In March I had the honor and privilege to serve as .NET Track Chair for SYS-CON Events' Web Services Edge East Conference & Expo in Boston. It is no exaggeration to say that it was simply the best conference I have attended in several years. The technical content was meaty, the opinions were strong, and the discussions were open - who could ask for anything more?

Of particular joy to me was the warm reception with which my long-anticipated "CLI Day" was received by the conference audiences. Miguel de Icaza, CTO of Ximian and founder of the Mono Project to port .NET to Linux, kicked things off with a truly brilliant keynote on the afternoon of March 18. On March 19 we had a day's worth of sessions in the .NET track that focused exclusively on CLI implementations other than Microsoft's CLR. Yahya Mirza, Brian Jepson, and Brad McCabe all did incredible jobs presenting their material - and the developers in attendance made their appreciation well known!

In the afternoon I moderated a panel of .NET experts, including a couple of people from Microsoft's New England offices, a .NET consultant, and Infragistics' legendary CEO, Dean Guida. The hundreds of .NET developers in the audience asked some very well-informed questions and I didn't say anything too stupid during the course of the panel, so I walked off stage feeling very content, indeed.

After CLI day, I had dinner with many of the other presenters at Cheers. (We were in Boston, remember.) We all enjoyed an excellent conversation. Unfortunately, the war in Iraq had begun in earnest just a few hours before, and many of us found it difficult to keep our thoughts from straying.

My conference experience concluded with me giving a day-long tutorial on Mobile .NET. By agreement with the students in my class, we limited our lunch to a single hour (there was a food court with a delicious Sakkio restaurant right next door, which made me a happy camper), so that we could cover all of the material and still to get to our respective flights just a little bit earlier than the rest of the crowd. Based on the feedback I have gotten so far, everyone seemed to learn what they had hoped to learn about the .NET Compact Framework (which Microsoft had - quite cooperatively - released just the day before) and the Mobile Internet Controls Runtime.

Interoperability
.NET interoperability is a topic that has been very much on my mind lately, as I have delved into a project here at Expand Beyond that very much revolves around this topic. PocketAdmin for Windows will allow Windows administrators to control their Windows desktops and servers from mobile devices with exactly the same degree of ease and power that our existing PocketDBA products bring to mobile database administration. However, achieving this kind of control requires interoperating with the Windows Management Interface (WMI), the Active Directory Services Interface (ADSI), and a whole suite of other administration technologies, as I'm sure you can imagine.

Closely related to WMI and ADSI, of course, is the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). In this issue, James Thomas has provided an excellent introduction to SNMP interoperability for .NET developers.

Also in the interoperability grab bag for this issue is John Bristowe's excellent piece on using Microsoft's Web Services Enhancements (WSE) for .NET - their implementation of the WS-I's emerging standards for Web services interoperability. And, last but not least, Roman Smolgovsky has provided a great piece on enterprise interoperability using .NET in a heterogeneous computing environment.

I enjoyed chatting with many of you at the recent Web Services Edge East Conference & Expo and - as always - e-mails with your feedback are welcome at derek@sys-con.com!

About the Author
Derek Ferguson is editor-in-chief of .NET Developer's Journal and author of the book Mobile .NET (Apress). He is also chief technology evangelist for Expand Beyond Corporation (www.xb.com), a worldwide leader in mobile software for enterprise management. derek@sys-con.com