Architect or Cobbler?: The Mid Morning Break

Last night's Birds of a Feather

I went to a fairly late BOF entitled Java vs .NET, and the first thing that surprised me was that I'm not the only Java developer here :-) The session was excellent, with people quickly agreeing that J2EE to .NET was a more appropriate comparison, although latterly it did tend to discuss Java versus C#, despite the moderator's great efforts to bring us back on track. I'm not going to go over the arguments, I think the overall concensus was that they are both great tools, and the fact that they both exist means that both products continually improve in order to try and remain competitive. The only thing I will say is that we could easily have carried on for another hour, it was that good.

This morning's keynote

In many ways, this morning's keynote left me with a happier warmer feeling, as the tools being demonstrated were very useful(or in Darrenspeak way, way cool).

Windows Workflow Foundation

WWF hooks directly into Vis Studio 2005, and has created a set of .NET classes which illustrate common application workflow choices. So for instance there are choice widgets, delay widgets, message widgets etc. Even better, you can create your own workflow controls and make these available in the workflow designer. I've played around with the Hand's on Labs already and it appears to be fairly stable. I suppose the question is, what about BizTalk? Well actually I don't see this type of workflow as competing with orchestration. Orchestration is all about high level business process, what processes must an order flow through for instance, while this type of application workflow is all about abstracting flow out of the application, so you don't have to have if statements inside a button event handler, for instance.

Visual Studio Tools for Applications

VSTA is the replacement for VBA. It allows developers to interact with Windows applications using the .NET class libraries, and also looks very powerful. It apparently will co-exist with VBA, and I for one am happy to see a new tool in my armoury for customising applications.

Expression

I'm a bit of a luddite, I'm still happy with 'green screens', so GUI's with a grey button are perfectly adequate :-) However, the WPF has given developers great flexibility and power when designing interfaces. And that's the problem, designers need to be able to create these interfaces, that developers can then glue into. Microsoft showed off three products in this range, which looked very good, in order to achieve this: Acrylic - A vector based image editing suite (with raster support) Sparkle - Allows the designer to add animation and interactivity to the design,w ithout having to write code. Quartz - A CSS compliant graphical page editor, which generates aspx pages, and more importantly appeared to support round tripping. No more changing the CSS and it not being reflected in the design view. Microsoft face some pretty tough competition in this space, so it may be an interesting few months. But the bar appears to have been raised, so we'll see how companies like Adobe and Macromedia respond to this challenge. The keynote finished by giving a much more complete demo of Office 12 new features and a sweetener for us developers - access to the Office 12 Beta 1. I can't wait to try out the Sharepoint integration.

# posted by James @ 6:44 PM 0 comments Comments: Post a Comment

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The Mid Morning Break

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Last night's Birds of a Feather

This morning's keynote

Windows Workflow Foundation

Visual Studio Tools for Applications

Expression


Architect or Cobbler? Good code starts with good design
about me Name: James Winters Home: Swindon links Solid Quality Mentors The Server Side - .NET edition The Server Side - J2EE edition The .NET Architecture Centre Java BluePrints Blogs I follow Darren Burford - Darren's Journal Julie Lerman - Don't be Iffy Danny Simmons - system.data.objects. dev guy recent posts PDC Day 1 Countdown to PDC Factory Methods The One and Only Tomorrow never comes Contracts in Indigo Playing with Indigo Getting Started archives May 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 May 2006 June 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 November 2007 March 2008 feeds	The Mid Morning Break Wednesday, September 14, 2005 Last night's Birds of a Feather I went to a fairly late BOF entitled Java vs .NET, and the first thing that surprised me was that I'm not the only Java developer here :-) The session was excellent, with people quickly agreeing that J2EE to .NET was a more appropriate comparison, although latterly it did tend to discuss Java versus C#, despite the moderator's great efforts to bring us back on track. I'm not going to go over the arguments, I think the overall concensus was that they are both great tools, and the fact that they both exist means that both products continually improve in order to try and remain competitive. The only thing I will say is that we could easily have carried on for another hour, it was that good. This morning's keynote In many ways, this morning's keynote left me with a happier warmer feeling, as the tools being demonstrated were very useful(or in Darrenspeak way, way cool). Windows Workflow Foundation WWF hooks directly into Vis Studio 2005, and has created a set of .NET classes which illustrate common application workflow choices. So for instance there are choice widgets, delay widgets, message widgets etc. Even better, you can create your own workflow controls and make these available in the workflow designer. I've played around with the Hand's on Labs already and it appears to be fairly stable. I suppose the question is, what about BizTalk? Well actually I don't see this type of workflow as competing with orchestration. Orchestration is all about high level business process, what processes must an order flow through for instance, while this type of application workflow is all about abstracting flow out of the application, so you don't have to have if statements inside a button event handler, for instance. Visual Studio Tools for Applications VSTA is the replacement for VBA. It allows developers to interact with Windows applications using the .NET class libraries, and also looks very powerful. It apparently will co-exist with VBA, and I for one am happy to see a new tool in my armoury for customising applications. Expression I'm a bit of a luddite, I'm still happy with 'green screens', so GUI's with a grey button are perfectly adequate :-) However, the WPF has given developers great flexibility and power when designing interfaces. And that's the problem, designers need to be able to create these interfaces, that developers can then glue into. Microsoft showed off three products in this range, which looked very good, in order to achieve this: Acrylic - A vector based image editing suite (with raster support) Sparkle - Allows the designer to add animation and interactivity to the design,w ithout having to write code. Quartz - A CSS compliant graphical page editor, which generates aspx pages, and more importantly appeared to support round tripping. No more changing the CSS and it not being reflected in the design view. Microsoft face some pretty tough competition in this space, so it may be an interesting few months. But the bar appears to have been raised, so we'll see how companies like Adobe and Macromedia respond to this challenge. The keynote finished by giving a much more complete demo of Office 12 new features and a sweetener for us developers - access to the Office 12 Beta 1. I can't wait to try out the Sharepoint integration. # posted by James @ 6:44 PM 0 comments Comments: Post a Comment << Main blog page