To avoid the “foreign language” feeling for users of a BI/DW system you must start with the decision makers. They are the ones who are going to use business intelligence profitably. They are the ones that turn the information in your data warehouse into usable knowledge. So, just talk to the users. It sounds so [.].

Sometimes Decision Makers view the Business Intelligence system as if it were a foreign language. They took the training. They tried to get information out of the system. But they gave up because the terms used in the interface between them and the Data Warehouse are not the terms they use to conduct business. For instance, [.].

In my last post I talked about how requirements are really the stuff that goes in and out of your system, the black box. The “stuff” are things like data, documents, objects, requests, events, and when “this stuff happens. But what else constitutes requirements (stuff)? Well systems often adhere to rules. W-2s for the previous [.].

Once the boundaries for your system / software / business unit are defined as a black box, do not worry about what is inside the box. Focus on what goes in, what comes out, when this happens, and rules the box must follow. So just what can go into our come out of this box? [.].

By clearly understanding the boundary of your system you can easily distinguish between requirement and design statements.

After dealing with requirements in all sorts of shapes and sizes over the years I find the “black box&# approach works well. For requirements, I think of any system as if it were a black box. can “see” or experience the outside of the box. can experience the contours of the box. can [.].

So how do you define requirement? was working with a large hospitality corporation when I was asked this question. The problem is that the notion of requirement comes in many forms. The definition seems to depend on what role you play in relationship to requirements definition – Customer, Business Analyst, Systems Analyst, Designer, Architect, [.].

The View – Model – ViewModel design pattern, also known as MVVM, is getting more popular these days. have found it extremely easy to use when developing very different applications and have used the design pattern recently in both ASP.NET, WPF and Silverlight applications. However easy as it might be is seems to confuse people as I have seen some terrible examples where people make a complete mess of things. Josh Smith did an excellent screen cast for Pixel8 on using MVVM with WPF, you can find it here. The View is data bound to a ViewModel. This is the most important step to remember. 11: {.

Note: This blog post is written using the.NET framework 4.0 Beta 2 With Windows Workflow Foundation 3 it was possible to rehost the workflow designer in your own application. But possible is about all there was to say about it as it was pretty hard to do anything beyond the basics. With Windows Workflow Foundation 4 live has become much better on the rehosting front In fact it is possible to create the fully functional and useful workflow editor below in about 200 lines of code. Now that is more like it! The WorkflowDesigner The WorkflowDesigner is the main class to work with. null ). {. Sweet.

Using the declarative DomainDataSource that is part of the upcoming Silverlight 3 RIA services makes it quite easy to work with data. All you need to do is add a DomainDataSource control to the the XAML, point it to the generated DomainContext class (in this case NorthwindContext) and tell it which method to use to load the data from the web service(in this case LoadCustomers). Next add a DataGrid to display the data and you are good to go. Adding paging. Sometimes the lost of data to load can get somewhat large and you might not want to load all data. Using progressive loading. Enjoy!

As you may have heard Windows Workflow Foundation 4 is not an upgrade from Windows Workflow Foundation 3 (or 3.5). The version numbers might suggest that the previous version was quite mature but in fact it refers to the version of the.NET framework. In fact Windows Workflow Foundation 3 was the first version and 3.5 added only very few features and some bug fixes. And as WF 4 is a complete rewrite we should approach it as a new product and forget just about everything we already know about WF 3. That might be a bit surprising, after all we still have activities and a workflow runtime right?

There are quite a a few cases where it is useful to have a duplex communications. An obvious candidate is allowing a service to notify the user interface application of the progress so the user knows what is happening. Normally, when using plain WCF , you would use a ServiceContract attribute with a CallbackContract that specified the service uses duplex communications. For example something like the following code on the server: [ServiceContract(CallbackContract = typeof (IService1Callback))]. public interface IService1. {. OperationContract]. string GetData( int value ); }. ServiceContract].