>I also see heavy use of the word "subscribe", making me wonder if this is more
>towards time-based software "licensing" (my terminology for downloading a
>product for use then it disappearing from your system when you close it) as
>opposed to permanently installed on your computer.

Umm, not quite. When hearing the two words "subscriber" and "publisher", think "client" and "server". It's not a direct analogy, that's why we have new terms. Here's one example: suppose you run a company that provides stock quotes. You provide your customers a COM+ (er, sorry, .NET) client that is the "subscriber" (keep in mind, this subscription service could very well be free; "subscribe" does not necessarily mean money changes hands). On the server, you have a "publisher". This publisher fires off a COM+ event every so often that says, "hey, new stock price is available!". From there, we get into Loosely Coupled Events (LCE) and Tightly Coupled Events (TCE). The main difference there is that with TCE, the subscriber has to be active. With LCE, the subscriber doesn't have to be active until the event fires. Markus had a good article in last month's CoDe magazine dealing with the subject.

>It looks like a whole new world to me, with XML being the main "glue" and
>canned "building blocks" used for processing. Maybe real programming is to
>join the dodo after all.

I've been hearing that ever since VB came out. ;-)