Keith Walker... pleased to meet you!

keith — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 17:11:00 GMT

Well... it's a good few weeks in now, and as the nights are drawing colder the pace at iPrinciples is certainly heating up!!

I've been working on some very interesting stuff over the past few weeks, particularly around the WPF and Silverlight space. These technologies have really excited me over the last year and I’m waiting in anticipation to see what's around the corner! I'll hopefully get the chance to share some of these experiences with you in this blog, giving an insight into what iPrinciples are doing, and perhaps even show you how were doing it!!

Before I go on, I should introduce myself; I’m Keith Walker.... "with a thirst for knowledge, and a love of all things 'code'!!"

I've contracted over the last 10 years, worked mainly in the Government, Publishing, New Media and Transport industry sectors. Although I have to say, starting out in (professional) life at a small software house for 5 years was the best introduction to software development I could have hoped for - these are the best places to get your hands really dirty in all aspects of the software development lifecycle! (I would highly recommend this environment to anyone really wanting to learn their trade)

My last role before joining iPrinciples was 3 years with London Underground. I was in the privileged position of having a relatively free role, tasked with driving the transformation of the development department from a traditional waterfall viewpoint with VB Client Server / Classic ASP to using an Agile approach utilising the .NET platform. This was a really challenging role; providing mentoring and guidance on tools, OO design principles and patterns, and practical implementation of the .NET Framework with up to 70 developers; system architecture and design sessions/reviews; evaluating and procuring new tools/components/platform; helping define development process and methodology..... (Honestly the list goes on... but I’m getting as bored as you now!). Great role, huge responsibility, wide exposure to many new technologies, and fascinating challenges within a fantastic problem domain!!!

During this time I advocated the drive towards a goal of a Service Orientated Architecture, firstly ensuring each developed application conform to a common architectural pattern with a primary constituent being a .NET web service exposing parts (if not all) of the application service tier. We latterly moved to a WCF approach, with one of the teams implementing a really nice WCF "WS-Eventing" based communication library set - full pub-sub over WCF, pretty sweet (perhaps some more on that later)!

This SOA drive was partly justified when we were evaluating a new rich web client GUI strategy late 2006. Our current Adobe SVG offerings were reaching the limits of the technology - we needed to do something, and quick! So, down the full evaluation path we go: Flex, Flash, have another go at stretching SVG again, or WPF. At this point we made contact with Microsoft to discuss their new technology and it's application into our environment. The end result of these conversation was a 3 week (15 day) Proof of Concept at Microsoft Technology Centre in Reading with 4 strong technologists (Stuart Harris - London Underground, Daniel Richardson - Edenbrook, Dave Brown - Microsoft, and myself), to take our existing SVG Front-ended Train Tracking application and prove it would work on WPF (almost a year ago to the day at time of this posting).

I was initially sceptical about what we could do in the time; "learn a new technology, implement this new technology with currently poor tool support, port all the track, signal and station level information from SVG into XAML, and set up a micro environment to mimic the heterogeneous back end data sources internally available at the Underground!"

But how wrong could I have been - we achieved all and more than I though possible in the timeframe. A topological and geographical high level view, a low level Track schematic view, and a 3d models of the underground - with animated train and signals movements from the (copies of) production web services. We not only managed to convert the application but we also added huge enhancements by drawing information from a further 5 internal web service. Now say you’re not as impressed as I was!!! It was a massive effort from all involved - but I think the results were well worth it. I ended up presenting the PoC demo at a live webcast of the Developers Launch of Windows Vista along with Peter Goss (The Boss!!!) who was responsible for managing the engagement and the delivering this PoC to the business (and yes, I’m the Scottish one getting excited about WPF and trains!!!)

Richards’s previous blog...	http://blogs.msdn.com/rgodfrey/archive/2007/03/08/london-underground.aspx
Download and View the presentation... (about 45 minutes in)	http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/4/6/f46669b6-f269-4fe9-8efa-4c6ae15fdea9/ms_en_v500_600x450_00.zip
"Audible Gasps"....	http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/26/vista_office/

If you watch the demo you might appreciate why I felt the SOA decision was a pay-off in this case, we were left with a rich user experience, drawing on content from several sources, giving the ability to overlay multiple data sources in context with real time events - and all developed in 15 days to a better than typical PoC standard! Fantastic job by all... (...if I say so myself) including WPF!!!

My last words on this subject have to credit iPrinciples very own Richard Godfrey for his contribution to this PoC, in his past life at Microsoft, for helping us to get there and enabling us to achieve what we did.

Anyway, enough about the past (and massaging ego's) - it's all about the future from now on! I know it's been a bit long for an intro, but I’ve hopefully set the scene of my background a little, putting my world into context.

I hope to provide some useful insight into my views on the many aspects of developing rich user experience applications on the Microsoft .NET platform in my blog from now on (well that’s the intention). Now that I’m just about out of breath, it’s time to sign off. I hope you tune in on occasion and contribute your thoughts!

Cheers!

Keith Walker : London Underground Demo, Silverlight

Keith Walker... pleased to meet you!