A few people will know that I am working on a project of my own in the background of all that’s going on in my normal day to day life. I hope that this is something that will benefit myself in the not to distant future and if all goes to plan, I hope that it will grow into something big over the next few years.

One of the current challenges of this project is for me to gain an understanding as to what motivates people to use social media. With this in mind, I intend to carry out an experiment using both Facebook and Twitter, over a 12 week period, to hopefully gain this understanding.

The experiment will be carried out in 3 x 4 week stages beginning on the 26th February. I will put up a web site explaining the experiment on the 25th February. However, the site will only explain the first stage of the experiment. As we continue through the experiment, I will update the site on the day preceding the start of the next stage. It will be important to check the site before each stage begins. The details of this will be explained on the site when launched.

I will post a link to the site on 25th February @ 13:00 using both Facebook and Twitter.

I hope I can count on your support with the experiment.

The key dates are as follows:

In this first post, I want to do nothing more than touch on declarative and imperative programming and why this is important when we look at Windows Workflow. It is aimed at nothing more than to set the scene for the posts which are to follow.

As developers, we are all aware of the fundamental difference between declarative programming and imperative programming. At it’s simplest, declarative programming is when we say what we want to do, against imperative which is us saying how we actually want to do it.

But why is this important when we are working with Windows Workflow 4?

Windows Workflow 4 provides us with a completely declarative programming framework which is clean and simple enough to allow us to model out business processes. The Windows Workflow programming model provides us with such an environment which fully allows declarative composition of activities which have no code-behind files which greatly simplifies the authoring of each workflow. At this point, I’d like to highlight that this doesn’t mean that we never write code. We still do write code for the implementation of each activity. (We will look at this in a later post.)

It is important to consider that when working with Windows Workflow, that we aren’t actually writing applications in the traditional sense. More so, we are composing applications from pre-defined re-useable assets/activities into a particular structure or flow which ultimately speeds up development whilst hopefully improving the maintainability of our code.

In addition, this declarative programming model provides us with additional semantics for transactional and compensatory tasks. Basically, when things go wrong, we are given the ability to compensate by coming back to the task in hand, or taking some other action. This is something which is not readily available in other .NET or imperative languages.

As developers, all of this makes our lives easier. When we are using imperative techniques, we can, eventually, figure out what is going on by following the path of execution within the code, through different method calls and no doubt with the debugger attached. With the declarative technique however, we have that model that self describes and as such is very easy to look at and figure out what is going on. This doesn’t only help us as developers but will also help wider members of your teams, such as business analysts who also need to know what is going on.

I was supposed to be speaking at DDD Scotland today, however on Wednesday evening, I came down with a spot of illness, (yet more migraines) and so, decided that I should give the team a heads up to this. We decided that, for obvious reasons, it was more important for my health to improve, and with the uncertainty of how the illness would progress, that it would be best to pull out and give someone else the chance to speak.

Fortunately today, I actually wasn’t feeling too bad this morning, so decided to pop along and be involved in the day as much as I could. I had to sit out a couple of sessions, but still very glad I attended. Ironically, the highlight for me today was Touch Me, Stretch Me, Squeeze Me: The Windows 7 WPF Multi-Touch Story which was delivered by Guy Smith-Ferrier. I say ironically as Guy actually stepped in at very short notice to fill the gap I had left in the schedule due to me pulling out. So thanks to Guy filling in.

The talk I had planned to deliver today was “A Step into Workflow Foundation 4″. I intend to still give this talk sometime in the near future, so look out for dates. In the meantime, I am going to write some blog posts around the topic, so at least some of what I was hoping to share today with the delegates at DDD Scotland, will still be shared.

So here we are. What’s new this year? Well, nothing less than this first blog post!

Many thanks to Andy, Craig, Colin and the wider team for putting on this event, and a special thank to all the speakers. Everyone did a good job, and looking forward to next year.