Richard Blewett is the CTO for DevelopMentor. He began life as a mainframe programmer writing ALGOL and COBOL, but jumped to OS/2 after a year. In 1995, he started developing under Windows and got his first taste of COM. He then spent quite a few years working with COM from both C++ and VB.
He has worked on a number of high profile projects and is perhaps proudest of his work as the middle-tier architect of the UK National Police Systems. His client list includes investment banks, software houses, and financial services companies.
In 2000, he discovered .NET and has been living in the managed world ever since. Richard spends most of his time these days digging around in the internals of the runtime and living the Service-Oriented Lifestyle with Biztalk, WCF, and WF.

For many, building large scale service based systems equate to using SOAP. There is, however, another way to architect service based systems by embracing the model the web uses - REpresentational State Transfer, or REST. .NET 3.5 introduced a way of building the service side with WCF - however you can also use ASP.NET's infrastructure as well. In this session we talk about what REST is, two approaches to creating REST based services and how you can consume these services very simply with LINQ to XML.

Writing Service Oriented Systems with WCF and Workflow

Since its launch WCF has been Microsoft's premier infrastructure to writing SOA based systems. However one of the main benefits of Service Orientation is combining the functionality of services to create higher order functionality which itself is exposed as a service - namely service composition. Workflow is a very descriptive way of showing how services are combined and in .NET 3.5 Microsoft introduced an integration layer between WCF and Workflow to simplify the job of service composition. In this session we examine this infrastructure and bring out both its string and weak points with an eye to what is coming down the line in Project Oslo - Microsoft's next generation of its SOA platform.