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Many of will like myself will code once and a while. As a BizTalk professional it is inevitable that you will code for instance a pipeline component, a helper class, functoid, or other custom code to support your solution or test. There are many tools available to make you more productive and provide...

In a few weeks, I’ll be heading to New Orleans to speak at Microsoft TechEd for the first time. My topic – Patterns of Cloud Integration – is an extension of things I’ve talked about this year in Amsterdam, Gothenburg, and in my latest Pluralsight course. However, I’ll also be covering some entirely...

Last week, the first public beta of the Microsoft.Diagnostics.Runtime library was released. This is a very cool library that can be used to write automated dump analysis of processes hosting the CLR. One of the first things you will need in order to use ClrMD is get a hold of the DAC library for the...

A couple months back, the folks at Salesforce.com reached out to me and asked if I’d be interested in helping them beef up their .NET-oriented content. Given that I barely say “no” to anything – and this sounded fun – I took them up on the offer. I ended up contributing three articles that covered: ...

I’ve been hard at work on a new Pluralsight video course and it’s now live and available for viewing. This course, Patterns of Cloud Integration, takes you through how application and data integration differ when adding cloud endpoints. The course highlights the 4 integration styles/patterns introduced...

Today, Microsoft made a number of nice updates to their Visual Studio tools and templates. On thing pointed out in Scott Hanselman’s blog post about it (and Scott Guthrie’s post as well), was the update that lets developers publish ASP.NET Web Site projects to WIndows Azure Web Sites. Given that I haven...

Now that cloud providers are maturing and stabilizing their platforms, we’re seeing better and better dev tooling get released. Three major .NET-friendly cloud platforms (Windows Azure, AWS, and Iron Foundry) have management tools baked right into Visual Studio, and I thought it’d be fun to compare them...

As many of you know, the BizTalk Team is putting on a BizTalk Summit. The BizTalk Summit 2012 is a 2 day pre-release event to prepare for the launch of the next version of BizTalk Server. Activities at the summit will include a Keynote by Scott Guthrie, product roadmap, and technical sessions by the...

I’m glad to present the first release of BizTalk Zombie Management. You can find it at http://btszombiemanagement.codeplex.com/ What is BizTalk Zombie Management ? This is a codeplex project. It proposes a solution to process zombie message after their zombified state. It’s a windows service...

I am working on a project where we are uploading client files to Azure Blob Storage.  Blob storage is perfect for this type of application and uploading them with public access is the default behavior.  Therefore any anonymous client can read blob data out of your container.  This doesn...

I think we’ve moved well past the point of believing that “every service should be a workflow” and other things that I heard when Microsoft was first plugging their Workflow Foundation. However, there still seem to be many cases where executing a visually modeled workflow is useful. Specifically, they...

Scott Guthrie announced a handful of changes to the Windows Azure Portal, and among them, was the long-awaited migration of Service Bus resources from the old-and-busted Silverlight Portal to the new HTML hotness portal. You’ll find some really nice additions to the Service Bus Queues and Topics. In...

I’ve been doing some work with APIs lately and finally had the chance to dig into the ASP.NET Web API a bit more. While it’s technically brand new (released with .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012), the Web API has been around in beta form for quite a bit now. For those of us who [...] Blog Post by: Richard...

Further to a question I recently answered on StackOverflow, I wanted to expand a little on when it is necessary to restart a BizTalk Host Instance, and when this is overkill. Host Instance restart required Any change to an underlying datatype, map or orchestration will require a restart of the corresponding...

Welcome to the 42nd interview in my series of talks with thought leaders in the “connected systems” space. This month, we have Shan McArthur who is the Vice President of Technology for software company Adxstudio, a Microsoft MVP for Dynamics CRM, blogger and Windows Azure enthusiast. You can find him...

Donnie Berkholz of the analysis firm RedMonk recently posted an article about observing tech trends by monitoring book sales. He saw a resurgence of interest in Java, a slowdown of interest in Microsoft languages (except PowerShell), upward movement in Python, and declining interesting in SQL. While...

Yesterday, Microsoft kicked out the first public beta of the Service Bus for Windows software. You can use this to install and maintain Service Bus queues and topics in your own data center (or laptop!). See my InfoQ article for a bit more info. I thought I’d take a stab at installing this software on...

Sometimes you can’t run a debugger in a local environment and you have to remotely debug your deployed code.  This can be a tricky process and if there is a missed step along the way, can prove to be a pretty annoying troubleshooting process.  NOTE: In order to run a remote debugging session...

Recently when deploying a site to IIS I got the following error. I tried several troubleshooting options such as checking the IIS mapping configuration to see if the .aspx pages were an accepted page extension, folder permissions on the deployment folder,  and I knew for a fact that .net was correctly...

Recently when deploying an application out to IIS we had the need to deploy a sub application within the same domain.  Essentially, what we were trying to do was make the sub application an extension of the parent application, but live in separate app pools and the code base would be kept separate...

I recently ran into a requirement to both transmit and receive documents using “Plain Old Xml”. The system we were integrating was not able to understand the concept of namespaces in an Xml document, but BizTalk requires them, as messages are determined by the combination of a document’s...

I was thinking about this topic today, and as someone who built the AWS Developer Fundamentals course for Pluralsight, is a Microsoft MVP who plays with Windows Azure a lot, and has an unnatural affinity for PaaS platforms like Cloud Foundry / Iron Foundry and Force.com, I figured that I had some opinions...

In the previous post I covered the Messaging Channel group of patterns. In this post, I will cover the Message Routing Group patterns. This group contains: Content Based Router, Message Filter, Recipient List, Splitter, Aggregator, Resequencer, Composed Message Processor, Scatter-Gather, Process Manager...

For years we have all utilized Gregor Hohpe’s Enterprise Integration Patterns book (and the web site ).  Many of these patterns, if not most, are well known and there are many resources out there that talk about how these patterns can be implemented.  There are also a number of resources that...

At the most recent MS MVP Summit, Dean Robertson, founder of IT consultancy Mexia, approached me about visiting Australia for a speaking tour. Since I like both speaking and koalas, this seemed like a good match. As a result, we’ve organized sessions for which you can now register to attend. I’ll be...