Papers

Magnify your diagram

2010-02-18T14:21:00Z

Default layout mechanisms offered by DSL Tools are not challenged by VS’s 2010 edition. It's not a reason to be disappointed but to acknowledge efforts produced into other areas such as extensibility. DSL Tools wisely called for help to offer alternative solutions that are far more than blinded workarounds. Indeed, the solution chosen is supporting WPF. DSL Tools knew benefit from the announced marriage between this technology and Visual Studio. This being said, to illustrate this choice, this post...(read more)

Provide an improved user experience to your DSL's

2009-09-20T23:19:00Z

The goal of this article is to present a way to leverage WPF technology in order to improve your DSL's editors user experience....(read more)

Multiply Dsl points of view

2009-01-13T15:20:00Z

DSL Tools are becoming more popular everyday and naturally questions are increasing in volume on MSDN forums dedicated to Visual Studio Extensibility. However, this fact is not the only reason to advocate that DSL Tools gained in maturity. It is better for now to focus on a recurring request in the form of multiple views of a single diagram. This is mainly derived from the fact that models implemented using DSL Tools are getting bigger and bigger by the day and it becomes quickly important to be able to occult some aspects of the model while putting the emphasis on others. The goal of this article is to present a solution to implement such functionality....(read more)

Let your community site leverage Windows Live

2008-11-03T07:00:00Z

kjlkjMost web sites require managing users from personal details to authentication. Event though, ASPNet provides some tools ease this process with a Sql Server backend database. This can be tedious to manage and implies a responsibility to keep personal data safe furthermore people put some time and effort into filling in their Windows Live Id profile information. Of course some web sites make their business on having a huge user database. However community web sites such as netfxfactory does not gain any added value from managing its own user database. Various blogs and papers on the web explain how to leverage Windows live authentication mechanism to validate a local user (see here here and here). They mostly let someone associate its web site account with his Windows Live Id however it’s name, dob, email etc… are still managed localy by the web site (this is the functionalities offered by the Memebership provider offered with the Windows Live SDK). Only the authentication mechanism is leveraged here. The goal of this article is to go one step further and externalize as much as possible the user management. Managing locally user’s data requires an extra effort from the user to keep his information up to date. We will demonstrate a solution using Windows Live based on a custom aspnet membership provider used to pull out information from Windows Live such as User info but also his contacts info. This is a first step towards S+S as promoted by Microsoft. Most web sites require managing users from personal details to authentication. Event though, ASPNet provides some tools ease this process with a Sql Server backend database. This can be tedious to manage and implies a responsibility to keep personal data safe furthermore people put some time and effort into filling in their Windows Live Id profile information. Of course some web sites make their business on having a huge user database. However community web sites such as netfxfactory does not gain any added value from managing its own user database. Various blogs and papers on the web explain how to leverage Windows live authentication mechanism to validate a local user (see here here and here). They mostly let someone associate its web site account with his Windows Live Id however it’s name, dob, email etc… are still managed localy by the web site (this is the functionalities offered by the Memebership provider offered with the Windows Live SDK). Only the authentication mechanism is leveraged here. The goal of this article is to go one step further and externalize as much as possible the user management. Managing locally user’s data requires an extra effort from the user to keep his information up to date. We will demonstrate a solution using Windows Live based on a custom aspnet membership provider used to pull out information from Windows Live such as User info but also his contacts info. This is a first step towards S+S as promoted by Microsoft. ...(read more)

Snip your dsl into prototypes

2008-06-25T22:48:00Z

Preamble Mary Jo Foley revealed the love story between Microsoft and modeling a few months ago. But the information that must retain our attention is that Oslo will be certainly the city chosen for this honeymoon. Indeed, a few years ago Microsoft did the first move when appointing famous modeling engineers and developing DSL Tools in order to seduce this model on the first date. Since then, Microsoft never stopped declaring its love and even promoted it as an essential pillar of its SOA strategy....(read more)

Acropolis, what is the real target?

2007-07-19T12:30:00Z

Adopting new technology is not just about building a “Hello World” Application but testing its capabilities to match precise requirements for real-world situations. After a fair amount of playing and digging in, this article aims to provide an overview about Acropolis. At the same time, I will suggest solutions to enhance some of the drawbacks identified in the current build that I outline in this paper. Rapid Application Development Acropolis provides an integrated designer within Visual Studio...(read more)

Service Referencing part II: dynamic service discovery

2007-07-04T14:07:00Z

As outlined in the first part of this article, referencing services greatly extends their visibility and promotes their capitalization. When most of the time services are deployed somewhere and accessible from a fairly static location, it happens that, to cater particular business needs that we will be outlined later on this post, some services requires to be discoverable in order to be accessed transparently regardless of their particular location at the time. This document covers such a requirement by exposing how to combine open standards and WCF to publish services in such a way that they can be discovered dynamically at runtime based on custom business criteria. ...(read more)

Acropolis NavigationManager Extensions

2007-06-25T05:00:00Z

1 - Introduction In my previous post , I said that Acropolis provide out of the box 2 kinds of Navigation Model : "SinglePartNavigation" and "MultiPartNavigationManager". In conclusion of my previous post, I have shortly described the limitations of these 2 navigation models, highlighting the fact that the Navigation between Components is hard coded on the application Design. Therefore, enforcing dependencies between Components. That's why, it is more convenient to build our own navigation engine....(read more)

Service referencing part I: Business service cartography

2007-04-27T11:57:00Z

Not knowing precisely the services developed and deployed in an environment is not something anyone serious about service oriented architectures can afford. In this regards, business service cartography is a key pillar of SO architectures and valuable help to get insight on your business related developments. Being able to draw a map of your business, at any time, is a must to start capitalizing, industrializing and get enough insight to predict with maximum reliability the impact of change within an organization. ...(read more)

An effective way to access WCF services

2007-01-24T10:33:00Z

WCF offers a very seamless way to handle service end point configuration. This is done via both the service configuration file and the client's. Specially in an intranet and even more in development environment, where you have to take care of both the cook and his clients, maintaining each and every client up to date with the latest service config can be quite tedious specially if you have a large number of clients to update. One way to overcome this problem is to retrieve the service's metadata in order to infer the services endpoints configuration instead of deploying via configuration file on each client. ...(read more)