Reasons to love Metastorm BPM version 9 (part 1)
"One aspect of Metastorm BPM that really lights my candle, and those of our customers, is the Visual Scripts. Not because they are easy to create (they are not, I'm afraid), but because the documentation they provide is stunning."
Comments
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Thanks for the feedback Jerome. Great stuff. I'm thrilled to see that you appreciate this. You certainly have the idea. I cringe every time someone uses the code activity, since it obfuscates what is going on, but we kept that in to allow for flexibility. We are just starting to scratch the surface in this area.
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Make the Visual Scripting faster, and it will get much more use IMO. Right now it can be very slow and painful when you have a large script as I have shown. Each update to just the title can take between 10 and 20 seconds, which is a lifetime when coding.
The speed of the Expression Builder needs to be increased too. Getting those two faster would be a fantastic benefit, especially for sales demos!
Asa for the code activity, you still need it. There are things you can do in code that you cannot to in an activity, such as paering a list (despite what the doco says - youi just cannot). Obviously the creation of any variables of any type, eg a List, which is not avilable as a variable, and all the C# types such as arrays, make code essential at times.
I agree, though, I would prefer to use Visual Scripts as much as possible.Code is nice, but code keeps the barrier between the developer and the business user alive an well. The more we can do to damage that barrier, the better.
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Jerome Designer v9 needs realy powerfull machine, but as I think the component to creating workflows is the same, as in Visual Studio. I'm not sure if Metastorm could make it faster
I hope, but... 
I agree with speed of Expression builder, trying to concatenate more than 3 strings using it make me crazy
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Alienware with an I7 quad processor and 1 GB video card enough?
True I have to use a VM, and it maxes that out, but the Designer install is trashed on the host OS. It was not a great deal fatser there.
I think the performance when building large scripts degrades exponentially, a bit like v7 and lots of fields on a form.
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I'm not sure why, but we have big performance problems working on VM with designer. It works the worst when we use remote desktop.
I hope Metastorm have influence on performance. They use some framework as I understand, I hope this framework could be much more faster, and addins prepared by Metastrom could be much more faster.
As you said, i't like working in v7 with complicated forms.
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Yes I too agree that the speed of the Visual Scripting can be slow, but I have noticed something that I got caught out with when first using the expression builder.
If you edit the expression in the main area, section 1 in the pic below, as I was tempted to do to make minor changes, it is far slower, as it tries to rebuild the sub expressions below it.
I found it responded far quicker to edit in section 2, directly in each sub-expression, especially with those more complex ones.
This is definitely something to make people aware of during training of the new designer.
But to finish on a positive note, the idea behind the visual scripting and the ease at which you can extend the visual activities and expression builder is fantastic, far less clunky than editing the xml file for the 7.x wizard, eagerly looking forward to the changes still yet to come as Rob has hinted at!
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OK, now I have my main machine installation running and I am once again free from the VM cage, it is an awesome difference. I think the VM sucks a huge amount of cycles trying to keep the graphics going, and the visual scripts are graphics intensive (and in true Microsoft style, not optimised).
The Expression Builder is still slowish, but only compared to the rest of it. It really only takes 2 or 3 seconds to put all the fields for a large SelectSql(). I was waiting up to 10 before. The longest wait is loading 'new' component types, eg loading the first Visual Script, or the first Process. The second is fast enough. That is, I suspect, where the large amounts of RAM usage are coming in, but as long as it does not keep going up, I'm happy.
So, in conclusion, now I am free from the VM I am happy to take back the criticism of speed and looking forward to going great guns with Visual Scripts once more!
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:smileysad:
Hmmm, I need VMWare in our development environment as when I'm working with different customers and different databases it's pretty chaotic to try and work on one environment on my main machine (and to be honest I don't want to have to install and re-install dev softeware on my main desktop)
VMWare allows me to have many different combinations of database platforms and Metastorm running but the problem is running the latest release 9.0.2.1 I'm finding the query builder to be a huge pain in the a$$. When trying to populate parameters for a stored procedure, it's taking 10-15 seconds each time I assign a local variable to a parameter before I can fill in the next. This means for a 10 paramater sp call I', looking at over a minute just to get the assignments in! I used to be able to handcode this directly in 10-15 secodns in total. This is a huge problem if V9 becomes a day-to-day development platform
Are there any workarounds for those that need to run this within a VM?
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I'm getting this on my W7 machine, despite a quad processor. The Expression Builder seems to get slower and slower every time I use it.
Speeding that up would be a major benefit all round, but the rest can be extremely slow for large solution files too. I think it jas never been tried with a normally sized system, to be honest, or testing would have shown this up.
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I agree with Jerome.
I understand that this is based on VS framework, but this is a lot too slow to work with this designer.
If you have large solution (tith projects and libraries) you can wait 15 minutes to open on slower machines (2 minutes on latest lenovo quad core notebook with fast hard disk and a lot of free RAM).
I'm not sure how to show this potential new clients on presentations. v7 designer was realy fast and we have made a lot of realy good show times.
I had hope that will be much better in SR2, but i'm a little bit disapointed
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I absolutely hate the visual scripts: s l o w ; they just add a useless layer that breaks the code into fragments artificially and make it impossible to see the big picture, even with a lot less than a page worth of code.
But it's the lack of documentation everywhere that makes me most crazy!!!
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But they are understandable to a Business User. As we NEED to communicate what we do with those who have a Business to run, they make prefect sense to me.
Used well they can be extremely beneficial. Used badly, I agree they can be a waste of time. It is just a matter of translating all those lines of relatively meaningless code into discrete units.
I am not saying there are no disadvantages, there are, such a not being able to associate Business Objects, and not being able to create local variables (except for form events, of course), but I disagree that they are useless.
I really see it as the future of code-writing. It makes more sense to code visually, just like it makes more sense to define a Business Process visually, and after all, that is why we are here, not in the .Net forums!
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