In a recent blog post I mentioned that SOAP and WS are catching on in the devices space. Last week, somewhat serendipitously, Rob Williams and friends from the Windows Devices group came over and gave us some great demos of some WS-based devices. It's amazing how much progress they've made - it's easy to forget we're really only in the very early adoption phases, and the best is yet to come :-) Here are some of the devices they demoed or told us about: Printers and scanners : a bunch of printers are now discoverable over WS-Discovery, and publish events such as "toner low" and "true end-of-print" - which you subscribe to using WS-Eventing subscribe messages. The printers and scanners support the obvious control operations (print and scan) as part of their WSDL. Also, some enterprise printers will support "secure" printing, where they will encrypt the traffic so that no one can snoop on the wire format. Rob brought one such printer, but pretty much all the major manufacturers have WS-* enabled printers - including HP, Canon, Lexmark, Fuji-Xerox, Epson, Brother, Konica Minolta, Toshiba, and I'm sure I'm leaving off some (sorry!) Projectors : Epson, Toshiba, NEC are apparently all going to sell WS-enabled projectors by EOY. Rob demoed a projectors that does this already, and also another device that can proxy WS-Discovery calls for existing projectors, and help set up an RDP connection from a laptop to a projector. I can't tell you how much time we waste at Microsoft "Fn-F5/F7-ing" a video signal to a projector, and how flaky that seems to be in many of our conference rooms. I welcome the day where I can just find the projector automatically and send my screen to it without having to connect any cables. And that day seems to be nearing :-) Home Automation : Exceptional Innovation , mControl , and others are building home automation systems that utilize WS-* - Rob demoed the Exceptional product (which you can get at Best Buy) - you can drive your entire house using Web Services (turn on/off/dim the lights, arm/disarm the alarm, set the thermostat temperature, play video and music on your home entertainment devices, etc). Nicely done! There was even a lego robot that has a WS-* stack, and can be controlled (move left, move right, etc) over web services. Cute :-) Finally, Rob mentioned a whole bunch of other types of devices that are going there - Building Control, Routers/Firewalls (like the Linksys Buffalo), RFID systems, Point of Sale (ARTS group), Energy Management Read More...