Attila Hajdrik's Blog

Me and my blog has been moved...

I know I was not a very frequent blogger, but I (have to) promise that this will change in the future...

 As of 31st december I left Microsoft and establlished my own development company, which was kept me busy...

Our primary focus will be on RIA and Multimedia solution development with Silverlight 2 and of course .Net based back-end services.

We've just finished the first release of the Illuminated Chronicle which was a project what we're proud of. SteveB gave a unique edition to the Hungarian Prime Minister during his visit in our country.

 The codex is available online at http://www.kepeskronika.net. It's a Silverlight 2 Beta1 based solution which is utilizing the DeepZoom technology, the user's action are synced to audio-visual metadata.

Only the Hungarian version available now, but for Silverlight 2 Beta2 the English version of the first chapter will be available in textual and audio form too. (We're still looking for some funding to get the rest of the codex translated and recorded in English).

The Beta 2 compatible version will have other features as well :-) so bookmark the page if you're interested.

My company's website is available at http://www.eyedea.hu

My new blog is at http://www.eyedea.hu/blogs/attila

See you there!

Web Service Software Factory v3 Community Drop (build 27) released

New build of the Web Service Software Factory v3 was released yesterday. This build is released in source code form. Please pay attention to the included StartHere.htm within the package since it contains the instructions on how to successfully build the factory. If you're new to the v3 of this factory then read the Walkthrough.htm also.

If you're a factory developer make sure you check out the following projects within the solution:

• Microsoft.Practices.Modeling.CodeGeneration
• Microsoft.Practices.Modeling.Dsl.Integration
• Microsoft.Practices.Modeling.ExtensionProvider

Have fun and please provide feedback on the CodePlex site!

DSL model migration tool fixes...

Yesterday I migrated my DSL model from April CTP to June CTP of the DSL Toolkit. The migration was almost painless, but I faced with some problems.

This morning with fresh head I redo the migration and for two generic problem I also did the fix.

1st problem is related to migrated model files (not model definition files):

If you've accented characters in your model which we had for Summary and Comment type fields, then they are not preserved since the migrated model file is not saved as UTF-8 encoded. Don't let the model's first line fool you that xml instruction about encoding was put there by the migration tool "by hand" :-)

Here is the fix:

PDC 2005 Summary

So everything must end....PDC 2005 reached it's end. Currently I'm on a plane over Canada, flying back to Home. Thanks for Lufthansa for their FlyNet technology, which made this blog entry possible (no, it's not free :-)). Shame on Dell because my Inspiron can work about 3-4 hours from battery :-)

This conference was a well organized event without no problems. There was a power outage but that's not the fault of the event staff :-) It was far better then the PDC in 2003. One day as Me and my colleague worked from one session to another we talked about the conferences in the past and the evolution of the facilities what you got on each conference. First You've the ability to rent wireless cards and Ipaq devices to get connected on the conference, and there was a few wireless hotspots. After a few years the possibilities were much better, since you already had your wireless device with you, but there were stiil only hotspots, but much better coverage. In 2005 at PDC you had all the devices in all form factors with wireless inside and we had full coverage thruout the convention center.

Also finally I met some friends whose I'd only online contact before. I'll not go thru all of them, but it was a pleasure for me to meet with Eric J. Smith the author of CodeSmith since we'd talked a lot before. Eric, thanks for the photo :-)

Also I met my colleagues from Redmond Campus and it was good to put a face to the names from the distribution lists.

I had a job interview at the PDC, well....we'll see what will happen :-) If everything goes right maybe I'll be a speaker at the next PDC :-))) (Just joking but chances always around, you just've to catch them).

Thanks for everything (specially to my Manager who made it possible for me. Just one more favor, please sign my expense sheet :-))

See you all of you at the next PDC.

What about the future of this blog? Which was opened at the PDC....All I can tell that I'll continue blogging about technologies and problems I'm faced with what I'm working with. You can expect content about: Model Driven Development, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Presentation Framework and everyhing about .Net.

Missing Session Blogs...

Maybe some of you who read my blog continously missed the blog entries about thursday and friday sessions. The cause of this I was in a hurry and switched sessions a lot of times because of the collisions. So here up I just write a summary about the technologies I visited.

Windows Workflow Foundation

It's a must for all .Net developers if they like to save time and money and headache. Since WFF is NOT a product then we developers have the task to let the sales people know about this Foundation.

Windows Presenstation Foundation

I guess you read about it  a lot - if this technology is interesting to you - so I can't tell too much new. The fact the at the marketplace Chris Sell's new book about this was sold out twice thruout the conference is marking that this other new Foundation will be one which matters to a lot of people.

Atlas

This ultimate project will save us - web developers - a lot of headaches we had before. By combining this technology with ASP.Net 2.0 will be a very powerful stuff and pretty straightforward. In my plans I've to do a simple ASP.Net 2.0 Flash control and integrate it with Atlas features to provide rich interaction between a HTML embedded flash movie and the server side ASP.Net 2.0. This way you don't really need any other product to do real interactive flash content which is getting the data from the server. You can do it without publishing XML and JPG files directly onto the web.

Biztalk Server futures

The BizTalk Server 2006 will be released soon, but the BizTalk guys made a very cool demo about the futures of the product, how they changed the designer and enriched the feature set. As a core developer I'm not a big fun of BizTalk, but maybe the release of the WFF this product will get into the right slot and will not be treated as a generic product for filling all the gaps, instead it will be used in real integration scenarios where it's appropriate.

Windows Communication Foundation: Under the hood of the Service Model Layer

ServiceHost features was covered. It provides the Endpoint to it's client, it's a CommunicationObject, which organizes the states. It has a rich extensibility model and rich event model.

You've the ability to either use configuration for the host or imparetively do it from your code. At the end of the day when using config files it will end up with the same code, but maybe you need to get the configuration data from a different source than the configuration file.

You can have your own contract creation method instead of the default generated one. All you've to do is just override a method called OnCreateDescription. If you like to replace the configuration system there is an override for this too: OnApplyConfiguration.

The behavior model of Indigo was shown, how you can add, remove, configure behaviors via config files, but as before you can develop your own behavior of course.

The following things was covered too (just a reference, I'm not describing them here): ProxyBehavior, DispatchBehavior, DispathOperation.

I'm sure that Communcation Foundation will be a base pillar and a replacement for a few technologies which are around us.

Thursday Keynote - Bob Muglia

Traffic was terrible this morning so we missed the first 10 minutes of the keynote. But we didn't miss anything in fact.

There was a demo about the new VS 2005 presented the Application Designer and the Deployment Model Designer, which had extensions for Microsoft Operations Manager by the SDM Toolkit. Everyone who saw the designers mentioned before missed a piece from the puzzle...after validation, how will you make the deployment itself in an operating environment. Now I saw the solution for this, but can't tell you about it yet. Ok, I'm just joking. Macrovision made a version of InstallShield, which takes an SDM model file and the built binaries and package them up in separate MSI files as it's defined in the deployment diagram, it's so cool, thanks guys!
On the other hand, when tested the client application an exception occured, which was generated on the server. After this they switched to MOM and the exception was there. In VS the developer got the data about the exception and when loaded up into VS he saw the exception details, the time of the exception and every data, also there was a link to the source code too, and when he clicked on that VS positioned into the right file on the right row which caused the exception. All this without debugging, and the data came from a Live system!

New stuff next year:

• Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition, it's name speakes for itself. Tons of machines which will run highly scalable performant applications in a distributed manner. It's the beginning of a new era of high performance computing.
• Monad, Object-based command line language, full managed support, no more typeless 'on error goto' VBScript for administrators.
• WinFx, new base pillars will be part of the OS like Workflow Foundation, Communication Foundation, Identity and Access Services, which includes not just Active Directory, but Rights Management and other related components too.

Active Directory for Developers Demo
In the demo the new InfoCard technology was shown and the new Security Token Service. In a SOA environment you've all the possiblities to write federated applications based on trust. By the use of the new XPS document format, they generated a customized pricelist proctected by Rights Management. For Security there was no code what you had to write. It's all about contracts and configuration files, so in that way, it's flexible.

Longhorn Server
We're lucky ones because we receive the CTP of the Longhorn Server, which includes the technologies above. Bad news that it will ship only in 2007 timeframe, but I guess we'll follow the new habit and will release CTPs from Server products in every 6-8 weeks, it was not announced, it's just a logical thought. Finally the true transactional NTFS will be included in Longhorn Server. The Server will have a separate model, it's consists of a Server Core Plus, which includes the basic services which needed for management, and upon it you can add regular services what you like to have on the particular server like DNS, DHCP, File and others.

IIS 7
"Metabase is dead" :-) No more metabase, just configuration files. So you don't have to be an administrator on the machine to configure your web app. IIS 7 is componentized and the modules are not anymore in one dll, but it's separated and the developer has the ability to do it's own stuff like never before. In the Demo all the modules was removed from the configuration, and there was no 500 errors :-) instead a blank page came up. No more IISReset, everything is done dynamically when you're changing a configuration. You can safely remove the unwanted modules from the configuration file. For example on an anonymous website you can get rid of all the authorization and security related modules in other words you can make it much more secure by removing the unwanted stuff. Forms authentication is built into IIS 7, so for example a PHP application can take advantage of it too, not just ASP.Net applications.

Introduction of Windows Workflow Foundation

This platform is the most awaited one at least by me. As it name states, it's a Foundation not a separate product. It's primarily made for developers to built on top of it. You can define SequentialWorkflow or a State Machine.

Components are: Base Activity Library, Runtime Engine, Runtime Services

It supports long running transactions and state persistence too. You can think of workflows and activities like the workflows are the forms and activities are the controls on the form.

There are several modes to author workflow:
- Markup Only (XAML)
- Markup and Code (XAML + C# or VB)
- Code Only (C# or VB)
- Application Generated (App creates activity tree and serializing it)

It has it's own compiler which is "preprocessing" workflows and after it the managed language compiler generates the assembly.

The activities has properties and methods and will end up in a .Net classes. Optionally you can attach your own Validator, Designer, ToolboxItem for your own activity it will be shown and respected by the Workflow Designer.

One thing must be emphasized: This Foundation is not only server side! Imagine a Wizard Framework or an MVC application which is under the hood driven by a workflow. Isn't it cool, huh?

Wednesday Keynote Part 2. - Steven Sinofsky

Steven is the Vice President of Office team. They announced the availability of Office "12" Beta1.
The first 100 people who signs up gets a set of Microsoft Office Steak Knives :-)

Office System moves to server (no don't get frustrated :-), there are already known components but there are new ones too:

• Live Communications Server
• Exchange Server
• SharePoint Server
• Forms Services
• Excel Services

For developers the new extensibility options are about:

• XML and Web services
• Visual Studio integration
• Managed code
• Results-oriented UI
• XML file formats

The demo was about Enterprise Content Management, which covers all products including the server side one like the new SharePoint. MetaData is everywhere, you can define your metadata structure, design an InfoPath form for it, and assign it to a Word Template. After this publish this template into a SharePoint Document Library as Template. SharePoint is integrated with Windows Workflow Foundation and with no coding you can define document workflows in SharePoint.

Wednesday Keynote Part 1. - Eric Rudder

There were a lot of announcements (as I write before we was courious about these):

- Windows Workflow Foundation
It is filling a huge gap in nowaday's software development. It is as it's name says, another new foundation, which means that it's a base pillar for a lot of new technologies and products like Office "12" and SharePoint "v3" and so on. It has very rich VS integrated designer support and you can even place a breakpoint on a box which represents an action in the designer and not in code. There was a new information for me, Eric Rudder told that you can host the workflow designer within your application to make the end user able to design it's business workflows from your prebuilt components, actions.

- Microsoft "Acrylic" Expression Graphics Designer
A bitmap and vector graphics designer, which has a lot of features, which simply kill the other commercial competitors :-) In the demo we saw a headshot isolated from a photoshot and it was awesome and painless...no more pixel by pixel selection, it's simply using a technology for the isolation developed by Microsoft Research.

- Microsoft "Quartz" Expression Web Designer
It's a totally new Web Designer application, and is not part of the Office product family, and it was not said, how does it affects the new Frontpage releases. It's a complete web designer, which integrates with ASP.Net 2.0, supporting DataSources, CSS, XHTML compatible designing and validation. You're working with a very familiar UI a Visual Studio like one. CSS design support is awesome, you see the changes live. XML DataSource is very powerful, after dragging the XML DataSource to a page, a default XSLT is defined for you, and you can customize it with designer tools.

- Microsoft "Sparkle" Expression Interactive Designer
This app will be the designer's tool for application development. No more headaches for the developers about design. They are just dropping the controls to the form and put the functionality behind them, and the designer will do the stlying. Ohh...I forget to tell: Sparkle is about Windows Presentation Foundation - Avalon. So you're working with XAML, but without see any markup on the screen :-). You can have templates which can be applied to any templatable visual element. This is not just controlling the look and feel, but the behaviour of the given visual element too. If you like to compare flash to this tool...I've to say that Flash 8 is just released, but this tool will beat it in terms of design and the possibilities you can achieve with this. Of course it's not a "rating" just an opinion :-)

- Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA)
This is the new standard for making applications extensible or in other words the "new VBA". Althou it can work side by side with VBA within the same application. In the demo we saw AutoCad 2006 demonstration. VS is integreated into AutoCad and launched within the application itself. It works exactly the same way as it was for VBA. You get your managed object and helper classes from the application host.

- XAML Integration for PLM/CAD
In this demo we saw that XAML will be a supported format by broad range of 3D applications and not just XAML, but the brand new XPS container format which will be a standard electronic paper format.

Programming with Concurrency

Programming with Concurrency (Part 1): Concepts, Patterns, and Best Practices

Jan Gray did a well built presentation about the managed world basics of threading, concurrency, locking.

He covered the typical pitfalls, and how to get rid of them. We also get a sneak peek of the futures about parallel computing, multi core processors and what is Microsoft doing to make the developers life easier by trying to provide solution to these typical problems.

In Part 2 of this session Joe Duffy continued where Jan finished and drove us thru the scenarios within Windows Vista, "Longhorn" Server and the CLR.

Office 12 User Experience Part 1.

Because the keynote was longer then planned my first scheduled session "Lap around WinFX and Win32

SDKs" is rescheduled to a not yet known time, so no blog about that now :-(

Instead the next session began in time: Office 12 User Experience Part 1.

Unfortunately, there will be no part 2 since I've a collision here :-((

We saw the "Old Office Museum", as I see the word versions side-by-side, it was amazing, that how

the number of menu items, toolbars, taskpanes incremented from version to version. In 2003 there was

about 38 toolbars, 30+ taskpanes and lot of menu items.

The UI is totally revamped and redesigned from a usability perspective, the main advantage is that

you see only the menu items which is available in the current context. For example, if the cursor is

in a table, then you've the Ribbon for table manipulation visible, if you're within a text, then the

formatting Ribbon is visible.

New UI Components was emphasized (just to name a few):

• The "Ribbon" - The context sensitive functionality is available here
• Galleries - Dropdown list for a given function like table formatting, etc.
• Live Preview - Every change is preview by hovering over an item, you don't have to open a dialog-change something-press OK-start from the beginning because you don't like the change
• Contextual Tools - It's name speaks for itself
• Quick Access toolbar "QAT" - Allows one-click access to commands from anywhere can operate in compact and full size mode
• "Floatie" - On-object UI for the features you actually use. Helps prevenc tab switch flicker in the ribbon as context is changing
• Super Tooltips - Heavily illustrated tooltip, text with image and formatting and more

For power users the keyboard usage is redesigned, to a "3 tier" keyboard scheme, so you don't have to reach out for the mouse every time you like to execute a function from the Ribbon.

The new zoom functionality is awesome...and looks fast.

Keynote happened....

Keynote - Bill Gates

The keynote began at 08:30...and guess what...we were on the highway stucked. We met the worst driver at the PDC I guess...he took wrong direction twice, crashed the back of the bus while turning around...so the attendees on the bus was pissed off a little bit. But finally at 08:45 we arrived to the KeyNote hall...the introduction video was rolling...so we missed the start of it. After the video (no no details here about that :-))

Bill Gates presented the past and the roadmap and after it the new Microsoft Office 12 was shown for the public for the first time. The primary focus was to make the user to be productive faster than ever before. No more pulldown menus, instead there is a toolbar which show "Galleries" to select your options from, you've live preview on data when do styling on Document in Word or a Graph in Excel, you just have to hover your mouse over a style and the changes (if you like and click) will be applied to the selected artifact. It's hard to summarize it in a blog entry so just one final word about the new Office 12: It's awesome...

Keynote - Jim Alchin

Windows Vista

SuperFetch
A background system "service" which optimizing your application loading time based on your usage data which is collected for hours, days, months, years...In the demo about 8 apps was launched as "Cold", and in the next step with "SuperFetch". The cold one was 38 secs and SuperFetch application startup time was 10 secs....It's amazing...so no battery power is wasted for application startups.

USB Memory extension
In Windows Vista, if you're plugging in a USB memory stick, your OS recognizing it and can use it as a memory expansion to your system in a secure way. All the data is written as writethru and exncrypted, so if you are removing the USB dongle from the machine, nothing happens I mean in a bad manner. SuperFetch is also taking advantage of this new feature.

Process Sandboxing
You've the ability to sandbox processes, this way there is no chance for a webapp to do a CreateFile into your startup folder (it was a demo).

"Atlas"
Finally one company (who else like MS :-)) took another weight on it's shoulder and developed "Atlas", which is an application framework for the Browser Client Side, which make the developer able to develop AJAX like solution with no pain but with much gain.

And this info was only the keynote....more will come in the sessions....

3 hours left....

Just 3 hours left until the keynote....I guess that a lot of attendees are online now and waiting for 08:30 :-)

We as insiders also think that there will be some announcements which will surprise us too, not just the Customers, Partners.

It was a short night, 5 hours sleep....so I hope that some magic word will wake me up during the keynote....

I'm looking forward, after the keynote I'll try to blog a.s.a.p.

DAY 02: Precon #2

Today jetlag was almost gone I was able to sleep 6 hours, it rocks :-)

After a "comlementary continental breakfast" (it will never happen again) I headed to the convention canger and had a mixture of two precon sessions.

I took the first part of the VS Extensibility session, which was very interesting, and it was great to see that in the new VS 2005 everything is possible, and the extensibility levels are built upon eachother, so the newbies VS extender (like me :-)) is not facing with a complex automation model or a complex SDK if he has to accomplish a simple task.
The four level of extensibility is (from simple to complex), the item below is including the features of the previous one plus the items listed in the row:

• VS User Customization, just IDE customization
• Macro writing, full IDE control, no new functionality
• Addin writing, new functionality thru tool windows, commandbars, tools options pages
• VS package authoring, there is no limit...

After lunch I checked out the Business Intelligence features of SQL Server 2005.
The first part was about Analysis Services. This part made me sad. Not the content or the presentation, but I faced with my own inner fear. I can't be "generic" from now on. Every new product has the managed world integrated, new possibilities (which mostly are limitless) so I'll have to specialze my knowledge since no one man can take this all. Back to the topic.

Presentation about the Analysis Services was amazing, specially the brand new designer integration, and the DataMining part. The new 9 functions which was developed by the SQL team with Microsoft Research. My favourite was the "Prediction" method it show awesome results :-) I realized, that by integrating the new AdoMd APIs to any business application you can save a lot of time and pain just by not trying to write the code which already exists in Analysis Services.

The AdoMd method has the similar objects and the same working methodology like their relation class pairs, they are just existing in a different namespace and some of them has the "Md" in their name.

Second part was about the Reporting Services in SQL Server 2005. Just a few hilights: Local and Server mode. With VS 2005 you'll get the ReportViewer control and without SQL Server you can use it to design, present, print and export the SAME reports as you have it in Reporting Server. There was a late breaking news announced at the session: PDF Export is part of the ReportViewer control, so it's not a value added feature of the Reporting Services anymore (thanks guys, I bet the we just made thousands of developer happier). Now you've full control of reports, services, and server administration via the brand new SOAP API. You can use the same DataSources for reports which exists in the designer (yes, ObjectDataSource included too :-)). Reporting Services has a very rich extensibility model, you can plug in your code to any layer of it.