Happy Iranian New Year! It's the biggest day of the year for Iranians. Oh, and it's the start of Spring and the end of Winter.

Jason DeFillippo has added a photoblogroll (Jason is the guy who wrote the web service that I'm using for my blogroll now -- the list of links over to the right).

Hey Ole, here's Don Box talking about Web Services and SOAP. The talk is a little old, but it gives you a good insight into what Web services are. Link thanks to Kerry Gates, publisher of MSDN Magazine (among others). (No relation to Bill Gates). She also said that she and her staff just redesigned their Windows Developer network site. Nice.

Dare, in my comments, says he disagrees with my conclusions about .NET, but then he points me here, which seems to agree with what I wrote. So, I'm wondering: "have I nailed .NET or not?"

Dare seems to be saying that .NET is only about Web services (if you build a Web Service using SOAP, he says, you've built a .NET app). The problem, Dare, is that Microsoft says this, but then Microsoft puts the .NET name on servers and programming tools that don't just build Web services. It is this disconnect that is massively confusing folks. Obviously Microsoft's execs don't have a good handle on it either, which is why the name of Windows Server 2003 was changed at the last minute.

Maybe I should have added a fourth thing: ".NET is what you want it to be." Heh. That actually is a good one, since what .NET means seems to change over time.

Mike Amundsen reacts to my .NET piece and gives a little insight of his own. Mike should know, he wrote the IBuySpy demo, which was one of the first .NET apps to be released to the wild.

He says that .NET is the next Microsoft operating system. Well, I get where he's going with that. For geeks, that's true. But for end users, that isn't true. This is probably where the disconnect is. Most people don't think anything has changed if they can't see it. My dad, for instance, doesn't even know he has the .NET Framework and runtime loaded on his machine. So, all he knows of .NET is that it's something Microsoft is doing (he only hears the marketing messages).

Joe Bork says that Microsoft just announced the .NET Compact Framework for the SmartPhone.