Matt's Workflow and Integration Musings

Moving On v2

Matt Winkler — Mon, 01 May 2006 13:33:00 GMT

The prior post indicated I was leaving LRS to go and join KL. I was having an excellent time there, but another opportunity presented itself, and my wife and I decided to take that. We've headed to Redmond to join the mothership. I'm the Technical Evangelist for Windows Workflow Foundation.

I'm having a blast.

Check out the new blog!

Moving On

Matt Winkler — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 22:29:00 GMT

Just made reservations for Doug and Michelle's wedding in June. We're looking forward to a wonderful trip to the Northeast to see Maine! We'll probably extend the trip out into the following week if vacation schedules allow for it. That would also be convinient to roll into TechEd 2006 the following week in Boston. I may then be back in Boston for the Worldwide Partner Conference the following month, in the week leading up to Festivus Clevelandus, or, the wedding of Ed and Lorrie.

Speaking of things job related, Thursday was my last day at Levi, Ray and Shoup (LRS) . I'm moving out of consulting and I'll be moving into the product development group at KnowledgeLake , a St. Louis-based company specializing in document-imaging and enterprise content management (ECM) solutions based on top of Microsoft SharePoint. It's a very exciting change for me after 4 years at LRS. I'll be moving to a much smaller and younger firm, and I'll be getting to work on some things that I just don't have time to do in a full-time consulting role. Not a lot to say about what I will be doing (there is still lots of defining to do [this press release here , gives a good idea of the product suite]), but I will be spending a fair amount of time gearing up for the Office 12 launch in late 2006, along with some associated WWF stuff. In the mean time, I will probably try to hit the conference circuit to do a few talks and try to get some magazine articles published. I'd like to do a book, but I will have to do some work at work!

The great thing is that starting with Visual Studio 2005 and SQL 2005 going RTM this past week, Microsoft has a big, big year of rolling out some neat innovations. From the rapid release schedule of the Atlas product set, BizTalk 2006 and then Office 12, WinFX (rolling up WPF, WCF and WWF), all leading up to the release of Vista, it's a fun time to be a developer. There are so many technologies to focus on, it's a bit like a kid in candy shop for us geeks.

I'm starting tomorrow, and it's my first new job, so I'm quite anxious to hit the ground running! I'm not changing locations much, I'll be down Olive about 2 miles to the east from where I was at, on the 7th floor of the Microsoft building. I'm trying to finalize all the prep I need to be doing for tomorrow, and I'll be honest... I'm a bit nervous.

I also will be moving all tech postings over to my geek blog, available at http://www.geekswithblogs.com/mattw, and keeping all of my personal musings and whot not over at http://www.winksquared.com , along with plenty of cute pictures of Grace.

oh boy...

Matt Winkler — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 18:58:00 GMT

my life just got really interesting.

Introducing “.Windows Workflow Foundation.”

PDC goodness

Matt Winkler — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 15:19:00 GMT

I'll be honest, lots of cool stuff coming out of PDC, a couple of thoughts below.

Office applications (see video here): Impressive, and what I find really interesting is the way Word (and especially Powerpoint) look a lot more like the slick UI I have come to expect from my Powerbook. There is a reason that I only use Keynote when I need to do a presentation, it helps me make my presentations look good. What I saw in this video is Powerpoint, Word and Excel doing the same thing.

It’s a fun time to be in the industry, lots of exciting wind ups for some cool, cool technology that is coming down the pipe.

Seeking Therapy By Listening to: Chopin - Funeral March

BizTalk 2006 install

Matt Winkler — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 13:45:00 GMT

I’m working to get the BizTalk 2006 Beta installed to do some work on a BAM demo. I’m moving ahead with the multi-box install (I have the pre-beta 1 bits from TechEd that I did a single box install on). The setup is greatly improved, and I’ve got a few screen shots showing what I selected for the developer box install. This box has Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 (along with the Indigo beta bits, so I can muck around with the Indigo adapter and learn two birds with one stone). The best part of the setup is that it automatically detects components you don’t have installed and goes out and gets them. No more mucking around with KB links!

The items I’ve selected for install are:

Documentation
Administration Tools
Developer Tools and SDK
Additional Software

Ent SSO Administration
Business Rules Composer
BAM Client
BAM Event API (if I want to experiment instrumenting my own apps with BAM)
Business Rules Engine(for stand alone dev against the rules engine)

I’ve also got a server with all of the goods installed, so, in a couple of hours I should know if I have this up and running or not.

The challenge of requirements

Matt Winkler — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 15:05:00 GMT

Lately I have really been struggling on what seems, on the surface, to be a relatively trivial problem. The problem is one of accurately capturing a customer’s requirements and translating those conversations into a well-crafted, stable application. This goal seems to have become more elusive to me the closer I try to get to it, leading me down many frustrated paths.

It seems the process is a good place to start. Who is involved in requirements gathering? Usually we will use a technical resource and a project manager or a business analyst, and most importantly, the client. The client can be internal or external, we all have customers. The techie provides insight into potential solutions, while the business analyst role is used to write up a lot of the requirements as well as try to probe the client for additional information and to deliver value by suggesting other alternatives while going through this process. The client is their to ensure that their vision is implemented correctly, as well as to serve as a conduit to the subject matter experts who can help us detail the intricate twists and turns of an organisation's processes and practices.

Usually, other parties that get involved are the person controlling the project purse strings, other IT staff ensuring standards, documenting third party systems, or maintaining IT order on the project. Each one of these parties may have their own vested interests in the outcome of the project, and provide input as well. It’s that input that I’m having a hard time with.

Where do we even start? Do we break up requirements by functional area, by web site navigation, by chronological order of conversation? The real disconnect that I am struggling with is how we ensure that the technical requirements, specifications and designs adequately serve the requirements and ensure compliance. My team gets slowed down when we have to stop and add fields to the database because they are captured in a single paragraph on page 158 of the specification, and, without our developer being an astute reader, would have slipped our minds until testing. Which brings up a point those XP folks will hammer on is that we need to ensure the tests are associated with the sections as well. So what can we do better, and what information do we need to capture?

This seems like it starts to break out into individual nodes of a tree like document following a very defined schema. What I’d like to see is something like

Narrative:
UI Notes: (must have drop down calendar, etc)
Database Tables :
Objects:
Security:
Tests:
Integration Points:
Performance Requirements:
Estimate:(could have a tasks breakdown as well, and maybe reflect dependencies to drive a project plan?)

Am I missing something, if we were to link these all in a format like this, would that improve our process? Would that document a majority of our situations effectively, or would it be too brittle and still allow things to be "missed"? Are there tools to deal with this, or do people have a home-grown kind of toolkit to system-atize this process? Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Seeking Therapy By Listening to: Green Day - Burnout

Obligatory Bio Post

Matt Winkler — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 14:26:00 GMT

A little bit about myself, and a little on my background.

Matt Winkler
Living in St. Louis, MO
Education

B.S. in Math and Computer Science from Denison University
Currently working on an MBA at Washington Univesity in St. Louis

Career

4+ years of consulting at a firm to be named later
Currently focused on integration technologies (read, BizTalk)
Lucky enough to be on our first VS 2005 application

Technical interests

BizTalk, especially BAM and the Business Rules Engine
Information Bridge Framework
Visual Studio Tools for Office
VS 2005
Indigo

I hope to be able to write about all of these technologies here, and hopefully provide some insight into the tools I’m having such a good time using.

Seeking Therapy By Listening to: Counting Crows - Mr. Jones

Obligatory First Post

Matt Winkler — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 13:38:00 GMT

Testing this from blogjet… hoping I have it all set up correctly.

Now playing: Dire Straits - Money for Nothing