On the same day we had the Gates / Mills event in NYC, we released a whitepaper that describes Microsoft and IBM's joint vision for what the Enterprise-ready Web services protocol stack looks like. Some of the underlying architectural ideas are described in some detail - for example the principle of composability, the resource model, what it means to be metadata-driven, and the capability-based security model. The characteristics of a Service-Oriented Architecture are also defined in an elegant way. Brad and John have been pioneering some of these architectural principles for a few years now (with ample help from Don and the rest of the spec authors), and having them described like this should help explain some of the design choices for Web services to a broader audience. This paper really is a must-read for folks who want to deeply grok how we think about Web services. I'm starting to suspect that my PDC deck will basically be a powerpoint version of this paper...
