October, 2006

Despite its flaws and bugs, Visual Source Safe continues to be the most popular source control program in the Microsoft realm. Many poeple I talk to are not aware some of its more useful functions such as "Pinning". Understanding the use of pinning can...

When declaring complex types in XML schema definition, I have grown accustomed to suffix the type name with "_Type". This allows me to easily distinguish a complex type from a global type when viewing the definition in a graphical design tool such as...

Acumen Business has just released the beta version of the new Policy Verificator that supports BizTalk 2006. Major enhancements are made in the Interactive Rule Map (rule spider). There is a new free text search. And of course all the previous functions...

A few months ago I wrote about an issue with writing fully streaming custom decoding components for BizTalk pipelines, which originated in limitations imposed by the disassembler components (the XmlDisassembler component in particular) on the streams...

In the category essential tools for the BizTalk consultant; here we have the Throughput and Capacity Tester made by Larry Beck. What else can we ask for? Update: The new release has been renamed to BTSPerfTester 1.0 The BizTalk Performance Tester (the...

Acumen Business released the Policy Verificator version 1.1 . An all new UI is designed what should significantly increase the usability issues from the initial release. Specially of interest is the inclusion of Datetime support for rule verification...

Log4net development is showing signs of life! After a long period of silence the 1.2.9 Beta has been released . Some highlights of the list of new features: New logging contexts GlobalContext ThreadContext LogicalThreadContext LoggingEvent .NET string...

I started of with log4j in my Java days, and was quick with adopting another fine .NET port: log4net . But for work, we had to consider Microsofts Enterprise Instrumentation Framework (EIF) . But a little more reading revealed that this package is getting...

The book (by Scott Woodgate, Stephen Mohr, Brian Loesgen ISBN 0-672-32598-5) seems to be getting into it's final stage. There was a page advertisement in the MSDN magazine of November 2004 (Vol 19 NO 11 Page 108) offering a 30% discount for ordering the...

Scott Woodgate published the list of Biztalk Competition Winners . The vocabulary upgrader got mentioned at point F! The Vocabulary Upgrader is also available at Acumen Business . Also available on this site is the automatic Business Rule Verification;...

The BizTalk Vocabulary Upgrader has gone into beta. The Vocabulary Upgrader enables to replace multiple references to different versions of a vocabulary to a single vocabulary version. Have a look at the documentation, screenshots, getting started guide...

There is a new updated product documentation for BizTalk Server 2004 (7/23/2004). Download details: BizTalk Server 2004 Product Documentation . There is a lot of new material about the Rule Engine, Engine Control Functions, Rule Action Side Effects etc...

A great resource for all those BizTalk 2004 server questions you have not found an answer for yet: BizTalk Server 2004 FAQ - netologi.se

The Service Pack 2 release for Microsoft XP has a lot of improvements on security settings. As a side-effect the regular install of the BizTalk 2004 Developers edition will fail at the Single Sign-On service. It is all well documented by Microsoft, and...

A simple rule: Conditions: Case:/Root/Income/BasicSalary is less than or equal to 75.000 Actions: Case:/Root/IncomeStatus = approved Would a basic salary of only 800 be approved? Or rephrasing: would the rule fire? I expected it would. But the answer...

So you got all the certifications in place, and finally your secure SOAP service is receiving signed encrypted messages. Are you sure? An essential tool to figure out what is happening (behind the SOAP scenes) when you use WSE 2.0: The WSE 2.0 Tracing...

Security is important, especially when we have a B2B scenario where sensitive information has to be sent. Not too long ago, Microsoft released the Web Service Enhancement 2.0 package( WSE 2.0 ). Among other features like sending attachments with SOAP...

Another Java based XML rule engine - QuickRules , I was not aware of. They also have a DecisionTable editor. The .NET integration goes through COM, so that is just a marketing line. There is also some workflow editing provided. But not on the level as...

So who was first Idiom or Microsoft? They both use the concept of defining the datamodel by XSD schema's and use drag-and-drop to place these elements in rule constructs. The advantage of Idiom here is that you seem to be able to show multiple rules at...

I feel a little guilty for omitting the following poem from my consideration of Walt Whitman as Patron Poet: I Saw Old General At Bay I saw old General at bay, (Old as he was, his gray eyes yet shone out in battle like stars,) His small force was now...