Check it out here

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000867059961/

United, bless their souls, have a set of 'Premium' Economy seats in the front of coach. These are not paid for extras but are instead dished out on a first come first served basis.

If you are flying through to a US destination on NZ/UA combined you should ring 0800 747 400 (press 1 then 1) and they will generally be nice and stick you in this section of the plane

In case you didn't know I'm originally from New Plymouth and root for my home side.

http://www.tvnz.co.nz/view/page/411749/611894

I'm currently sitting in the Maple Leaf (Air Canada) Lounge @ LAX. It is a tiny, overcrowded hovel with nasty processed cheese at the food bar.

But, it has Internet, whereas your swanky pants brand new luxurious and spacious lounge next door, does not.

Do you have rocks in your head or something?

You upgrade the 747 fleet and don't put internet in them..... OK... you could arguably make that decision on reasonable grounds...>. But to get to the new lounge and find no internet! Come on!

[UPDATE] They have hard wired internet here..... so bring your travel WiFi router (I left mine @ Home this time)......

Dave, one of the DE's for Aus had his Smartphone voting app featured on the PDC Commnet!

Go Dave!

It's a cool little app that lets you use a WM5 smartphone for collecting votes at events and so forth.....

THey have just shown the WWF designer pulled up into IE to dynamically edit the Indigo workflow they've just built...... and you can also edit currently running workflows.

This is just SOOOOO cool....

Imagine how good this could be for mobile routing solutions.... you can login 1/2 way through the transaction and reconfigure a running workflow to handle and exception case.

This is probably the coolest WWF demo that I've seen so far.

THey showed a workflow hanging on a delay activity and they dropped in some new activities after it stright from the web browser.

Sitting in a Don Box session at the moment looking at some future stuff for how WWF and WCF will talk together.

Very cool concepts- theability to simply have a workflow be an Indigo service but they really tightly integrated the two.... which is great.

For example if you have a correlated receive and send pair or activities in your workflow when exported as an Indigo service they will be matched up as a Send/Receive pair..... This also means that we can model contracts more richly than just single pairs- we can model contracts as conversations- i.e. we know the order in which our workflow expects to recieve messages.

Looks great. One thing that I'm interested in is just how much hosting support they're going to give us for Indigo Workflows. I'm pretty sure that IIS is going to be an out of the box supported hosting mechanism (hosting session is next).... will be interesting to see what sort of higher end support services we get OOB... things like persistence services and so forth to enable long running work flows.

One of the fundamental things you'll need to get your head around when you start playing with workflows is how to go about getting stuff out of, but more importantly into your executing workflow. Here's my 30 second synopsis......

1. Your workflow runs inside a runtime engine.
2. All of your communications from the outside world will come to you via services provided by your host. In addition, in many cases your communications with the outside world will be sent by way of services provided by your host.

This is basically the provider pattern in action and it's an important concept to grasp... here's an example of why.

Say you build a workflow that manages registrations for your user group events via email. The logic is obviously going to be pretty simple, receive registration emails, send confirmations etc.... Your workflow declarativly defines the logic of what should happen in the sequence. Your workflow contains EventSink activities e.g. ReceiveEmail that allow your eworkflow to receive inbound mail. Try, as much as you can, to think of these EventSink activities in their abstract form. That is, your activity represents a mechanism by which your workflow receives an email but, as far as is possible, doesn't mandate or specify too much concrete implementation as to how that is delivered. The actual mechanics of how it does this will often depend on where your workflow might be running- e.g. You would probably receive the email in a different way depending on whether you are running your workflow in Outlook or on a server hosted in IIS. If we want to be able to use exactly the same Workflow definition, with exactly the same Activities then we need some sort of indirection mechanism to seperate the logical concept of ReceiveEmail with the actual concrete implementation of how we do it.

So let me give you an example. You have an activity that represents receiving an email. This is an abstract concept. You then create a workflow definition (in code or XOML/XAML) that uses this activity. You then host this workflow in a couple of different hosts. When you set up each of the hosts you can construct a different service type to service you ReceiveEmail activity depending on where you are running the host. When it is running, your activity is going to ask the runtime to provide it with a service that implements a certain known .NET Interface type. Thus you could have two different services that use two different email receipt mechanism, one for a desktop host and one for a server host. Through this mechanism you achieve the indirection that enables us to use the same delcarative business logic definition (the workflow) in a number of differnt contexts which may have markedly different requirements.

All About WWF
SO Windows Workflow Foundation shipped today. We've been kicking it around for a bit now.

WWF is going to be the worflow engine for windows. It basically allows you to declarativly stitch together application logic into worflows. Not only does it support your typical 'Biztalk style' sequential workflow types but it also allows you to build state machine type workflows. You can either write them in code or.... wait for it..... you can declare them in XAML (though it's called XOML in the current drop). What this means is you could potentially stictch together a whole application out of components in just XML. Avalon would form the UI and WWF could be used to provide a state based execution engine. Slap a nice GUI UI around it and you've got a high productivity app builder that any old BA can use.

I'm going to post a bit over the next few days about some of the things that I've learnt around WWF thus far and some of the cool ideas that I've got for WWF.

I'll post some screen shots tonight once I'm back on my dev machine.

Was the new Linq namespace which is the unified data query namespace.

Will post more on it once I've found all the details but should be up on MSDN today.

Sitting in the Office 12 session here @ PDC....

THe new Office UI has.... wait for it.....

'Chunks' and 'Floaties'...... sounds like what you'd see after a big night on Castle St.

The Office UI has changed a whole heap. There are no longer any menus except File.

Yes you heard right. NO MORE MENUS.

Everything is driven from either the new tab based Ribbon Toolbar which is made up of Chunks. Or by mousing over 'Floaties' that are like toolbar type smart tags.

But Seth Veale, one of my crew in Dunedin sent me this

http://www.venganza.org/

Hooters is coming to New Zealand.....

I look forward to it being added to his wings tour next time around.