Friday, July 04, 2008

CAB/SCSF: Designing WorkItems From Use Cases

One of the most elusive and complicated parts of CAB is the workitem dependency injection container and all its use case resource collections. SCSF improved on the CAB workitem by adding the WorkItemController as the place to put use case controller logic. The WorkItemController gets a WorkItem instance injected, and many developers never use anything but this default workitem built into the ModuleController. This might lead to a system that is hard to build and maintain due to lack of task isolation because of no good mechanisms for controlling the lifespan of use cases (workitems).

In most projects there is a strong focus on the visual elements of the solution: the views (WorkSpaces, SmartParts, Ribbons, etc) - and CAB makes it quite easy to create a composite UI application. But this doesn't necessarily make for a maintainable, pluggable and loosely coupled composite application / service-oriented business application (SOBA).

It is imperative that the workitem structure and lifespans are analyzed to be able to design the lifecycle management based on the dynamic behavior, events and state of the system's use cases. Without designing a set of workitems and their lifecycle management requirements, your application will not be able to provide users with a task-oriented composite application allowing users to start, work on, switch between, and complete a set of use cases. Without workitems, your system will be just a multi-view forms-over-data application - having no processes for resource life-cycles.

I recommend reading the 'Identifying WorkItems' section of Designing Smart Clients based on CAB and SCSF by Mario Szpuszta, a case-study from Raiffeisen Bank. The case-study shows how to analyze use case diagrams to identify workitems and modules, and provides some good rules for how to do this analysis. It shows how to use root use-cases and pure sub use-cases to identify first-level workitems and sub-workitems, and what I call hub-workitems from sub use-cases that are used from several use-cases. The hub-workitems are often entry points to use-cases such as "find customer".

What I would like to add to the procedure is that adding a dynamic modeling aspect based on the use cases will help with explaining, doing and presenting the workitem analysis.

Dynamic modelling is done using UML activity diagrams or BPMN diagrams, both showing workflow and responsible parties using swimlanes. The main help of using these dynamic diagrams is to get a dynamic (run-time) view of the static use case diagrams to be able to see the lifespan of tasks.

Create business process or workflow diagrams of the use cases. Each process will have a defined start and end, and is a good candidate for becoming a first-level workitem with zero, one or more sub-workitems. The diagram swimlanes are good candidates for identifying sub-workitems of the first-level workitem. Use the process diagrams to identitfy the lifecycle management requirements for workitems in your composite application.

Don't create a CAB application with only one workitem that lives as long as its module, unless your use case is as simple as that.

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

WCF, SVCUTIL Proxy Problems

We've had some rather strange proxy problems with our WCF client code lately, with some PCs not being able to connect to the services using DNS names ("There was no endpoint listening at ... that could accept the message"), but working fine using the service's IP address. This happened even if all PCs had the same MSIE "bypass proxy server for local addresses" and the same exception list in "do not use proxy server for addresses beginning with".

To make a long story short, there is a "sneaky gotcha" in the proxy exceptions logic: port numbers are not considered to be a sub-domain. So an exception like this "*.blogspot.com" might not include e.g. "*.blogspot.com:12001" depending on your system setup. Alas, you can add your own <bypasslist> directly in the <system.net/defaultProxy> element. Note that the bypass list addresses must be valid regex expressions. Read more about proxies and <system.net> at
Matt Ellis' blog.

<system.net>
<defaultProxy useDefaultCredentials="true" >
<proxy usesystemdefault="True" bypassonlocal="True"/>
<bypasslist>
<add address=".+\.blogspot\.com:\d{1,5}" />
</bypasslist>
</defaultProxy>
</system.net>

For more info about WCF and proxies and how to do this from code, see Setting Credentials for your HTTP Proxy by Kenny Wolf.

The <system.net> proxy configuration can also be applied to SVCUTIL.EXE when e.g. proxy authentication is required to get the WSDL from the MEX endpoint.

Create a file named svcutil.exe.config in the directory where SVCUTIL.EXE is located to apply the proxy configuration to the tool. To pass user name and password use "username:password@" in front of the URL in the proxyaddress attribute. Do not store passwords in clear text like this.

PS! note how the casing of the attributes and values in the <proxy> element differs from what's normal.

Technology & Restaurants in Trondheim, Norway

It is vacation time in Norway, so you won't see many posts on my blog in July. So this summer's post is a bit on the light side: restaurants in Trondheim that me and two colleagues have dined in this year while on a project there.

The ranking is based on the quality of the meals (food+wine), then the service and atmosphere:

1. Credo: the best overall experience, really good wine list, always full, lively place.
2. Fem Bord: maybe the best food, the smallest place of the top three.
3. Emilies: one of the top three, close race with Fem Bord, a bit too quiet.
4. Palmehaven: the best main courses in Trondheim, the best service, too few guests.
5. Rica Nidelven: based on local food, too few guests, impersonal waiters.
6. Chablis: a bit to formal/bizniz, but the food is good, quite good wine list.
7. To rom og kjøkken: one of the top ten, few tables, combination of bar and restaurant.
Non ranked, not quite up there: Jonathan, Dråpen

What has this got to do with technology? Trondheim is the technology capital of Norway, with my univerity
NTNU, and both Fast, Google and Yahoo has research centers there. So, if you like e.g. Google's Marissa Mayer ever goes to Trondheim, you know where to dine.