Infosys | Microsoft

When I was working with this workflow, I realized that ,this is just Visual representation of Activities we have achived so far. To Run the activity I have to go again to project, right click and click Menu – related to each activity as shown below.  

And here we don’t have any control on execution as Menu does not check whether activity related to it is ready to execute yet or blocked. Is this killing the purpose of having functionality supported to show activities in colors indicating their status?

Ofcourse there has to be some way to restrict execution of blocked activity unless all its parent activities are marked as complete. After exploring, I found that to have such restriction through menu is currently not possible but there is other way we can achieve it.

What if we have a link in my .mht file which is shown for each activity in workflow window. This link should also allow me to run command associated with Activity. Link will work only if activity is ready to execute (Green in color).

So I opened ‘AddDBConnection.mht’ file and added on hyperlink there say ‘Execute’.  Address set for this hyperlink was as follows

blueprints://60db6b1b-5562-4bd7-9773-f8dc8fa3fc32/

 ‘60db6b1b-5562-4bd7-9773-f8dc8fa3fc32’ is guid associated with blueprint command which you need to execute for given activity. This guid can be easily obtained from file ‘Commands.xml’ in ‘properties’ folder of Blueprint project. Note that guid will be generated only when you will build your blueprint project.

Now workflow window will look like as shown below

If you click on execute for ‘AddDBConnection’ activity it will execute properly as activity is Green and ready to execute.

But if you click on execute for ‘AddDataEntities’ activity it will show following message as activity is Red and blocked as long as ‘AddDBConnection’ is marked as complete by checking checkbox.

When you click ‘Details’ button to know whats happening it will show you following window

I truly admire this wonderful feature provided out of box by blueprint. This allows us to run activities directly from .mht file instead of providing menus. In this way activities become truly dependent on each other restricting developer to do anything wrong. Ofcourse this will hold true only if he always use blueprint activities only to complete his/her task. If developer does any activity manually we cannot get the information whether it is completed or not.

Posted by Archana Sachin Ghag at 6:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let’s take example where we have Blueprint which will help to create Data Entities from database table. We will also assume we have two commands in the blueprint

• Add Database connection
  
• Add Data Entities

Now without having database connection one cannot create Data Entities.  This can be very well communicated to developer using WF process workflow in your blueprint.

To see this, I have created Blueprint named “CreateDataEntitiesBP” which has following
It has two commands ‘AddDBConnection’ and ‘AddDataEntities’ created.

It has menus which use above two commands.

So on right click of unfolded project you get menu as shown below

If you want to know how to achieve this in Blueprints please visit here.

If you click on Workflow in menu you will get default workflow which is attached to every new blueprint.

Blueprint provides you way to change this workflow according to your requirement. You can add sequential activities here and even can configure dependent activities. To add your own WF process workflow for your blueprint, click on “Add WF Process” menu on your Blueprint project.

This will add new workflow project in Blueprint solution. This workflow project will have file “project.workflow.xoml” which will contain the workflow. By default it will have sequential activity with BlueprintProcessActivity Overview added in it.

This BlueprintProcessActivity will have following important properties
 

Name: Name of activity
 

Description: Description of activity.
 

Details: Name of “.mht” file which explain this Activity in detail. This will appear in right side of workflow window.
 

Sequence: Sequence of Activity within Workflow.
 

ShortDescription: Short description of activity. This will appear in left side of workflow window

Add two more Activities in this workflow other than default Overview Activity.

Create two .mht files ‘AddDataEntities’.mht and ‘AddDBConnection’’.mht. Put these files in Blueprint’s project Content\Workflow directory. Change “Details” property of two newly added activities to show these files in workflow window. Change Sequence property to 0 and 1 so that they will appear in sequence.

Now Build WFProcess project. Build action will copy “project.workflow.xoml” file in solution directory of Blueprint project. This “.xoml” file is the one which represents workflow for our blueprint so it has to be there in Blueprint project’s folder Content\Workflow, so Add file “project.workflow.xoml” in this folder.

Build Blueprint project and test it using new Visual Studio Instance. Now Workflow will appear as shown below.

If you recollect we had used Sequence 0 for ‘AddDBConnection’’ and 1 for ‘AddDataEntities’, ‘AddDataEntities’ activity is appearing as child of ‘AddDBConnection’’.

If required, you can also create Activities at same level in tree to do this we need to use Parallel Workflow Activity instead of sequential.  We have used it to have “Overview” and ‘AddDBConnection’’ activities at same level.

Best part of WF Process workflow in blueprints which I like is, it automatically takes care of disabling activity as long as all its parent activities are marked as complete by checking the checkbox shown.

All Activities which are ready to execute are shown with Green color whereas all blocked activities are shown with red color. If I checked ‘AddDBConnection’’ now, ‘AddDataEntities’ will become green.

In this way you can provide guidance based on workflow in your blueprint and this will notify developer about exact steps which he/she has to carry out and in what sequence, to use the blueprint. According to me this really adds value to improve developer’s productivity.

Posted by Archana Sachin Ghag at 4:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

However if you read the above blog by Scott, it has merit and definitely there are issues with respect to appropriate working together of designers and developers. However there is another angle to it and that is more evident if you have attended (or seen the recorded session) of the talk Seema had given in PDC 2008. You can find the link to it in my this blog.

Tools like expression when used to generate XAML may not generate the most efficient XAML, especially as you try to record some animations, or create grid columns by dragging column separator or create animations etc. The various values that get written in XAML can definitely be subject to more optimization to help gain a little more runtime mileage.

And hence develper may also need to edit the XAML and in this case, it may literally be editing the XAML in XML view in VS/Expression and not in designer view. However this can lead to subtle issues as well, which you should be careful about. See a similar connect feedback item I had logged for Expression generated animation here.

Personally, I don't completely buy into the MS comment on the connect issue. It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on the same.

Posted by Atul Gupta at 2:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Cloud computing is a style of computing that defines the way IT functions are going to be delivered or acquired in the future. This can essentially be contributed due to the emergence of revolutionary technologies such as Virtualization, Service oriented Architecture and the Web.

I will attempt to explain the influence of these technologies on the formation of the "Cloud".Let me do this by first highlighting some key attributes that basically characterizes the “Cloud”. Followed by, describing how these emerging technologies meet to address them.

ABC's of the “Cloud”:

1. Adapt: Being scalable and elastic to meet fluctuating  resource demands
2. Black-Boxed: Delivery of capabilities “as a service”
• Focus is on the Results and Not on Components
• Delivery Service Levels are Critical
3. Commune:  Anyone Anywhere Anytime access

The amalgamation of Virtualization, Service oriented Architectures based on open standards along with the pervasive nature of the Internet has made IT services generally available at global scales. Now let’s look at how these technologies principally function to meet the ABC’s of the cloud:

Virtualization:

Virtualization technologies such as Hyper-V, VMware, Citrix have de-coupled software from the hardware making it possible to run multiple software instances on a single hardware. The technology allows IT administrators to seamlessly Ramp up/down computational capabilities such as processor, storage, RAM in a matter of hours or even minutes. Virtualization has enabled efficient use of shared resources along with the de-coupling increasing the economies of scale of computing.

Services:

"Functionality being delivered through a platform independent contract" is the key design principle behind service oriented application. This makes service consumers consume information by being de-coupled from the technical implementation of the provider and focus only on the results. Also being self contained, services can be designed or managed at a unit level hence allowing for more granular control of service levels.

Web:

The global pervasiveness and the open standards of the Internet have made this technology as the de-facto mode of delivering IT-services on the public cloud. Although one may also argue that in case of private clouds, say within an enterprise, the use of private networks may enable cloud-style environments delivery capabilities without ever using Internet technologies. However from a universal accessibility stand-point the access over such channels may be confined to that within the enterprise boundaries limiting the openness otherwise observed on the cloud. 

Posted by Sidharth Ghag at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Microsoft .NET Services as part of Azure Services platform, offer building blocks which provide the necessary infrastructure to develop cloud aware applications. One scenario we wanted to try out was to be able to have a on-premise services to be consumed by an application hosted on Windows Azure.

Firstly, to have an on-premise service made available for  consumption by an external consumer, the service had to be made publically available. This is possible by using the connectivity capability of the .NET Services which allows for on-premise WCF type services to be seamlessly made accessible on the public cloud. And so we decided to use the .NET service supported configuration bindings in our on-premise service code.

We approached this assuming, for obvious reasons, that .NET Services (DEC 2008 CTP) being a part of the Azure platform would be supported on Windows Azure (Jan 2009 CTP). However we later found out that not all bindings of the .NET services platform were able to support this scenario.

In such a scenario, with the current release of .NET Services, we found that only “basicHttpRelayBinding/wsHttpRelayBinding” along with having the “RelayClientAuthenticationType” set as ‘None’ was supported. Other bindings cannot be used as they cause a conflict with the current version of Azure Platform.

Additionally what was also noticed was that the hosting .NET services using IIS is not supported in this release, which apparently had been available with the earlier release. Hence the use of IIS as a WCF service host had to be substituted with the likes of a custom hosting application such as a console or a windows service. Once the WCF service got hosted a proxy needed to be generated, the usual process followed by which any .net client can consume a WCF service, using svcutil command.

Interestingly the configuration file generated by using the svcutil utility defaulted the binding type in the service model configuration of the client to either a wshttpbinding or basichttpbinding.

Thus, allowing the Cloud-aware services to be consumed by Azure hosted applications.  

Posted by Sidharth Ghag at 8:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What do we do when we want to do something which we haven’t done before? Basic instinct of a developer says that Google and this is what I did. And what was i trying? Write a unit test case to compare two objects for equality. By equality here, I mean similarity of data present int he objects.The objects I had to compare had sub-objects, properties as lists and the usual primitive data type properties. Unfortunately .Net doesn't have any API which compares object for equality.

One key new feature of the recently released Win 7 beta that should excite UX designers and developers is the support for building touch and multi-touch based interfaces.  Some time back, I had posted a blog entry about my first hand experience of using the Microsoft Surface computing device. These new technologies open huge opportunities for designers to transcend existing user experience limitations and build immersive, life-like interactive applications.

Relating back to the ALIVE design approach I had proposed some time back, touch and multi-touch capabilities are huge because they remove artificial interface elements like mouse and keyboards and allow more natural interactions.  They also make true collaboration possible by letting multiple people simultaneously manipulate stuff on screen. I think we can place this development in the same league as some other computing related advances like miniaturization, connectivity and vastly improved processing speeds – all of them having profound effect on  how, where and what  of computers and our daily lives.

I think two factors play a decisive role in helping make computers an integral part of our day-to-day life: content and interface.

The ‘content’ is the data or media that we consume or interact with using the computers.  Fancy interactivity and high tech multi-modal interfaces may create initial excitement, but would not take us very far if the content is limited, irrelevant, boring and restricted.  Touch based products like Surface computers are currently ‘content poor’ in that sense; and will depend on Microsoft partners to provide applications, games and widgets

In this Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Cloud computing driven world we are entering, access to quality content will progressively become cheaper and easier. With  ‘Mash-ups’ as a way of consuming information becoming popular, users are getting plenty of flexibility for juxtaposition, layering and blending of information - thereby opening unlimited opportunities for switching the context and perspective.  It is like a kaleidoscope!!

This is where the capability of the interface - to intuitively navigate through information, drill up or down as needed, and zooms in or out with just flick of fingers - will come key. The richness, and directness, of touch based interactivity will be great match for the rich, multi-faceted, multi-layered data we may be interacting with in the not-so-distant future.

Imagine configuring dream cars..., playing with your buddies.., creating art master piece…, manipulating  business data…or just plain adjusting the volume of your media player …all this and more without using mouse, keyboard, joy sticks and the likes.

As we know, keyboards inherited their form factor from the typewriter. Mouse and joystick had little historic stereotypes to rely on – but they had to evolve and grow as the ‘sidekicks’ of the omnipresent keyboard.  With all of these out of the way, the “computer and monitor on a table and the user on a chair’ paradigm is going to be seriously challenged.

Touch sensitive monitors may end up being more horizontal to facilitate natural walk-up-and-use mode.  And kiosks too will have opportunities to evolve from the typical wizard driven user interfaces to allow more open ended interactions when the tasks need them to. In the weeks to come, we will look at how, where and what will change as touch computing takes roots.

Posted by Chandan Gokhale at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mid last year, I had written about this issue where Word was crashing due to a default printer, which wasn't currently available since I wasn't connected to the office network. Windows 7 offers an interesting solution to this issue.

Did I say Windows? Should this not be really handled by Office 2007 service pack or maybe in Office 14? Maybe it will get fixed there also, but this feature in Windows 7 does offers a solution.

Posted by Atul Gupta at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Atul Gupta at 6:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The other day we were ready to deploy an internal facing Silverlight 2.0 built application. As a final round of testing, I thought to put to use the EnableRedrawRegions settings that I had just learnt from Seema's talk in PDC 2008 as part of her session - Building an Optimized, Graphics-Intensive Application in Microsoft Silverlight.

Interestingly, after the application loaded, I could see a small portion in the middle of the page continuously changing colors. It could only mean that this region was getting redrawn again and again. But why? Checking the code we realized that we had some animation at load time and once the data was loaded, the animating panel was just pushed to back in Z order and another panel came on top. But this still meant that the animation was happening, but we could not see it. This EnableRedrawRegions flag really helped immediately identify and remove unwanted animation (we set the panel's visibility to collapsed).

Posted by Atul Gupta at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Steps to add related blueprint are very easy and straight forward.

First of all create two blueprints which you want to relate with each other. Suppose we have two blueprints named ParentBlueprint and ChildBlueprint.

Build both these blueprints. This step is important before defining relationship between two Blueprints as build process generates GUIDs which are required for parent-child blueprints relationship.

Now right click ParentBlueprint and open menu Blueprints ->“Edit Configuration”. Go to tab “Related Blueprints” in this and “Add” related Blueprint information for ChildBlueprint.

The information which needs to be provided is as follows.

• Description: As name suggests it is description for related blueprint. In example we have taken it is “Child Blueprint”.
• Workflow GUID: This is GUID which is used by Child Blueprint for showing WorkFlow command. You can get value of this command GUID from file “Commands.xml” in “Properties” folder of ChildBlueprint project.
  Command which is used for WorkFlow looks like

Note that these entries are automatically added when you build blueprint. So building is necessay to get this GUID.

• Unfold GUID: This is GUID which is used by Child Blueprint for unfolding project using Blueprint. You can get value of this command GUID from file “Commands.xml” in “Properties” folder of ChildBlueprint project.
  Command which is used for Unfold looks like

• Unfold: If this is true Child blueprint will get unfolded automatically whenever Parent Blueprint is unfolded.
• Dependent: if this is true Child Blueprint is marked to be dependent on Parent Blueprint.

Build ParentBlueprint now and you should see Parent-Child relation in Blueprint Manager as follows.                                                                 

Posted by Archana Sachin Ghag at 5:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Check a lively discussion on stackoverflow at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/270401/is-oslo-going-to-make-the-role-of-developer-obsolete

Once in every few years we come across vendors who make such bold predictions. In this case MS has not made any such predictions but hysteria is already being generated in the community.

My opinion is Oslo kind of technology and integrated tools are a way forward in the software engineering and would make developer job easier. These tools would help us focus on solving unsolved problems instead of solving the repetitive problems many a times. 

What do you think?

Posted by Naveen Kumar at 3:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)