Loosely Coupled Thinking

"Concept Typedefs", the Holy Grail of BPM and Closing the Gap Between Business and IT

2009-09-22T11:01:00Z

A typedef is a keyword in both C and C++ used to introduce new names for existing types. A simple typedef declaration lets you define your own names that can be used in place of type specifiers such as int, float, and double. Surprisingly, some people have started applying typedefs to well-understood concepts, resulting in confusion and debates about the very concepts they are trying to explain. Jason Bloomberg from ZapThink recently published a briefing entitled " Process Isomorphism: The Critical...(read more)

Strange Days Indeed

2008-12-04T20:56:00Z

Most peculiar mama (whoa)....(read more)

HBR on Susceptibility to Fads (like SOA)

2008-11-25T16:28:00Z

The December issue of the Harvard Business Review contains a compelling article on "Why You Shouldn't Go Global" ( excerpeted here for free ). While the article is worth reading, a sidebar in the article raises some excellent points which we might be able to apply to SOA. Since the sidebar is not available in the free excerpt I'll provide a brief overview of it here. The name of the sidebar is "The Susceptibility to Managerial Fads" and is only a page in length.. While SOA is not necessarily a managerial...(read more)

Moving the SOA Goalposts

2008-07-01T23:13:00Z

SOA is about loosely coupled system integration . Sorry, I meant to say that SOA is about enabling loosely coupled business processes . On the other hand SOA is about reuse , except that its actually not about reuse . Hang on a minute, SOA is like event driven architecture (EDA) . No, scratch that – SOA is different from EDA but it still manages to complement it . On second thought, SOA has nothing to do with technology at all – SOA is about business transformation . But lets not confuse SOA with...(read more)

Getting User Context in Silverlight 2

2008-05-16T22:54:00Z

I recently completed work on an internal Silverlight app. The project was a blast – it really reminded me of how coding could be fun again . One of the surprising gaps I found in Sliverlight was the inability to get the current user context (e.g. determine the login domain and userid of the person viewing the page). I checked with the product team and they confirmed that this is not (yet?) a feature of Silverlight. While this feature may be provided at a later date, I needed it now. I was able to...(read more)

Star Destroyer: spaceship or film director?

2008-05-08T18:55:00Z

Apparently Lucas is up to his old tricks again . How sad . I was hoping that Spielberg might diminish Lucas’ influence on the film . *sigh* I’ll probably go see it anyway. On the upside Iron Man was surprisingly good and Prince Caspian looks to be good as well....(read more)

WWT == Wow

2008-04-19T00:16:44Z

The World Wide Telescope (WWT) is amazing - I can't wait to show my son. You can see a demo of it from TED here . I'm not sure when this will be available but I hope its soon. This is a great application of the Deep Zoom effect . BTW - if you're an astronomer wannabe like myself I highly recommend APOD 's desktop of the day tool (I've been using it for years)....(read more)

If you can do something it doesn't mean that you should...

2008-04-18T23:39:00Z

I'm not really doing anything BPEL related these days but a post by Jesper Joergensen caught my eye. Since I'm not focused on BPEL I haven't kept up with some of the developments in the BPM-related blogosphere. Apparently Bruce wrote a post illustrating some of the fundamental differences between BPMN and BPEL. BPMN is much more expressive so representing a BPMN process as BPEL is not necessarily an easy task. Jesper makes a point in his post that should not be taken lightly: BPEL is not suitable...(read more)

SOA Fatigue

2008-04-15T22:33:06Z

Dave Linthicum recently blogged about not attending SOA conferences because he is able to determine the core trends and messages they would be promoting. I've thought this about SOA books, reports, trade magazines and online articles for well over a year. Does this mean SOA is dead? Is it time for yet another IT crisis? Hell no. The answer here is simple - SOA is no longer a mysterious concept that we need conferences, presentations,...(read more)

Copying the Silverlight community menu

2008-04-08T10:30:00Z

I'm building out a website using Silverlight. The more I learn about Silverlight the more I love it - I haven't had this much fun writing code in a long time. This is seriously addicting stuff . One of the things that frustrated me is that many of the Silverlight 2 samples were not very useful. How many people are really interested in writing a video game with Silverlight? I needed an exciting (and easily implemented) menu effect for my web page. I searched everywhere but didn't find much. Many of...(read more)

Wow

2008-03-27T02:42:00Z

Seen this yet? Take a walk or a drive around Seattle or San Francisco. Very cool....(read more)

Well that didn't take long...

2008-02-23T04:03:36Z

Seen this yet? Interesting to see it pop up on Yahoo News of all places. I had a feeling something like this was going to happen....(read more)

Fixing the WF FileWatcher sample

2008-02-22T22:00:00Z

There is a FileWatcher WF activity sample that ships with the Windows SDK . I initially thought this might be of value to me but when I tried to open the workflow I ran into the following error: “Theme properties can only be changed in the Theme Configuration Dialog.” Very intuitive right? Actually it is an intuitive message, it just requires some knowledge about how custom activities are built. The original version of the FileWatcher Activity included some code in the designer initialization to...(read more)

Logic Need Not Apply

2008-02-15T23:28:00Z

Interesting story popped up on ComputerWorld today about the Microsoft offer to Yahoo. Here's what made it most interesting to me (emphasis mine): According to the Post, the discord revolves around Yang and his followers being so opposed to selling the company to Microsoft that Bostock and his group fear they will act out of emotions rather than their fiduciary duty to Yahoo shareholders . Such an action could expose the board to lawsuits by shareholders. I thought it was nothing more than simple...(read more)

Free XSLT Profiler

2008-02-08T10:16:23Z

Today the XML Editor team released the XSLT Profiler Addin for VS 2008 , a quick and reliable performance analysis profiler tool that assists in the development and debugging of XSLT documents. The XSLT Profiler allows developers to measure, evaluate, and target performance-related problems in XSLT code by creating detailed XSLT performance reports. The XSLT Profiler Addin for VS 2008 includes a wealth of useful hints for XSL and XSLT style sheet optimizations, which are essential for XSLT-based...(read more)