Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

On Mike Breeze blog I noticed two posted about last TechEd08 about building RFID solutions with BizTalk and Getting Workflows Running and talking in Your Applications. First one I could not much with since I do not have an environment with BizTalk running together with RFID the another one was for me more interesting. The slide deck and code could be downloaded . I tried out the examples on my VS2008 virtual environment. The samples are around the presentation demoing different aspects of hosting and running workflows (WCF based, .NET 3.5, Tracking, FilePersistence, Obtaining Metadata etc). I downloaded the samples, unzipped them and started the solution. I did get an error concerning Microsoft Office; on this virtual machine no office was installed so that explains the error. On project called WordDesignerRehosting need Microsoft Office. I set BasicWorkflow project as startup project and started instance. I tried out sample running a toss coin. Nice, I am going to try out the other...

H ere you can see me with Bird Rock in the background. VS Live has come to an end and before I went home I enjoyed one more day in sunny northern California. I went on a daytrip from San Francisco to Monterey Bay, 17-mile drive with a stop at the Bird Rock. This stately landmark is home to countless shorebirds and groups of harbor seals and sea lions. It ended in an hour stop at Carmel by the sea; just awesome. VS Live conference was a bit different than the one I went to six months ago in October 2006. In Redmond the focus a clearly on SOA, BPM and BizTalk. Whereas this conference was more for developers, with subjects like ASP.NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005, Vista,.NET best practices, Visual Studio Team System and the upcoming (or already here) .NET 3.0 framework. For me the .NET 3.0 was most interesting and that's where all my attention went to. There was not allot of SOA in the .NET 3.0 Sessions, although it was mentioned in the title, talks around WCF and SOA were more about best pr...

Day 4 at VS Live in San Francisco. Today I went to a WPF talk done by Billis Hollis, a great speaker who I have seen a couple of times of the years. He showed some cool demo's and I am amazed what one can do with WPF. Notes about this one I refer again to Jan van de Pol , who is more a UI expert than I am and does a very good job of making notes of this one on the technical side of things. Next one up is more my cup of thea, workflow. It's second part of introduction of workflow and a followup one the one done yesterday. The slides are here . Goal today with his talk today is how to build workflows with WinWF. Three basic patterns, out of the box, others can be customized. (1) Sequential Synchronous ASynchrounous Natural Sequence of operations Workflow is in control (dictates what comes next) (2) State Machine Control outside workflow Workflow restricts choices Simpler than sequential (3) Rule based workflow pattern No natural sequence Rules model relationships independent of t...