Watin => Selenium ?

I've been using Watin for quite some browser automation projects. But it seems that Watin is a bit dead in the water. No Chrome support. No Firefox 4 or higher support. It also seems to be an heroic effort of a few people.

So it might be time to move over to Selenium. Active development, wide browser support...

Mercurial branching

External function calls

The latest release of the Rule Manager allows to import external functions into the business vocabulary. As a little exercise I tried to get the current weather condition for a zipcode (maybe I can write some rules if I should bring my umbrella while I leave my house in L.A.)

Initially I intended to call a webservice, but it seems that all free weather webservice calls is something from the past. Yahoo offers weather information as an RSS feed. So a simple XPath query can select the information that I'm interested in:

Here is the code (note the FunctionAttribute decoration on the method)

1 using System.IO;

2 using System.Net;

3 using System.Xml;

4 using AcumenBusiness.IModel;

5 using Type=AcumenBusiness.IModel.Type;

6

7 namespace TestCallWebService

8 {

9 [Concept("Weather info", "Try to get weather forecast from different services")]

10 public class WeatherInfoProvider

11 {

12 private static readonly string YahooWeatherURLFormat = "http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss?p={0}";

13

14 [Term("workaround", "import function requires one field. (bug)")]

15 private string dummyField;

16 public string DummyField

17 {

18 get { return dummyField; }

19 set { dummyField = value; }

20 }

21

22 [Function("Get temperature", "Get the weather info from Yahoo",

23 ReturnType = Type.text,

24 ArgumentTypes = new Type[] { Type.integer })]

25 public static string GetWeatherInfoAsFeed(int zipCode)

26 {

27 HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest) WebRequest.Create(string.Format(YahooWeatherURLFormat, zipCode));

28 // execute the request

29 HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse) request.GetResponse();

30

31 // we will read data via the response stream

32 Stream resStream = response.GetResponseStream();

33 XmlDocument rssFeed = new XmlDocument();

34 rssFeed.Load(resStream);

35

36 //set an XmlNamespaceManager since we have to make explicit namespace searches

37 XmlNamespaceManager xmlnsManager = new System.Xml.XmlNamespaceManager(rssFeed.NameTable);

38 //Add the namespaces used in the xml doc to the XmlNamespaceManager.

39 xmlnsManager.AddNamespace("yweather", "http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/ns/rss/1.0");

40

41 XmlNode weatherCondition = rssFeed.SelectSingleNode("/rss/channel/item/yweather:condition/@temp", xmlnsManager);

42 if (weatherCondition != null) {

43 return weatherCondition.Value;

44 }

45 return null;

46 }

47 }

48 }

With the Import Schema adapter I can import this function and call it from my business rules. The coolest part is that you can invoke this from the Interactive Rule Map. So you can see how your rules are executing with this external data. It seems to be 76 fahrenheid in L.A.
Nice weather to jump on the bike and cycle to work...

.NET SOA BizTalk: BizTalk Tools and guidelines

Kishore Dharanikota has created a nice list of tools and guidelines for BizTalk developers and designers .NET SOA BizTalk: BizTalk Tools and guidelines. The Rule Manager is mentioned in the Development category. Interesting to see this classification. I probably would have placed it in the Design category. But that all depends on your frame of reference. Or it might hint that many BizTalk developers are playing a dual role of business analyst and developer.

RenewCert - Renew Expired Certificates

It's been just over a year when I deployed the RuleManager with a ClickOnce certificate. Today it expired. Visual Studio 2005 would suggest to generate a new certificate file, however none of the existing users would be able to update the Application (because of different certificate keys).
The error you would get is:


System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
at System.Deployment.Application.ApplicationTrust.RequestTrust(SubscriptionState subState, Boolean isShellVisible, Boolean isUpdate, ActivationContext actCtx, TrustManagerContext tmc)
at System.Deployment.Application.DeploymentManager.DetermineTrustCore(Boolean blocking, TrustParams tp)
at System.Deployment.Application.DeploymentManager.DetermineTrust(TrustParams trustParams)
at System.Deployment.Application.ApplicationDeployment.CheckForDetailedUpdate()

There is a workaround made by Cliff Stanford RenewCert, which allows you to regenerate an expired certification.

Thanks Cliff!

Graphical Rule Editor for RuleML format

In the last few weeks we have created the RuleML adapter for the Rule Manager. The RuleML adapter allows to export a business rules policy to the Reaction RuleML format.

Please bear with us that we are no experts in RuleML and certain rule constructions might be exported incorrectly. I hope the RuleML community can provide us with the feedback and we will incorporate any changes into our automatic update process as soon as possible. You can give feedback at the http://www.acumenbusiness.com/support forum.

Installation:
The Rule Manager product is available from the website http://www.acumenbusiness.com/

You can export to the RuleML format by installing the RuleML adapter module. See the screenshot [Menu: File\Options\Adapters\Rule ML]

The adapter will provide the new export format "RuleML (*.rrml)" in the Export wizard. [Menu: File\Export]
You can set .rrml as the default export type by changing the File Export type on the Import & Export options
[Menu: File\Options\Import & Export\File Export = RuleML (*.rrml)]

An example of the Driver Eligibility export is here

Paul Andrew : What to use Windows Workflow Foundation for?

Paul Andrew has a nice write up on why you would use Windows Workflow Foundation. There are some excellent arguments for the use of the rules component: the visibility into the business logic and the ability to change this business logic.

That is exactly the reason why I'm currently designing a Windows Workflow Foundation architecture for a very large client. Performance will become critical...