September, 2009

A couple of months ago I joined with Michel Hubert and Maxime Labelle to build the next version of the Powershell provider for BizTalk. (Also see my earlier posts here and here). We´re currently very close to releasing the first beta of this new version...

Just a little plug for the team at Black Marble. On 3rd December they will be hosting the Northern Architecture Forum event. If you work in the North of England this should be an excellent event to attend with some high quality people and some interesting...

[Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman ] For a forthcoming celebration, I've been working on a jukebox web application: The client controls the music being played on the server, so its intended for local networks where you want shared control...

Microsoft recently RTM-ed a new release of their server operation system ‘Windows Server 2008 R2’. Although debatable I think they did the right thing when they decided to only release a 64 bit version. From a developer perspective however there is a...

Recently I had some trouble when I wanted to create a new orchestration in Visual Studio 2008. The template for the orchestration was gone while the other templates (schemas, maps, etc.) where visible: I could easily fix this by repairing the BizTalk...

We got together recently at teched, and spoke about the concept of workflow, and SharePoint being a great host for human based workflow. No I have not changed my spots to become a SharePoint person, I have enhanced my spots my looking above and beyond...

You are probably asking what is StreamInsight. Well, it is the platform for performing Complex Event Processing (CEP) from Microsoft. Actually to quote exactly what it is - it is a " platform for the continuous and incremental processing of unending...

This is a repost of Ahmed Irkakene’s mail to his fellow BizTalk colleagues.   ======================================================================   I have been working with a customer last time to install several BTS 2009 systems.   Customer was cloning  his initial VMware system. As a result he is facing problem with MSDTC:  “MSDTC not configured correctly.” MSDTC component, during its transactional operations, needs basically SID and NetBios name to be resolved...

According to the DTCTest tool documentation , you create a DSN, and run the DTCTester.exe When I ran it, I got the following error: SQLSTATE=IM002,Native error=0,msg='[Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager] Data source name not found and no default driver...

The 2009 Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is less than a couple months away, and the team is starting to create content and demos for the event. The team has been working with PDC event management over the last couple months to secure sessions and space at the event; and I wanted to share with you how the event is shaping up, as well as make a plug for our sessions. The event will deliver a lot of really great material, as well as provide you with access to folks who are writing the code...

[Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman ] One of the frustrations of working with WiX is that when you want to do something out of the ordinary, chances are it's provided somewhere in a WiX extension, but unless you trawl through the XSDs...

At first sight, StreamInsight doesn’t appear to offer any support for dynamic queries. Once you have got over the initial ‘wow’ factor of creating continuous queries over streams using LINQ, rather than some SQL dialect or specialised DSL, the reality...

Well folks after my last tutorial, Finally Connected OCS to Trixbox I’m getting more and more questions about the OCS side of things…so I thought I’d expand on our OCS 2007 R2 side of the setup. So the internal setup looks a little like this: So here...

Over the past few months we have talked to a number of customers and partners about our plans for upcoming Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) events.  We have heard loud and clear that travel budgets are limited, and have evaluated the various ways...

While working for a client we had to use some custom XSLT within BizTalk to complete some requirements that was outside the bounds of the BizTalk Mapper and orchestrations. Along with what we were already doing the client came to us and wanted a value...

I woke up on Wednesday morning to a thick soup blanket of red. No buildings, no cliffs, no grass…just Red. (We’d been teleported to Mars I thought) Pretty amazing stuff, here’s some piccies that capture the moment :)

External assemblies are being called from within BizTalk orchestrations in almost every BizTalk application. Knowing how to debug them is important. This guideline will show you how you can debug those external assemblies on your workstation or a remote box using a very simple sample application. Debugging external assemblies on a local box with one [...]

I’m excited to announce a new program – WebsiteSpark – that Microsoft is launching today. WebsiteSpark is designed for independent web developers and web development companies that build web applications and web sites on behalf of others.  It enables...

[Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman ] If you make heavy use of lazy-loaded properties, the repetitive if-backing-field-null-then-instantiate code can be centralized in an extension method on the object class: /// <summary> /// Extension...