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Andreas Ulbrich demonstrates the Microsoft Visual Programming Language

Posted By: JonUdell | Aug 6th, 2007 @ 8:30 AM

In an earlier screencast, Henrik Nielsen illustrates how the Microsoft Robotics Studio, building on top of the CCR (Concurrency and Coordination Runtime) and DSS (Decentralized Software Services) technologies, exposes a RESTful service-oriented architecture.

In this companion screencast (WMV, Flash) Andreas Ulbrich demonstrates VPL (Visual Programming Language), a diagram-oriented dataflow language. Although it was created for the Robotics Studio, it is -- as you'll see here -- a very general way to visualize, orchestrate, and debug message-driven services that run work in parallel.

Tags: Robotics

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Chadk
excuse me - do you has a flavor?

Seems like a canned version of popfly and workflow. How does this justify that it doesnt seem to bring ALL that much new stuff to the table?

Vasudev

Is it something like National Instruments LabVIEW ?Graphical programming ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LabVIEW

Chadk
excuse me - do you has a flavor?

ChrisStepaniuk wrote:

The thick accent make it hard to make you out.

I have seen worse accents. I think his accent is pretty cool.

ChrisStepaniuk

Interesting talk...

keeron
Obsessive Geek

Chadk wrote:

Seems like a canned version of popfly and workflow. How does this justify that it doesnt seem to bring ALL that much new stuff to the table?

My thoughts exactly... the only thing I see different is CCR is available and the parallel programming thing (forgot what it was called, but he gave an example when doing the calculation in the end of the demo). This could easily be integrated in WF... known enviornment, programmin model (XAML), WPF and WCF also available..

odujosh
Need Microsoft SUX now!

I kinda got the feeling at mix with some of the Data initiatives Microsoft does a lot of skunk works. Many teams are working on the same problem from different angles and possibly different domains.

Some initiatives die a not so pretty death, others flourish, while others mutate onto the successful version. Competiveness breeds quality.

Popfly- A way to weld web serves together visually through use of a code generator.
MVP- A way to program without using textual code. Big limatation no backend code. Be curious to see if there is any xaml/xml that you could generate.
WorkFlow Foundation- A runtime for running workflows both visually and programatically.

I think it would be wise to weld all three together into the next version of work flow. Lets hope we have a volving story instead of we are deprecating Workflow Foundtion. Or here is a new way to do work flow.

georgioc

Chadk wrote:

Seems like a canned version of popfly and workflow. How does this justify that it doesnt seem to bring ALL that much new stuff to the table?

Hi, VPL 1.0 was actually released as product, last year, going beta over 14 months ago. Popfly is great and follows similar graphical model for composition although that is where the similarities end. They also target different developer segments (at least right now).

VPL produces high performance service code and is tuned towards a very specific data-flow (or data dependency scheduler) engine underneath, the CCR/DSS runtime. The underlying runtime model is a different approach to an open ended workflow engine. We are a bit more "strict" and enforce an application model (Henrik talks about our REST-based model more in a companion screen cast).

At some point things will start re-using each other, but until we all figure out what is common between all these approaches, what can run efficiently in a variety of environments, and what it means to have a common application model, its ok to have a bit of variety Smiley

g

PaulR

odujosh wrote: MVP- A way to program without using textual code. Big limatation no backend code. Be curious to see if there is any xaml/xml that you could generate.

MVPL has two backend code models...

when you are debugging, it uses an interpreter that traverses an execution model generated from the diagram.
when you choose to compile the diagram, it generates, and compiles, C# code to create a DSS service.

Using these two options allows a developer to use VPL to create a first pass service implementation, iterate on it, and then create the C#, which can further be iterated on using standard C# development tool.

VBCoder
VBCoder

LabVIEW is based on G-Programming which is totally different from class diagram innovated by Microsoft. LabVIEW uses presentable functions that conncection determines the program flow, whereas Visual Studio Class Diagram is an abstracted level for architects to sketch the enterprise framework of software that can be automatically converted to the skeleton of classes that developers implement their code in.