Sehmi-Conscious Thoughts : Miscellaneous

Twit

asehmi — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 13:59:00 GMT

This comment over on VentureBeat by user Livy had me in stitches:

I am forming a new company will have the same business model as Twitter with the exception that all messages will be limited to 50 characters or less. The new company will be called Twit. The target market are those who do not have time or attention span to send out the over detailed and complex 'Tweets'. For example "OMG pln crash NYC!!" or "feeding cat - so cute". The Enterprise version, designed for busy business professionals, will be limited to 25 characters. I am willing to take $500 in Facebook stock.

Back to work...

Microsoft Tag - Snap. Blink. Wow!

asehmi — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:21:24 GMT

Sometimes there's just a really cool idea worth mentioning. I hope this Mobile Tagging concept takes off because with server redirects from the info stored in the high capacity colour barcode tag, the possibilities seem endless and loose associative coupling between tag and function means the target scenarios can be really flexible.

"Microsoft Tag creates unlimited possibilities for making interactive communications an instant, entertaining part of life. They transform physical media (print advertising, billboards,product packages, information signs, in-store merchandising, or even video images)—into live links for accessing information and entertainment online.

"With the Microsoft Tag application, just aim your camera phone at a Tag and instantly access mobile content, videos, music, contact information, maps, social networks, promotions, and more. Nothing to type, no browsers to launch!"

Go to http://www.microsoft.com/tag/ for general info, http://tag.microsoft.com to make tags (you'll need to sign in using your Live ID), and http://gettag.mobi to download the tag scanning/snapping app for your mobile phone (Apple iPhone; Blackberry 81xx, 83xx and Bold; J2ME based handsets; Symbian S60 3rd Edition ; Windows Mobile 5 and 6).

This is my tag below and I can use the management tool to set up the associated tag action. In this case I've linked the first to my Blog and the second to my vCard, but you're also able to link to free text or a dialler. To get them to do their stuff just click to see a larger image, then Snap. Blink. Wow! :-)

This is the management console where, as of now, I have just two tags. Notice how you can get a report of how many times your tags would have been scanned.

This could be big for business to consumer scenarios!

Update: Long Zheng has written a couple of neat technical post on this technology. Check them out - [1] [2].

New .NET Logo

asehmi — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 05:24:15 GMT

The brand identity of Microsoft .NET is about to get a fresh makeover! .NET has become an incredible success in the past 7+ years with more than 4 million developers around the world using it to build great software and rich, compelling Web experiences. The upcoming .NET Framework 4 release will likely increase adoption momentum and the new logo adds a contemporary face to .NET's image in the industry.

I like it. What do you think of it?

AutoCollage 2008

asehmi — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 03:14:43 GMT

http://research.microsoft.com/autocollage/

My daughter spends hours making photo collages of her friends and school trips for her desktop backgrounds. Today I came across a Microsoft Research Product called AutoCollage that'll do an awesome job for her. You can buy it for $20 or £20 depending on your geography or get a 30 day free trial.

Would be great if this just came in the box with Windows 7 now, wouldn't it?

Microsoft folks at JAOO Conference, Sep 28 - Oct 3, 2008 Aarhus, Denmark

asehmi — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:31:29 GMT

Many of my colleagues and I will be presenting at the very popular JAOO Conference in a couple of weeks time. Although I can only be there for one day for my own session, I'm really looking forward to it. There's a buzz at JAOO that is rarely matched in other developer conferences.

"JAOO Aarhus is Europe’s premier developer conference on software technology, methods and best practices. The conference is designed by developers for developers and as a result JAOO provides a unique combination of industry leading expert presentations, learning, and networking opportunities."

Here's a list of 'Microsofties' speaking:

Anders Hejlsberg, Opening Keynote: Where Are Programming Languages Going?; C# 3.0 and LINQ
Arvindra Sehmi, Distributed Embedded Systems -The 5 Billion Devices Developer Opportunity
Beat Schwegler, Enterprise 2.0 & Enterprise Search
Erik Meijer, Why Functional Programming (Still) Matters; LINQ + New Microsoft Things; JavaScript as an Assembly Language
Jeffrey Snover, PowerShell
Joe Duffy, Concurrent Programming with Parallel Extensions to .NET
Josh Holmes, Architecture of a Rich Internet Application (RIA); Developing RIAs with Silverlight 2.0 (session + tutorial)
Mario Szpuszta, Office in a World of Services and Mash-Ups; Understanding the ASP.NET Web Development Platform (tutorial)
Pratap Lakshman, ECMAScript 3.1
Ronnie Saurenmann, A Developer's Guide to the Microsoft Platform (parts 1 & 2)

There's a great keynote line up and big selection of well organised tracks. Take a look at the agenda - it's pretty damned good. I hope to see you there!

pptPlex - Flying through your PowerPoint

asehmi — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:51:43 GMT

Imagine your PowerPoint presentation was laid out on a large canvas with other imagery complementing it or providing the overall backdrop. Then imagine being able to zoom into and flying to parts of the canvas thus revealing your intended presentation. You could do this in sequential order or you could simply zoom out and fly to another area taking you along a different path to make an alternative point. The OfficeLabs team has given us pptPlex - adding yet more power to PowerPoint. I've been waiting for this incubation technology to go public so please go ahead and try it here: http://www.officelabs.com/projects/pptPlex/Pages/default.aspx.

P.S. My clever friend, Christoph Schittko, built something similar with DeepZoom because pptPlex wasn't public. Now he can just use this!

Catch U @ PDC 2008

asehmi — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:32:03 GMT

The Incredible Quadraped

asehmi — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:05:01 GMT

I am completely bowled over by this video of Boston Dynamics' Quadraped. How long before this stuff hits the consumer business - 5 years, 10 years, or sooner?

Multi-Agent AI - I've Got the Bug Again...

asehmi — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:11:14 GMT

It's Easter holiday and it's raining, snowing, sleeting, windy and generally undecided. So the family stayed in just hanging about, doing some reading, eating well and enjoying the odd bottle or two of vino. In a recent post I talked about The Microsoft Robotics Studio and it's sub components, CCR and DSS. I have to confess one of the reasons I'm excited about this technology is because I cut my programming teeth many years ago in the (then largely academic) field of Multi-Agent Systems (and Decentralized Computing) which involved very similar thinking and discussed many of the issues and patterns that I see in the Robotics space. Recently, I also started working in the Embedded Systems area and I hope to post some articles on how Embedded Systems and CCR/DSS come together in interesting distributed computing scenarios that are highly relevant in the enterprise!

Anyway, before I get ahead of myself, I just wanted to mention that through my reading in this holiday came across Mat Buckland's excellent book, Programming Game AI by Example, which very briefly mentioned the use of AI in Halo. Mat's site eventually led me to the Halo section on Bungie.org where I found a really eye-opening presentation by Jaime Griesemer (Halo level designer) and Chris Butcher (Halo AI programmer), which brought me back full circle to my Multi-Agent Systems programming days. In some ways I'm also reminded of the 'Agile Machine' we built in FABRIQ. Wow, what a fun trip down memory lane I'm having this holiday!

Two Blockbuster Events Tomorrow

asehmi — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:50:52 GMT

1.	My BIRTHDAY
2.

What fun! :)

Microsoft Office Interactive Developer Map Version 2

asehmi — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:14:51 GMT

The Microsoft Office Interactive Developer Map is a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application that helps developers visualize the different programs, servers, services, and tools that will help them build solutions. It allows them to drill down to each product and technology and learn about new features, objects, Web services, namespaces, and schemas required to extend Microsoft Office and build custom Office Business Applications (OBAs).

This is such a useful tool. I wish we (Microsoft) had it too for the rest of the server-side platform stack not part of the Office System! Go get it here.

The Joshua Files

asehmi — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 01:06:41 GMT

I was over at the neighbour's with my wife and daughters over the Xmas break and we had a chance to peek at an advance copy of a book tipped by some to be 2008's big hit in the world of children's books - "The Joshua Files - Invisible City" by our good friend MG Harris.

We've heard a bit about this over the past two years as MG has been writing. It's an action adventure story set in Oxford (where MG and I also happen to live) and the ancient Mayan ruins of Mexico (where MG was born). The hero, 13-year old Josh is an Oxford boy who finds himself propelled into a world of international conspiracy theories and jungle adventure when he starts to investigate the murder of his archaeologist father.

And it looks like no other book we'd seen - slips neatly into a transparent orange neon flexible plastic case - just the kind of thing needed to protect the book if you take it along on your adventure! Pretty eye-catching too! That's me and MG in the picture proudly displaying a copy of her book. Go get your copy now!

European Commission and Microsoft: Court of First Instance Decision

asehmi — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 20:46:00 GMT

Being an employee of the company I keep my personal opinions on this case to myself and defer all questions to our legal counsel. But I do want to tell you I'm really proud of what Microsoft has achieved in Europe for its economy, our customers and partners, and our thousands of (new) employees since this case started in 1998. I've spent my entire 6 years at Microsoft traveling extensively all over Europe, Middle East and Africa meeting and working with customers and have seen this impact first hand. Here's an excerpt of what Microsoft Senior Vice President and General Counsel Brad Smith had to say at today's decision:

“I would note that a lot has changed since this case started in 1998. The world has changed, the industry has changed, and our company has changed. We sought to underscore that over a year ago when we published what we described as our Windows® Principles, principles intended to ensure that future versions of Windows, starting with Windows Vista, would comport not only with the principles of U.S. law but with the principles that are applicable here in Europe as well.

“We’ve sought to be open and transparent, and we’ve sought to strengthen our ties with the rest of our industry. Indeed, it’s notable that just last week we announced a new agreement with Sun Microsystems, and the week before that we announced a new agreement with Novell, two of the companies that started out on the other side of this case almost nine years ago.

“A lot has changed, but I will say that one thing has remained constant, and will continue to do so, and that is Microsoft’s commitment to Europe. When this case started, we published Windows in 24 European languages; today that number is 41, and it will continue to grow. When we started this case, we had 3,900 employees in Europe; today we have 13,000, and that number will continue to grow. When this case started, we were spending $3 million a year on research and development in Europe; today we are spending almost half a billion, and that number will continue to grow. Today we work with over 200,000 business partners, who employ almost 3 million people on the European continent, and that number too will continue to grow."

My thanks go to the hundreds of people in Microsoft right across the board who worked on this case. Despite the decision going against us, what you catalyzed in the company over the past decade in terms of attitude and change is quite amazing! My personal commitment to Europe and my customers in this great continent remains high and unwavering.

For the full speech go here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/sep07/09-17Statement.mspx
For more complete background and details of the case go here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/eucase/default.mspx

Sehmi-Conscious

asehmi — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 16:46:00 GMT

It's been a long summer of big Microsoft internal events to close the last fiscal year and bring in the new one. Given that in Europe and many other parts of the world business slows down due to holidays I lost momentum myself and slacked on the writing front. Nevertheless, I've been having loads of really interesting discussions with colleagues and friends so there's loads of stuff in the pipeline to write about over the next fiscal year... that is if I can get my half conscious thoughts together!

My wife and two daughters started a small hobby jewellery business which they called "Sehmi-Precious". I blatantly stole their brand name for my tag line and was quickly reprimanded. Naughty me! So I've decided to have the new tag line: "Sehmi-Conscious Thoughts".

JAOO 2005 Article on Windows Workflow Foundation

asehmi — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 22:43:00 GMT

Originally Created: 2005-10-17

This is an article which was inlcuded in the JAOO 2005 Conference daily newsletter of Wednesday 28 September. Acknowledgements to Scott Woodgate and Paul Andrew, Microsoft Corporation, for the core discussion presented in this article which I turned into a written article for the conference.

The Windows Workflow Foundation

0) What is your background?

I’m born and brought up in Kenya. I now live in England working for Microsoft EMEA as Head of the Enterprise Team in the Developer and Platform Group. This is my first JAOO and my colleague, Beat Schwegler, said "You must come, it’s different". So far, I’m really glad I did! But, enough about me, you want to know more about WF…

1) OK, what is Windows Workflow Foundation?

Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), which we announced at PDC 2005 (in September), adds workflow to the Windows platform. It will ship in WinFX, which is free by the way. WinFX also includes Windows Presentation Foundation, formerly Avalon, and Windows Communication Foundation, formerly Indigo. [See the Windows Vista Developer Center for more info.]

WF has the potential to enable every single application that you have ever written on Windows to have workflow capabilities - a bold statement indeed, but by adding this capability to the Windows platform we enable all the developers out there to add workflow directly into their applications whether those applications are console applications or web services applications or Windows form applications or future generation applications. In fact thinking about it another way, WF adds a new pattern to mainstream application development - I call this the "[externalized] workflow-first" design pattern.

Think about it, when you build UI you just reach for WinForms and/or the Windows Presentation Foundation; for data management you grab ADO.NET; and for distributed connectivity and messaging you use Enterprise Services, WSE, and/or Windows Communication Foundation. But for business services and business objects what do you do? We're starting to see the emergence of light, flexible modelling approaches based on DSLs to address this problem. They can give you a great start especially when used in conjunction with frameworks. But we still also see a huge amount of code that is simply branching logic - "if", "else," "while loops" and so on, this is opaque and is effectively workflow hard-coded directly into applications. Now imagine we are able to externalize the "workflow" aspects of applications and make them explicit through models. Suddenly an essential part of applications will be freed of their shackles - they will become more transparent. Furthermore, by providing graphical construction tools, we can make the workflow modelling experience even better. Try to imagine how powerful it would be to tie workflow models together with domain specific models in a DSL. I find that thought really exciting!

2) What is the development experience of using Windows Workflow Foundation?

Workflow is going to be new to a lot of developers so we've tried to make everything about building workflows as seamless as possible and easy to understand for .NET developers. We have an API set in System.Workflow to directly program workflows. But we also have a designer for developing workflow models integrated into Visual Studio 2005. This means you can build workflow models in Visual Studio and create workflow artifacts that become a regular part of your solution projects. You compile these as usual because they actually end up becoming VB.NET or C# code through model-based code generation.

The designer allows you to create the fundamental workflow component called activities. From these you can compose sequential workflows and event-driven or state transition based workflows. Behind the scenes, but not hidden from view, the designer is actually modifying the source code for the workflow which is comprised of statements which create the workflow as a model. The workflow ends up as a collection of activities with properties set via the designer. When run the generated source code creates your custom workflow type in memory and executes it on the workflow runtime. Since the workflow runtime has control of that type, it can manage both the lifetime of that workflow and the state that’s associated with it. The lifetime of the workflow need not be short like a procedural piece of logic, it can be long-running since it may be waiting for events from other parts of your application.

You can actually use an XML representation, XAML in fact, to create a workflow. So, it's very consistent with other technologies we have on the .NET Framework or in WinFX. Our customers demand transparency so you can literally write code and then load it into the designer which will reverse engineer the code into the graphical representation of the workflow. This is good for hard core developers who prefer code to graphical diagrams, but it also makes it a lot easier to learn this technology. Having this graphical-textual duality is also a boon for the modelling experience in general.

3) You said activities are fundamental. What are they?

Activities are the building blocks for workflows. You create activities much like you may create controls for Forms when you're building a Windows Forms application. There are built-in controls and custom controls and you simply drag them on to your Forms. You can do the same with activities. We have a bunch of activities that come out of the box and they appear on the toolbox when you create a workflow, be it a sequential workflow or a state-based workflow or another type of workflow - you just drag those on to the design surface and compose your workflow. Of course you can also create custom activities and we expect ISVs and other companies to build activities in different application domains. Within Microsoft the Office group is building a set of activities to support new collaboration and ad-hoc workflow features in the upcoming Office 12. Say an ISV in insurance, where there's a lot of workflow involved, wants to build a claims processing system? Well this process is very unique to each company, so you could imagine the ISV providing a set of customizable domain specific activities for many of the processes. Their insurance company customer would then use these to construct a specific instance of its own claims process.

4) How would you see this technology affecting human workflows?

We think about "workflow" as including both humans and software systems. Sequential workflow is ideally suited for system based workflows, they're very structured, they have a start and they have an end, they look like a flow chart and effectively you walk down a well trodden path.

On the other hand a state-based workflow is well suited for human interactions, where latency and exception conditions are the norm. Making a state machine available at the platform level for every developer to use is a really crucial thing we believe.

What we're doing here is consistent with ASP.NET or WinForms, it's just infrastructure belonging where it should - in the platform. There are many scenarios that you can build on top of this infrastructure and that's the value that you guys add and it'll run just fine on Windows XP, 2003 Server and Vista on the client. One thing to note is that this technology doesn't have its own standalone process nor its own executable; it actually runs in your process so the cost of execution is really low, and it can scale from a Windows console application all the way out to a line of business application or BizTalk Server or SharePoint and those kinds of things by allowing the workflow engine to be hosted as you see fit.

5) Are any standards being applied that you are aware of for workflow management?

Well, that's always a good question because many companies need to adhere to different standards when building workflow type applications. We've tried to build Windows Workflow Foundation so it can be made to work with different standards without restriction. For example, we've built a set of activities, which you can swap-out from the default activities, which allow our workflow engine to persist to BPEL format and read it back in. The BPEL pack will be available on the Windows Workflow Community website.

By making workflow generally and freely available in Windows, we had to avoid a fixed language grammar. I am sure things will be built using WF that will completely surprise us. Therefore the engine itself literally must not know what each of the grammar steps are in the language sentences made up of activities. When the engine executes an activity which might do an "if", a "while", or a "loop" it's the activity's own decision to do whatever it does not the engine's. The engine just chains together the set of activities. Out of the box we have the activities that you would expect, "if", "while", "else", "compensation transactions" and so on. But you can throw out our activities and still use our engine. You can implement a new standard, or invent your own via custom activities and you can still use the designer to support that. You can host the designer in your own application. And your custom activities would serialize out to XML in a manner that was appropriate with your standard.

6) If we have the ability to enable Workflow in any application, how does that affect BizTalk Server?

BizTalk Server is an excellent example of a Business Process Management application, and I think this really calls out the difference between infrastructure and product. BizTalk server is an excellent product for creating workflow - effectively "orchestration" - between applications. For example, say I have my Siebel application, my SAP application, and they might be Workflow enabled in themselves but what I want to do is integrate information in those applications together with my trading partners' information stores. So I have to create a Workflow that sits outside applications and BizTalk Server will absolutely continue to be vital to Microsoft's strategy in that role. In such scenarios you need to think about messaging, management, adapters, business activity monitoring and all of those standard capabilities of Business Process Management (BPM), all of which BizTalk provides you.

WF doesn't provide you with those features - it is a pure form of workflow technology and can be thought of as just the orchestration engine part of BizTalk Server, or BizTalk minus all the BPM stuff. Actually the next generation of BizTalk beyond 2006 will actually use WF as its base workflow engine. So, to be clear, a customer today wanting to integrate applications inside her firewall with applications outside her firewall using BPM should consider BizTalk server as the most cost-effective way to achieve this.

Just as a side note, WF is built by the same group of people that built BizTalk Server. This means there's a lot of experience being brought to bear on this problem space. And now that this group is part of Microsoft's Connected Systems division I think we'll see a lot of consistency in the combined WF, WCF and BizTalk strategy going forward.

7) How committed is Microsoft to this stuff?

The key thing is that this technology is going into Windows which means it is going to last for a very, very long time, and we absolutely expect there will be future standards in this space and future standards in each one of the many different scenarios this technology supports. We’ve created an engine that doesn't run on a fixed language but runs with general activities, so that future innovations can be enabled to support standards whilst maintaining consistency with the engine itself.

8) This all sounds great! Where can I find out more?

Sure, just point your browser to the Windows Workflow Community website here: http://www.windowsworkflow.net/. You can also pick up a great whitepapers on WF [1, 2] at the Microsoft stand in the exhibition area of JAOO. I'm also not surprised that there has been a fair amount of content in the JAOO agenda discussing workflow and orchestration. This area is hot and now WF has definitely broken the barrier to entry and adoption for application developers.

Have fun with WF - Thanks!