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Questions

  1. So Keith, tell as a little about who you are, what you do, your role at Microsoft. Give us a little inside in to your job.
  2. Tools like what?
  3. When you say modeling tools, I get this strange shiver down my back and I start to think of the UML tools of five years ago and recent times, as well as the case tools of the years before that. What do you mean by the term modeling tools?
  4. But Keith, I can do that today in Visual Studio?
  5. You're saying it's not essentially captured in one file?
  6. You've used the phrase, visualize, a couple of times, and you've mentioned a few seconds ago the idea of a box on a diagram, and it brings back to mind some of the older schemes about Visio programming. The idea that I'm going to take a bunch of boxes and throw it through one end and get a pile of code out the other end. And I get the sense that that's not quite where we're going towards. Give me a little more about what you mean about some of this diagrammatic stuff.
  7. Just like skeleton code and stuff?
  8. Is it fair to say that White Horse is a UML design tool? Obviously, when we start talking about the visualizations, the pictures, and so forth, the question of UML comes up. That in itself is sort of a loaded term. Where is the relationship between UML and White Horse?
  9. I can't even think of any tool that generates code.
  10. So, you've said that you don't want to use the UML meta-model because of its divergence from the actual programming language model, which then makes me, as a developer, a little concerned that my experience as I work with the tool is going to be different from that of another UML tool. Is that going to be the case or do you sort that out somehow?
  11. So, the class diagrams, the activity diagrams, what else?
  12. So you've talked about--in one of your earlier answers--you talked about the interaction. You mentioned that you're going to have several Web services; you're going to have boxes and lines in between them. And it sounds very reminiscent of the whole BPEL for WS, the Business Process Execution Language for Web services. How does White Horse, and what it's going to do, relate to BPEL and that space?
  13. This was BizTalk 2004?
  14. So, you said that there's one service that we hadn't yet covered yet. So it makes me want to step back and say, alright, so what is all here? What does White Horse consist of? Give me the 30 second elevator pitch?
  15. So this is a sign of like 'I'm going to get a view of the deployment environment before I actually get to the deployment environment.'
  16. We've been tossing around the term modeling a lot. You've mentioned modeling is good, we want developers to be able to model this. And this, of course, leads us in to another terms that is becoming really wide spread in the industry, which is, of course, model driven architecture, MDA. Where does White Horse fit in with the MDA space and what the OMG is doing there? Talk a little bit about that.
  17. So, what I'm hearing you say, when you talk about this, is what you want to build. You're looking at building something from the ground up. You want to start with the base and work and continue to layer on top of that. Is that a fair characterization?
  18. In two sentences, or a few more if you're really nice to me, tell me what it is that you would like to see White Horse do in future revisions. Where would you like the tool to go in coming releases, in future development?
  19. Thank you again very much Keith.