Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Matthew E David

J Kirk Haselden

Sergei Ivanov

Mohammed Fadel Shatnawi

Mark J T Durley

Kirk Haselden

The subject disclosure pertains to systems and methods for connecting pipeline components such as data flow pipeline components. Pipeline components are wrapped in metadata components that include the component as well as abstracted metadata in the form of input and output metadata descriptors. A connector can arbitrate metadata differences between pipeline components based on the metadata descriptors, thereby preventing upstream modifications from invalidating or breaking components downstream. Native or plug-in heuristic and/or related components can provide the functionality necessary to resolve metadata differences.

Abstract pipeline component connection

When a component is to be loaded or executed, the version of the component to be loaded may be compared with available versions of the component. If an upgraded version of the component is available, the upgraded version of the component may be enabled to dynamically and deterministically update itself. The component may be an object in an object model. The upgraded version of the component may update itself by calling an update method. The component may be upgraded with minimum user intervention, dynamically as the object is loaded.

Automatic upgrade of pluggable components

Employing abstract pipeline component connections to maintain data flow

An extensible generic command line parser may receive a list of options associated with an application and a command line to parse. A new command line option may be added to the options that can be parsed by adding the new command line option to the list of options. By receiving a modifiable list of valid options from an application, the parser is extensible, that is, instead of having to modify or recode the parser when a new option is added to the application, the new option may be added to the option file. When the parser receives the option list with the new option or options, any option in the file (including any new ones) may be automatically parsable by the parser.

Extensible command line parsing

Impact analysis provides the ability to determine the objects that a particular object depends on or uses, as well as determine the objects that are dependent on or use a particular object. The term object may refer to tasks and/or object types, for example. Impact analysis is desirable for improving user productivity in large, complex documents because it facilitates determining how and where an object is used by other objects in the system, thereby potentially saving a great deal of manual work.

Impact analysis in an object model

Systems and methodologies that facilitate real time recognition of missing and/or invalid objects in a component based framework, via employing a graceful load fail over engine that can self heal a component based application that has missing or invalid references, to be properly read, validated and executed on a user's machine. Information about the various components installed on a user's machine can be stored to reference a package backed up to a persistence state, and/or dummy objects or stubs can be provided to represent the missing object, and typically assure proper validation and/or execution of loaded object models.

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Sammamish, WA, United States of America

Matthew E David