REST is Gathering Momentum in and Around Microsoft

Wow, all in a matter of a very short time, we see:

1.) Visual Studio "Orcas" CTP released with improved REST support for WCF (as part of .NET 3.5). Although the talk seems to be that you will have to wait for the next drop for the real meat of these improvements.

2.) Tim Ewald, Former Microsoftie who remains close with some of the Microsoft Inner circle, announces that he finally "gets REST".
http://pluralsight.com/blogs/tewald/archive/2007/04/26/46984.aspx

3.) And then, the icing on the cake, a CTP release of RESTful Data Services codenamed "Astoria" http://astoria.mslivelabs.com/Default.aspx. Here is a sample URI accessing some data from the Encarta Database:
http://astoria.sandbox.live.com/encarta/encarta.rse/Areas [ 6 ] /Articles

All in all it looks somewhat promising but what's with the non-standard URI's like "../Areas [ 6 ] /.."? I sure hope they fix that and change it to "../Areas/6/.." as it should be.

Looks like some of the people in and around the "Big House" are finally getting REST!