improvements are good, much neater and organised that WSE2, and the tracing improvements are also a nice improvement. Although WSE3 makes things easier for advanced web service features and communications, I can't for Indigo/WCF to wipe away my "wussy" woes.

Now that its over, I can concentrate on the upcoming MVP Summit and ASPInsiders delab (Redmond, are you ready for me...?) and also really getting into the AJAX book that Wally, Scott Cate and myself will be working on. I have been delving into the Atlas hands on labs and having some fun with that. The Atlas implementation is quite good and works well, even at this early stage.

As usual, the ASP.NET podcasts will be continuing. Look for a special one soon (well they are all special, but this one even more so...).