I love spending time with my son.  He frequently reminds me that sometimes, life perceived through the eyes of a child is a pretty acceptable way to go.  I was a bit naive going into father hood and thought that I'd be the one doing all of the teaching. Yet every day I spend with my son teaches me something new about how to look at work or personal life in a different way.

Dave and I are in the process of collaborating to produce a new version of our Agile Training Course and I've had the chance to sit and reflect a bit on the Agile Process.  When you're deep into project execution, it's easy to loose site of the forest for the trees and it's good to take a step back now again (distinct and separate from your post-mortems) and look at the big picture.  Of late, I've been mentally musing about how to look at the process through the eyes of a child, and what that view can teach us as Agile practitioners and trainers.

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Just got a tweet from Dave Cardella at ESRI that my presentation from the 2009 ESRI Developer Summit, "Building RESTful Apps and Services with ASP.NET MVC" is now up on the ESRI Media Gallery.  The presentation includes the slide deck (recording started late so it's missing the title slide) as well as audio.  Many thanks to the EDN team at ESRI for getting all the presentations together and out on the web.   Anyway, check out the link and have a listen if you wish.

Author's Note: After I originally posted this write up, I got a good comment from Sean Gillies (see comments to this post) with a couple important notes in it.  First, I let SOAP and WS-* terminology bleed into my discussion of REST when I referred to a "REST endpoint".  Once it's RESTful, it's a resource, not an endpoint.  In addition, he called attention to an error in the example REST URI I provided (http://mywebsite/roadPoints/create).  Since we're not creating a new state on the server side, the correct request is a GET.  See Sean's comment for more info.  Sorry for the errors in the original post. During the ESRI Developer Summit last week, Dave and I both talked about some principles and methodologies in a RESTful architecture that we've used in several scenarios here at DTS, when the use of the ESRI-provided ArcGIS Server REST API either doesn't offer the functionality needed to accomplish a required function, or the REST API is not optimal in accomplishing that function. 

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