A good feature of InfoPath 2007 at 9:03 AM

Last night, I attended MS meeting of "Overview of new Portal features in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007". Although the workflow feature for document management sounds good to me, I have deep impression about a good feature of InfoPath 2007: One form everywhere!



Basically, you can design a form to deploy only once. If a user has InfoPath installed on his/her machine, the user will download and fill the form locally (smart-client version); if the user does not have InfoPath installed, he/she can use popular web browser to fill the form (browser version, slightly different from smart-client version); the user can even see the form on a mobile device.

"One form" makes development and business process much easier.

Something big - Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and ... at 5:26 PM

"Something big is about to happen ..." is the very first statement of the excellent book "Essential Windows Workflow Foundation".

The book convinced me that WF will change our programming world by enabling domain specific language: Programmers can build domain specific WF Activities, then business people can build system using those WF Activities directly! -- That will be a really BIG thing!

Another BIG thing I realize will be: big monitor! Our current monitor is not designed to show workflow. Take a brief look at a workflow diagram, you will know my meaning. :)

SOA Messaging or bridge table? at 4:54 PM

Nowadays, when we integrate different systems together inside a company, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the first choice.

But is it a really good choice? SOA is based on messaging to transfer request and response. Messaging gives us decoupling advantage, but also unreliability.

Let's suppose one case: System A sends message to System B for data update. What will happen if the message is lost for some reason (out of buffer, system failure, etc.)? Should we build shake-hand protocol between A and B to make sure the message is successfully delivered?

How about the old way -- to use a bridge table in a shared database? System A can add a new record into the bridge table for data update; System B can query the bridge table periodically (or to use database notificatione, like SQL Server 2005) to get the update. In this way, we can guarantee the update "message" is delivered from A to B.

If you think there is delay for this solution, SOA messaging also has delay. We can adjust query period for performance issues.

I am not saying SOA is bad. I just want to say when you integrate systems, old way may be a better choice than SOA.

How to break a connection in LinkedIn at 2:41 PM

I invited several friends to my linkedin account. I will invite more later, because it is an easy way to find old friends to keep in touch.

But it is hard to delete a person from my connection list: I did not find any button to break a connection. (This sounds like I hate somebody, no, I only do not want to keep many names that I can not remember well.)

Finally, I got this link somewhere:

http://www.linkedin.com/connections?displayBreakConnections=

Hopefully, when I delete a person from my connections, he/she would not receive an email like "Jun hates you! He does not want to see you any more!" :)