“Today, you can download a tool that you can use to describe the concepts in a problem domain as the basis for a modeling tool or graphical designer. It is itself a graphical tool built on top of our designer platform and it is completely integrated into Visual Studio. For example, if you need a business process modeling tool, this editor allows you to describe the concepts specific to the way you like to model your business processes.”

It is basically a graphical designer hosted in Visual Studio 2005 for designing and editing the concepts (or metamodel) of visual domain specific languages.

There is also an interesting : “Walkthrough of the Microsoft Tools for Domain Specific Languages“ showing the use of the object model for a user interaction process (UIP) chart language. UIP chart defines pages and transitions between them as part of the design of a Web site, a wizard, or a form-based application. Figure 1 is an example of a UIP chart for a fictitious online shopping Web site. You might find more information on this page about the User Interface Process (UIP) Application Block - Version 2.0.

If you are using log4net like me then I am sure you will like this idea. I combined it with ReSharper.

A log4net tip

This morning I woke up at 4:30 AM, and could not sleep anymore, so I decided to work on my publishing tool for my site Tech Head Brothers. I finally managed to publish directly from Word 2003 in a secure way.
The website expose a publishing web service that uses WS-Policy, to specify that it needs Signature and Encryption using a X.509 certificate. When the user hit the publish button, the tool:

1. Transform the XML generated by Word 2003, e.g. to include pictures, colorize source code...
2. Zip the XML document and all referenced files (pictures, zip)
3. Attach the zip file using DIME to the SOAP context
4. Add signature and encryption to the SOAP context
5. Call the web service

During my trip to Barcelona, last week, I met Atif Aziz, President and Program Director, and Roman Mathis, Vice President and Membership Director, of the .NET Managed User Group of Switzerland. We had several interesting discussions and I finally decided to join them in there user group as I am working in Zürich, Switzerland and there are located in the same city.

The 3 upcomings Events organized by the user group are:

Implementing MVC with ASP.NET
02.11.2004 at 19:00, 1020 Renens     
Presented by Sébastien Bouchet
Most of the development time in a project is dedicated to the user interface, making the presentation layer architecture the backbone of any ambitious development project. An appropriate architecture should enforce maintainability, versatility and reusability. This requires fine isolation of layers with different business lifecycles, such as the look & feel, navigation and business logic. Beyond the physical code-behind model, ASP.NET does not mandate any architectural paradigm for the presentation layer so nearly every project is required to create one from scratch. The Model-View-Controller (MVC) approach is a de facto industry standard and available in most development frameworks, but what about in .NET? This sample code-driven session will discuss application of MVC in .NET, available frameworks, and in particular the Microsoft User Interface Process (UIP) Application Block.

For sure there is a new version but I think the most important annoucement is the Skype API. Right now it is not sure what we will get, but I already see lots of possibilities for that.

TOOLS: new version of skype released

Today I am flying to Barcelona - Spain and leaving the horrible weather here in Zürich - Switzerland (same at home in Mulhouse - France). I am attending Microsoft Connect Event, and really hope to see a bit of blue sky there because it has been to much time without sun here.

In an older post, I talked about the method described by Steven M. Cohn to have Multiple IIS Virtual Servers on XP Pro. Discussing with Renaud yesterday he shown me a tool to do it, I don’t like to type under the shell ;-).

“IIS Admin is a small tool for use on Windows XP Pro. It allows you to create multiple websites on WinXP Pro and to switch between those websites. On Windows XP Pro, only one website can run at a time.“

On the 29 of September I was invited by Microsoft France in Strasbourg - France to be a speaker at there conference ‘Rencontres ASP.NET’ to talk about ASP.NET and the Starter Kits.
It was such an interesting experience to face around 80 peoples and to talk about ASP.NET. It started with 3-4 minutes of stress then the rest of the presentation went ok.
I hope to do again such experience.

1. Last Reading of the slides, stress starts