June 2007 - Posts
I'm going to be confused. During the last three days we've seen:
- Acropolis: a set of tools to make it easier to develop UI based solutions. Seems to be a good idea to make able every developer to write code as markup, regardless of what's happining under the cover. One of the annunced features is workflow support and integration, in order to drive UI through workflows. Sounds good.
- PageFlow: today Matt Winkler (what a great guy!) annunced on his blog a new workflow template, called PageFlow, that allows to define workflow driven UI solutions, able to control Windows Form, ASP.NET and WPF UI independently. Sounds good too.
- CAB+WPF: yesterday have been announced the availability of CAB + WPF, i.e. a CAB / SCSF that support WPF. It's good, but in Acropolis overview session the speaker said that Acropolis, on a long time schedule, will replace SCSF. Also Gleen Block said the same thing on his blog. So CAB + WPF sounds good too, but how long it will be good and available?
To summarize we have three different solutions, somewhere overlapping, somewhere not, all coming from Microsoft, all apparently not fully supported because they're not boxed solutions, but "models" downloadable, like patterns and practices and software factories. What should I suggest to my customers to use?
Probably the best suggestion I can give to my customers, as I always do, is to take inspiration from all of these solutions and to build his own one, just to be sure that it will be supported on a long time schedule. On the other side it would be great to have a unique and affordable direction from Microsoft.
Today, like many other TechEd attendee, I attended the session of Chris Anderson. It was a very effective presentation, about how to leverage XAML markup serialization to represent code with markup. The idea is obviously smart, above all because you can imagine a software written in markup and compiled and executed on a case by case basis, using WPF, SilverLight, whatever ... depending on the client environment, but with always the same XAML code under the cover.
By the way I think this is not the only positive side effect of markup programming (let me call it this way). The real power of this new technique of programming is that you can concentrate on what you want (write message, save customer, load report, sell product, etc.) and you don't need to focus on how to achieve your result. This means not only declarative programming, but also multi-platform support and above all parallel programming, transparent to the developer. WF programming represents a first step toward this goal.
I guess what we've seen today was just a drop in the sea of what's going on ... I'd like to see more ... :-)
Today was announced at TechEd 2007 the availability of a new tool to host WF workflows into BizTalk Server 2006. Sounds a good idea and confirms, like in this post of Paul Andrew, that WF will have a main role in future releases of BizTalk Server.
Many times, when I teach WF, people ask me what about BizTalk overlapping. I always answer that BizTalk Server is an application server to orchestrate messaging solutions, while WF is a base framework to build your own workflow solutions, but I also admit that a WF based BizTalk could be a good solutions to have a "zero-implementation-cost" hosting solution for real and scalable workflows defined with WF.
I've just attended a session about Smart Client development with Visual Studio Orcas. One of the most interesting new features are Synchronization Services, because you can leverage SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5, to manage offline data cache, with automatic synchronization with a backend SQL Server. Sounds a good idea, by the way I'm wondering if there's a way to enpower this infrastructura with entities rather than with DataSet and typed DataSet.
I've just attended a practical session about the RTM of VS2005 Extensions for WSS3. This Visual Studio Add-in allows to define Web Part, Site Definition, List Definition and SharePoint solutions, easily and quickly working within Visual Studio 2005. Sounds interesting the SharePoint Solution Generator utility, useful to convert a concrete site definition, defined using SharePoint Designer, into a Site Definition to deploy many times. Here you can download it.
Pay attention: the product works only with WSS3 installed on the same machine.
Today was not very exciting. The Keynote was not so brilliant, without any announcement or beta preview. By the way we know that TechEd is not a "wow" event like PDC, and this year PDC is under rescheduling ... so probably there's nothing really exciting at all.
Windows Server 2008 is almost known and available as CTP and beta; SQL Server 2008 (aka Katmai) has been released today, but without any public announcement during TechEd keynote. The Microsoft innovation wave will arrive at the end of the year with Orcas, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008, plus a lot of management tools and services like MOM, Forefront, Microsoft virtualization platform, etc.
I attended also a couple of sessions about WCF distributed transactions support, through WS-AT, and design principles for maintainable SOA services. Both were sessions about well know contents. Probably tomorrow will be more interesting.
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