I would love to announce that my wife is pregnant once again. She is 8 weeks along and we have seen the heartbeat!!! That means only a 3% chance of miscarriage now (thank goodness). She says everything feels different this time than last so we are really excited and hopeful. I don’t know why but I have a feeling that is it another baby boy.
why don’t I live in Seattle?
Microsoft was here yesterday pitching Commerce Server 2006 and BizTalk 2006. Let me tell you these products rock. Microsoft has really got there stuff together on these products. They had excellent tools for building document transformation and about every transfer protocol in existence. With a third party, BizTalk can act has a full-fledged EDI communications server. I loved this technology and really hope we make the investment in these servers. This would keep me from building my own inferior versions, not for lack of talent but of time 
What really got to me during this presentation is that they are using ideas I have had for years. I am not saying that I thought of them before Microsoft but I could have definitely worked on the teams that built these products. One of the first things I tried to pitch my employer 4 years ago when I was hired was the concept of “XML Glue”. Instead of using all the individual exes to run all the custom communications with customers (endpoints), I told them to forget how messages come in and go out and abstract that away. I further explained that our whole system should speak XML and we would handle the endpoints with simple transformation when needed. This was my “XML Glue” concept. I had one developer bite and he would build his individual programs with this concept in mind on a much smaller scale. Unfortunately I was shot down on the idea for 2 reasons: 1. I was too new and they did not trust me 2. They had no idea what I was talking about because they had not kept up with technology even though they worked in e-commerce.
My point behind all this is on a very basic level that is the concept behind BizTalk Server. It lets you abstract away the endpoints and just focus on the business process which talks all the same language, Xml. I would have loved to work on that team. I won’t even get into my vision for our e-commerce presence that is exactly what Commerce Server is. Thank you Microsoft for coming in a validating my ideas to management. It may be 4 years later, but it still feels really good.