At this meeting Dino Chiesa brought clarity to some important Web Services concepts which he illustrated as the "Baseline Stack", composed of: UDDI - Publish and Find Services WSDL - Service Descriptions SOAP Service Invocation XML - Universal Data Format HTTP/TCP-IP Communications

Putting hype aside, Mr. Chiesa discussed how many vendors are investing aggressively in XML web services, with tools and capabilities that are maturing rapidly. Within the talk, he covered:

• A brief review of the technology foundation of web services
• Architectural models for web services
• An examination of web services platforms, including comparisons between J2EE and Microsoft's .NET platform
• A discussion of interoperability issues
• What's real and what's not 

Dino Chiesa is Product Manager with Microsoft's .NET Enterprise Solutions Group, focusing on .Net Server.  He has 15 years of experience in the software industry, primarily as an application developer and distributed applications architect. Prior to coming to Microsoft, Dino worked for 8 years with IBM as a consultant and architect in the distributed middleware and application and transaction servers group, where he obtained extensive experience with a variety of middleware technologies including distributed message queueing, enterprise Java, distributed transactional environments, CORBA, and DCE.