Time to blog again! The road to Oslo turned out to have many twists, turns and eventually roadblocks. So for a little over a year now I’ve been working on database development tools with SQL Server Data Tools – known earlier as ‘Juneau’...

As modelers, one of the things we're doing all the time is looking for patterns - trying to distinguish what in each model is truly unique to the domain from that which is more broadly applicable, and then either using or adapting existing patterns or...

My focus within the Olso team is on domain modeling – creating models for specific problem domains using the Oslo modeling platform’s languages and tools. Let me describe why we think of this as more than just data modeling. At the center of an Oslo...

Long time no blog! In the meantime I've changed jobs within Microsoft; I've been working for the last several years on the modeling platform known as “Oslo” which 'came out' at PDC in October. You can f ind out more about Oslo at the Oslo Dev Center ...

Phew! A set of Visual Studio Team System Tech Notes have now been published on MSDN, including some fifteen new articles I've written on topics related to the Whitehorse architecture tools. These should all be easy to read and are inter-linked, to make...

Randy Miller has published a paper on agile development that discusses the use of 'shadow' applications in an agile modeling and development context, in which he talks in somewhat veiled terms about the use of the Whitehorse design tools. The term shadow...

We've been having hallway discussions about some of the dimensions of modeling application architectures. SDM adopts a particularly physical perspective, as it focuses on the deployment packaging stack of concerns. Its focus is on resources (things like...

An interesting initial round on this model-driven development podcast , including comments from Jack Greenfield from our team. Will be fun to watch this one develop... As someone who was involved in what we believed to be one the big successes of the...

Now you can try out Team System in a hosted environment without the hassle of downloading and installing. Check out Rob Caron's post for details.

I've not lost enthusiasm for this blogging thing, its just that I've been asked to convert some of my blog entries into MSDN TechNotes and write others afresh to accompany the Visual Studio launch, so I've been busy with notes/articles in work on the...

I have posted an article on top-down system design using the System Designer. This describes and illustrates a little-known technique for defining systems and applications top-down.

No doubt you know that Microsoft is very persona driven. A persona is a fictitous person that embodies the characteristics of a class of user - useful to us when working through product usage scenarios. Mort is probably the most famous of Microsoft's...

The Whitehorse Distributed System Designers are based on SDM - the System Definition Model. SDM offers a simple model for representing computer systems that can help in many parts of the design, deployment and management space. I'll try over an occasional...

Another question that keeps cropping up is whether we support viewing and editing Web service operations when these are defined on interfaces. It usually comes up in the form of the question, I've built a Web service and defined the operations using attributes...

There are two ways you can copy the specification of a Web service endpoint using Application Designer, which vary in subtle ways that you can leverage. You can simply use copy/paste - see my earlier post , or, if the source application has been implemented...

A little bit of trivia. Whitehorse is the capital of the Yukon Territory in Canada. That made sense as a name back in the days when the group's mission was largely SQL Server data tools. Times changed and our mission changed but the name stuck. Whitehorse...

This came up in a discussion with some MVPs the other day - they didn't realize you can use copy and paste on the design surface. It's actually pretty darn useful and worth a few comments. If you copy and paste an application then we copy the entire application...

I’m often asked why class libraries aren’t supported on an application diagram. At first glance the diagram seems like it should support visualizing all aspects of application structure. In Whitehorse we use the term application loosely to talk about...

Hi - I'm Bill Gibson, a senior program manager on the Whitehorse team. I want to use this blog to share some insights and observations from the world of Whitehorse. In case you missed it, Whitehorse is the internal project name for the Distributed System...