Rene Schrieken

My real love: Palm

Infected by Rob Vonk I did buy a Palm Vx 5 years ago. A Palm Vx uses a modest 512 Kb of  memory for running Palm OS 4, an OS which has one single purpose: run very, very well on an handheld device. The Vx had a stunning 8Mb at that time.

Jalouzy came sometimes to mind when I saw people walking around with brand new iPaq with a zillion colours and Microsoft CE, with a user interface familiar to the desktop. But somehow I always sticked with my dating but still functioning very well Palm.

But now Bill again changed everything. The unthinkable happened: Palm and Microsoft joined forces and in january 2006 Palm will launch the new Palm Treo which will run Windows Mobile 5.0.

That IS the best of both worlds. I can stick with my Palm to keep Rob happy and run Windows Mobile to keep Bill happy. And if Rob and Bill are happy: I'm happy.

XML in Indigo, forget that, XML in WCF

On the end of a PDC day you have to pick your session carefully to prevent falling a sleep. As Don Box pounded on me on the previous session to go to see Doug Purdy I decided to follow his advice. Nice to see that besides Don himself als Steve Swartz came to Doug his presentation.

Doug comes across loud and clear. And as a Lead Program Manager for Indi..WCF he has a lot of knowledge on the XML messaging bits and bytes. As a dare devil he used Windows Vista and a late build of VS2005 to do his demo's. And suprisingly they worked... except for F5. After the build was finished and the debugger should start it showed a msgbox with 'unknown handle'. Doug called to Redmond but a developer told him 'dunno'. Doug's response:'If you dunno how will our customers now'.

Now onto the XML in In..WCF. The WCF team did rebuild the XML stack primarily focussing on XML needed for messaging. The reason they had to do that was one of performance. The System.XML is great for standarized, general purpose XML but is overloaded for just messaging.My own experience is that XML serializing just creates a lot of bytes on the wire. And it still does until you use the new WCF concept of an XMLDictionary. The message size got reduced dramatically. Only requirement: both ends need to talk WCF. As Doug stated: If we talk Microsoft, we are pretty quick, if we talk with some one else, where not as quick.

The different ways of leveraging the infrastructure by adding custom readers, writers and validators makes the possible ways of exchanging messages very flexible.

Don and Dharma

This was an astonishing presentation of WCF and WWF working together. Don and Dharma showed how Service and Workflow come together to meet the new era of IT and business alignment.

As the Conneccted Systems Division is moving forward I already see a trend. The XAML format is not only going to be used for WPF but is a general object serialization model. But as that is not enough it also used as an exchange mechanism for sharing the meta data between workflow end-points .

Most astonishing was where Dharma showed the overcrowed room 150/151 the alteration of the workflow by browsing to the xaml endpoint file with the ?view query paremeter. There it showed the Workflow just as it was before in the VS2005 IDE and then he changed the workflow (added a step) for the running workflow instances... awesome!

And it worked.

So overall:
WCF and WWF are very, very great foundations.
XAML might be come the new 'open' standard for a lot of meta-data descriptions.

PDC Party

As always every up-side has his down-side. It is nice to be at PDC and sit and listen to all those great developers and program managers to tell about their products. But on wednesday the fun was over.

7000 PDC participants where directed to not too many buses and transported over totally congested freeways (funny name)  to a theme park called Universal Studio. it was so Universal that it looked like the Efteling but than smaller.

We were greeted by a mexican dance- and fire-eater act. After that we proceeded to the Frankestein walk-through ghost house. Some mentally ill americans jumped from behind walls to scare the *** out of us, which went very well.

After that we had to wait for 5 minutes to get in the Terminator 2D-3D theatre. After the theatre was pumped full with mist we were presented a sort of unrealistic movie. I didn't get where all the fuss was about but that might be caused by my lack of understanding the english language.

When we left the theatre we headed for a restaurant where we had a 3 course meal (French Fries, Hamburger, Coke).

The queue for an animated presentation of a Shrek was a moderate (about 10 minutes) wait. Here the crowd was sprayed with water. The same happened in a presentation called Waterworld. On the billboards the show was rated as #1 in the World. In real some actors performed some stunts with boats and pyro-technincs. They even simulated a plain crash. It didn't impressed me because it wasn't a real plane.

Finally we had to take a ride in a car, a DeLorean. I don't like convertibles and this car had a special lousy suspension so the guy in the front-seat had to puke.

Luckily at 11:00 pm the ordeal was over and Rob, Erwyn and myself could finally get to our hotels.

If you ever happen to come to a Microsoft Conference, skip the party.
 

Windows Workflow Foundation

Nice introduction sofar. Custom activities, nice runtime engine that runs in any host (Winform, Console, Service)

Impressive Statemachine Workflow.

Have a look at the Workflow website.

Next is: Custom activities in depth.

PDC Behind the scenes

As a kid I was a member of a so called 'Operrette Vereniging'. I wasn't a great singer but performing before a audience of 700 enthousiastic parents, grandmoms and granddads always thrilled me. However on stage I wasn't only getting in to the play (and foremost my role) but more on the technical things happening. Lights, microphones, the curtains, the way the scenary was put up. And still when I'm in a theatre I'm not only looking at the play or the comedian but still looking for  how the ligth plan has beem implemented, how some special effects are created.

When you are at big events like TechEd and PDC a lot things of go on behind the scenes. And here also my eyes are inspecting the way the technical where abouts are being put together. Cameras, Light show, overhead projector, switchboxes, wireless microphones (asthonisching to see that those don't interfer with the WiFi network, bothways). That there is a lot of cabeling is understandable but at our Starbucks location I start wondering if the network will meet the SLA of 95% up-time...

Windows Workflow Foundation

Okay, on the current project we have to integrate with a Workflow system. I will not name it because it is Staffware. Point is that when integrating the whole stuff, one of our teammembers, Mike,  has to take the definitions and import them into our development environment. Hopefully the names of variables are correct and our software will understand the whereabouts of staffware client and staffware is ready to eat up our integration stuff.

Now how different are things to become after november. The Windows Workflow Foundation integrates neatly in VS2005. You can design you're workflow graphically and even create new workflow actions.steps in C# (or VB). The nice thing is that this also checkins into source control and gives all the debugging fuctionality you expect. The most incredible thing  was the debugging of the actual workflow steps. So you could step through your whole workflow step by step and use F11 to step into sub workflows and use F11 again to step into the custom classes you created.

I think the WFM vendors on this world: Staffware, Filer, IXOS/LiveLink should start to worry, espcially if you are on the lower end of WFM.

Office 12 (and especially sharepoint0 s going to fully levarage the Workflow Foundatiion. 

PDC Monday: VSTO

PDC: VSTO 2005

I did a talk last thursday on VSTO and VS2005 and today I'm briefed by 4 microsoft employees responsible for the VSTO product. It is clear that MS move away from per prodcut programmability (like the VBA-model was) to a more overall common program model is a long and winding road.
You can already see some great enhancements, like a better integrated object model but you still  see some rough edges. The handling for things like Host items and Smarttags are just diffeent in Word or Excel or simply not fully extended yet. It will take the release of Office12 to get this model further enhancent and integrated.

The smarttag development will be easier but only on the per document basis, not application wide.

For security sake the VSTO team did remove a lot of full-trust permissions and for real deployment you have to fiddle around with caspol a lot. The nice thing was that even Mischa (a developer from the VSTO team) didn't get it clear. he admitted the security model sometimes fires back on him also.

For data and databinding sceanrio's we get support in excel and word like we are used to in 'traditional' winforms development. We recognize DataSources, databinders and nice ListControl that does the tricks.

The last demo we got was about mobile webservices. It enbales you to get into your outlook data (or better said, the exchange server) on your mobile by using SMS.

During Q&A a good question was asked: how does IBF and VSTO and PAI goes together. PIA and VSTO could (and should) be used together. The IBF is another team, the VSTO is communicating with them but integrated: not really.

Overall VSTO looks good and sure is usable and deployable now for enterprise apps. 

Metrics

Metrics is a hot and though topic. During your projects you collect all kind of data which you then use to do some crystal bowl predictions. Based on some vague requirements you have to estimate how much time you will spend analysing, coding and testing on the a new and unknown project.

Last night I watched ESPN, the sports channel. There was a baseball game between the Mariners and another team I don't remember. Baseball isn't a sport that has a lot of supporters in the Netherlands. Nevertheless the world championships for baseball were held in the Nehterlands last week. So real baseball fans have to bare with me. 

During the game you get a lot of statistics about the performance of the players. And my guess is that the coaches use those numbers to predict and steer the outcome of the game. Now that is metrics on his best.

This morning I watched the review of the last night games. They showed some footage of Barry Bonds.
Barry Bonds is a baseball player of the Giants. And they showed his metrics. One statistic struck me: Standing Ovation: 53 seconds.

That is a metric I really would like to introduce in our software development shop!
 

PDC Sunday

Ok, This is the first (and very early post from LA.

One tip if you come to LA from europe: Get a direct flight and select your cab driver carefully.  We had a stopover in Atlanta and immigration to the US consists primarily of queus. A queue for immigration, three forms to fill out, finger prints taken, photo of your face (goes all in the database), a queue for getting you're suitcase of the conveyer belt. A queue for getting you're stuff back on the plane again. A queue for getting you fully X-Ray-ed (I'm fine, no disseases detected so far)

The young cab drivers here drive like crazy. We went from 65 miles to a full stop with 20 seconds several times during our 20 minute drive to the hotel. The driver squeezed his cab several times into gaps my bike wouldn't fit in.

On checkin of the Hilton/Universal City we upgraded our stay with breakfast so that adds $35 a day to our bill. This gives the pleasure of eating in the Executive lounge which is on the same floor as oir room (21st to be exact).  I have seen a comment about the all expenses trip. I hope I can reclaim the taxi ($60) and the breakfast. I think it won't be a prolem because the company probably doesn't want me to starve to death.

Now about the PDC: Sessions will not start unitl 10am. I will follow pre conference track PRE004: Building .Net Web Services Today with .NET 2.0 and WSE 3.0.  I already got my PDC t-shirt and a bag of goodies.

I'm going to finish my Starbucks Capuchinno ($3, also goes on the all expenses bill, ... d***n...forget to ask a receipt....you are my witnesses).

PDC 2005: Here I Come!

The last few years my manager promised to make some arrangement to get me to the PDC. Somehow it never happened.

But how different are things this year. I'm on the  brink of leaving for schiphol airport together with Rob van der Meijden and we will join Erwyn there.

I'm going to make an effort to keep you posted on a daily basis. If you have any special questions or even session you want me to attend, feel free to drop me a note and I will see if I can fit it in my schedule.

See you @ PDC2005

VS2005 CTP August 2005 and VSTO

I promised you a lot and realize not much came true.

But I really had some headache with the latest CTP. On my laptop I was confronted with the haunted keyboard problem. The keys for delete, backspace, cursor etc were not functioning in the code editor window. And there was an annoying message each time I closed VS2005: Cannot save the .sett.ings file.

To get things working I installed VS2005 on my project desktop which disabled the opportunity to do any work on the presentation during the evenings or weekend.

Luckily I was able to create a presentation and a working demo, with less functionality than I originally planned for. My impression was however that the attendees of my session where satisfied.

Here is the presentation