During a recent consulting, I helped a client to resolve his authentication issues with his existing Web application and Windows Phone application.
Using the existing MembershipProvider
If you have already an existing Web application and you want to extend it throughout a Windows Phone application you can use the existing System.Web.ApplicationServices for the authentication.
If you are looking for inter state-machines communication using AMUSE, following example should help.
It’s a kind of “Hello World” for multiple machines, simplest possible example 
Two state machines fires triggers to each other: Ping fires ping trigger and receives pong trigger and pong works another way around.
1. Download XMI
2. Create an empty Enterprise Architect project
3. Import XMI
4. Open ping and pong state machine diagrams
5. Add both to AMUSE simulation window
6. Start pong first then ping
7. if initial ping wasn’t caught, fire first trigger manually via trigger menu
8. watch the ping/pong counters
If you model and simulate behaviors using Enterprise Architect and AMUSE some Mock UIs based on Windows Forms can improve your model significantly.
How you can do that in a simple way? In that case you typically need to:
1. setup an Visual Studio Project and take care of some settings (e.g. usage of 3.5 NET); 2. develop a form; 3. compile the VS project into assembly; 4. import the form into your EA model, AMUSE reverse engineers it from the assembly and create a form class; 5. create an attribute in the class, that contains the state machine of type of reverse engineered form class; 6. connect form events with the state machine triggers; 7. initialize your form at state machine initializing phase
We recommend not import the form class directly but rather to create a wrapper class that contains only the events and methods you really need for modeling, otherwise the reverse engineered form class contains too much stuff inherited from the Form basis class. That means you have basically one more step to do.
The described procedure is not really complex and after performing it once you have a reusable template. In addition you develop and test the UI in very comfortable VS development environment.
But what if the usage of VS is not an option or you just want to perform the whole modeling using EA environment only?
– Not a problem at all 
. Following XMI contains a simple model including an integrated Windows Form: simple model including an integrated Windows Form
Please find below the corresponding video:
We are very happy to hear that Sam Mancarellas campaign worked out! I was kind of involved – serving him while Sam was working to get supporters at the Cambridge,MA event.
“I’m honored by the recognition and confidence so many of my OMG colleagues have given me through my election to the Architecture Board,” said Mancarella. “This role will enable me to make a significant contribution to OMG’s state-of-the-art specifications and standards over the next two years.” Mancarella added, “I am looking forward to serving the OMG and its members, Sparx Systems, and the greater modeling industry in this prestigious role.”
Read the full story on: Sparx Systems Representative Elected to OMG Architecture Board | Benzinga.com
Lately I developed more state machines than ever before. In the past I had respect for that type of diagrams but now I think it’s just cool 
Why to use state-machines at all?
UML supports state charts for really long time, but only a small part of UML community uses state-machines on a regular basis.
My experience confirms that – it isn’t easy to start using them. The question is – why?
In my opinion, the reason is – the way how the people do thinking – in functions and activities (actually straight forward 
). Therefore most of us likes sequence and activity charts better.
Everybody begins programming by writing functions – first, you have an idea of desired result in your mind and next, to get that result – you program a… function. Other way around – nobody will start thinking about classes, instances, states, interaction between objects, etc. if you just want e.g. to parse some strings.
But one day you want to (or you have to 
) develop code in a more structured way. At that point machines can help
- Why? Because they get the object oriented methodology to the heart of the matter – it’s all about objects and their states. But as already mentioned above, at the beginning, state-machines seem to be non-trivial
– So what to do?
How to get the state-machine right?
Wouldn’t be great if an UML tool could interact with you and give you feedback while modeling to show if you are still on the right track?
– It’s exactly what AMUSE does. It extends Enterprise Architect to an interactive UML tool.
My first lesson learned with AMUSE
Basically it is easy and exactly the right way to think:
- So, you want a state chart? First question you have to answer – state of what? And the answer is – state of class you have to design.
Answering that question is the first step in the right direction of good design!
Bottom line
meanwhile i came to the conclusion:
- Usage of state machines is probably most suitable way to enter into object oriented design, but they are also excellent helpers for experts.
Next time more …
Our Application Mexico is available on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace!
It is an port of an existing Windows Mobile 6.5 Application – and yes it was a rewrite – but it didn’t take very long.
Lately I been investigating the options Enterprise Architect offers to record Sequence Diagrams from code, because we want to learn for LieberLieber AMUSE.
And I found a pretty interesting result:
It only takes into account “Classes” and not “Instances”.
There is two links that proved helpful – a video tutorial from Sparx Systems and a Blog post from Tom Peplow.
(weiterlesen…)
