May, 2009

Here is the latest in my link-listing series .  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past.  You can also now follow me on twitter ...

Since the WCF Publishing Wizard in BizTalk does not support adding custom headers defined at the server, we need to programmatically modify what gets created by the wizard to add custom headers. However, from the client you have the option to pass in...

Architecture reviews at my company are brutal.  Not brutal in a bad way, per se, but in the sense that if you are not completely prepared and organized, you’ll leave with a slight limp and self doubt that you know anything about anything at...

Thanks to all who attended my talk on migrating from WF 3.x to WF 4 at Dev Days .  I’ve posted my slides and demos which you can download for review.  Thanks for a great show, and look for me to post some screencasts of several examples in the...

For those of you who attended my talk at Dev Days 2009 , I’ve posted the slides and my demo code for the custom activities talk.  I’ve included the activities, the designers and the designer rehosting code along with some sample workflows using the...

WF4 beta 1 ships with a comprehensive set of activities (more than 35) that you can use to author your workflows or to create your own custom activities. This post will give you a quick tour through the activity palette and introduce you to the key characteristics of the out of the box activities. Activities are the unit of work in a workflow program. Activities in WF4 have a signature and body. The signature of an activity is defined in terms of its public arguments. These public arguments define...

From my MSDN subscriber blast…. Dear MSDN subscribers, End of Financial Year Special 45% off  on Team Suite Upgrade Conditions Apply Update: Team Suite is cheaper in June* Benefit from a 45% discount * if you purchase a Step up license from Visual...

Today I tried to start a sample program which contains a connection string like this: const string connectionString = @”Data Source=.\SQLEXPRESS; AttachDbFilename=|DataDirectory|\SampleInstanceStore.mdf; Integrated Security=True;Asynchronous...

When optimizing a BizTalk environment one thing you can do is change the value for the ‘maxConnections’ setting. As stated on the MSDN site (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa561380.aspx) this setting determines how many connections...

There are integrations which only purpose is to move a file just as it is. No advanced routing. No orchestration processing. No transformation. Just a simple port-to-port messaging scenario. It is however still a good idea to monitor these just as one...

Thursday the 28th of May. I’ll be presenting at the DevDays 2009 The Netherlands. I’m going to talk about using BizTalk 2009 & ESB Guidance(Toolkit) 2.0 in a Event Driven Architecture. The presentation is about Event Driven Architecture and I’ll give...

Microsoft yesterday released a new ‘May 2009’ CTP for their 'Oslo' toolset. This can be downloaded from Microsoft's web site at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=827122a5-3ca0-4389-a79e-87af37cbf60d&displaylang=en...

LIDNUG (Linked .NET Users Group) is hosting an online chat with me today (Wednesday) from 11:30am to 1pm PST (Pacific Standard Time).  Anyone is free to join and the agenda topic will be open – so bring your questions! Click here to learn more about...

Hi folks, Much more of the BTS09 material (documentation etc) is starting to appear in the masses from MS. Grab it Here and there are a bunch of others you’ll love to get also. BizTalk 2009 Posters p.s. I’ve also added all the Install Guides and all the...

Thomas a fellow MVP has written a great write up on his thoughts and views on WF 4.0 (in it’s current form). Found in the .NET 4.0 Framework Beta – check it out. http://winterdom.com/2009/05/comments-on-the-wf-40-designer Cheers, Mick

The May 2009 CTP drop of the Microsoft Oslo SDK was released today. I was just installing it to check out what’s new, and thought it was a bit funny how Oslo’s minimalistic UI design extends all the way to the CTP installation program:

Our local SQL Tech Specialist Ron alerted me to a change in policy. http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2009/05/19/sql-server-support-policy-for-failover-clustering-and-virtualization-gets-an-update.aspx

I take advantage of both VirtualBox and VirtualPC as core parts of my development environment. I keep several sets of Virtual Machines around on both platforms that I use for core development (writing code) and testing on different platforms. Because of this, I’m constantly switching between the two, depending on which VM I need to use [...]

Finally made some progress on BizUnitExtensions and have released Beta-1 for the new version which now complies with BizUnit 3.0’s object model. This release specifically centres around the main Extensions and the Extensions.BizTalk libraries. Main...