BizTalk Gurus

Turn learning Office into a game

QuickLearn Team Blog — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:58:00 GMT

After spending hours learning to play the fake guitar simply to get a higher score, I often wondered why someone couldn’t make a game to learn useful skills. Where’s arithmetic Hero? Going-to-bed-on-time Hero? Microsoft Office Ribbon Hero? Well, at least the last one finally exists. Microsoft Ribbon Hero lets you learn to use the Microsoft Ribbon and earn points while doing it. They even have Facebook integration so you can compete against your friends and coworkers. (My FB account is...(read more)

New CTP Available for Download: WF Migration Kit

The .NET Endpoint — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:47:42 GMT

Happy Monday! It’s an exciting time here as we start ramping up for launch next month. Within the product group, there has been a flurry of activity as they squash their bugs, and the final polish is being placed on the Visual Studio release. In the business group, we’re busy finalizing web content and launch material that you’ll start seeing over the next few months. On Friday, in preparation of the release of the new Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) runtime in .NET 4 (WF4), the team has released...(read more)

Some VS 2010 RC Updates (including patches for Intellisense and Web Designer fixes)

ScottGu's Blog — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:07:29 GMT

[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] We are continuing to make progress on shipping Visual Studio 2010. I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who has downloaded and tried out the VS 2010 Release Candidate, and especially to those who have sent us feedback or reported issues with it. This data has been invaluable in helping us find and fix remaining bugs before we ship the final release. Last month...(read more)

A few announcements for those in the UK

ScottGu's Blog — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 07:04:30 GMT

[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] This a quick post to announce a few upcoming events for those in the UK. I’ll be presenting in Glasgow, Scotland on March 25th I’m doing a free 5 hour presentation in Glasgow on March 25th. I’ll be covering VS 2010, ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET Web Forms 4, ASP.NET MVC 2, Silverlight and potentially show off a few new things that haven’t been announced yet. You can learn more about...(read more)

Form, function and complexity in rule processing

Charles Young — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 19:39:25 GMT

Tim Bass posted on ‘ Orwellian Event Processing ’. I was involved in a heated exchange in the comments, and he has more recently published a post entitled ‘ Disadvantages of Rule-Based Systems (Part 1) ’. Whatever the rights and wrongs of our exchange, it clearly failed to generate any agreement or understanding of our different positions. I don't particularly want to promote further argument of that kind, but I do want to take the opportunity of offering a different perspective on rule-processing...(read more)

San Diego:Windows Azure Conference is Tomorrow!

Blog.BrianLoesgen.com — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:59:38 GMT

San Diegans, time is running out, the Windows Azure conference (I blogged about it here ) is *tomorrow*. This is a great opportunity to ramp-up quickly on what Windows Azure is, and how it can be used in the real world. Come see why everyone is so excited, and why everyone agrees that this is a major shift in our industry. This is not future-tech, the cloud isn’t vapor anymore :) – this is live and production-ready today. I will be presenting on Windows Azure platform AppFabric, and specifically...(read more)

PowerShell provider supports BRE deployments

BizTalk Messages — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 08:59:59 GMT

Just a quick link to a post on Maxime’s blog: http://maxime-labelle.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!D8D9369449D177DA!236.entry Maxime added support for deploying vocabularies and policies to the PowerShell provider for BizTalk. In our opinion this is the easiest way to deploy BRE artefacts. For now it is only available when you grab and build the latest sources. It will be included in the final [...]...(read more)

More on untyped messages and Business Rules Engine

BizTalk Messages — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:19:05 GMT

I a previous post I described a way to deal with untyped messages in the Business Rule Engine. This allows for flexibility in scenarios where you want to use a single set of rules (lets call it an “untyped policy”) on multiple types of messages. Untyped policies work great when tested directly in the Business Rules [...]...(read more)

Untyped messages and Business Rules Engine (part 2)

BizTalk Messages — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:14:41 GMT

This is a follow up post to my previous post on this topic. The method described in that post doesn’t seem to work when the policy is called from an orchestration. For more background information see this blogpost. I this post I will use the exact same sample as in the previous post. These are the [...]...(read more)

TechEd Middle East (Dubai) wraps up

Service Station, by Aaron Skonnard — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:06:20 GMT

I’ve really enjoyed my time here in Dubai for the first-ever TechEd Middle East . Pooya Darugar , my track owner from the local Microsoft office, told me that this was actually the first “paid” technical conference to be held in the area, so it was a pretty major undertaking. They had an excellent turnout, somewhere between 1600-1800 attendees, and even had folks showing up on the last day with money to get in. Suffice it say, the show was a great success. Amory Somers Vine and the rest of...(read more)

BizTalk 2006 R2 version number not updated after applying SP 1

BizTalk Messages — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:59:30 GMT

In the past I have published overview tables of BizTalk version numbers. I used to publish a new table whenever a new version or service pack of BizTalk server was released. I wanted to do the same after the release of SP1 for BizTalk server 2006 R2. Unfortunately it appears that the version number is not [...]...(read more)

Determine BizTalk version using PowerShell

BizTalk Messages — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:59:04 GMT

I wrote a very simple PowerShell script which allows you to easily determine the installed BizTalk version and service pack level. You cannot just look at the version number anymore because it seems SP1 of BizTalk Server 2006 R2 does not update the version number. This means the version numbers for BizTalk 2006 R2 without and [...]...(read more)

Interview Series: Four Questions With … Mikael Hakansson

Richard Seroter's Architecture Musings — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:18:57 GMT

Here we are at the 18th interview in my riveting series of questions and answers with thought leaders in the “connected technologies” space. All the MVPs are back from the recently MVP Summit and should be back on speaking terms with one another. Let’s find out if our interview subject, Mikael Håkansson, still likes me [...]...(read more)

New 3-Day BizTalk Server 2009 ESB 2.0 Toolkit Course from QuickLearn

QuickLearn Team Blog — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:15:00 GMT

On March 15th, students from around the world will be attending QuickLearn’s newly revised 3-day version of BizTalk Server 2009 ESB Toolkit 2.0 course . QuickLearn’s expert developers just added an entire third day of advanced hands-on training that teaches you how to build a complete end-to-end ESB 2.0 solution. Attendees will learn the A to Z of the ESB 2.0 Toolkit including installation and configuration, creating a flexible, secure, and reusable infrastructure for services, and building...(read more)

BizTalk Data Services: Making BizTalk more RESTful with OData

Jesus Rodriguez's WebLog — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:05:00 GMT

By Jesus Rodriguez, Uri Katsir, Tellago, Inc The code referenced on this post is available at Tellago's DevLabs CodePlex workspace: http://tellago.codeplex.com/releases/view/41246 Introduction During the last few years, BizTalk Server has established...( read more )...(read more)

Announcing Tellago DevLabs on CodePlex

Jesus Rodriguez's WebLog — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:02:00 GMT

It's been a few weeks since my last blog post mainly due to the fact that it's been an extremely busy month for us at Tellago . We have been heads down working on several fun projects that we are expecting to share with the dev community in the next few...( read more )...(read more)

“Route Failed Messages” routes the wrong message – really?

BizTalk Server Team Blog — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:21:00 GMT

Consider the following scenario: You have an adapter on a Receive Location, which submits a message in Format A into BizTalk. The Pipeline configured on this Receive Location converts the message into Format B. Assume that there is no map configured on the Receive Port. You have the “Route Failed Messages” option enabled on the Receive Port. You have set up an orchestration (or Send Port) which subscribes to the Error Reports (i.e., the failed messages which are routed due to the “Route Failed Messages...(read more)

BizTalk User Group Sweden - BizTalk Host Integration Server Adapters

Mikael Håkanssons Blog — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:12:00 GMT

Support for integration with IBM Mainframe and AS 400 is often mentioned as a key feature of BizTalk. And as many of these system are still in use, the knowledge of these adapters should be widely spread; -but unfortunately it is not. In fact, it has been a challenge to even find anyone to do a session about this topic. It was not until we sent out a request for speaker on our blogs that we eventually found someone qualified to do the job. This is a great opportunity for anyone calling themselves...(read more)

Windows Server AppFabric Beta 2 now available

Blog.BrianLoesgen.com — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 05:38:11 GMT

The AppFabric team hit another milestone today with the public availability of AppFabric Beta 2. Congrats team!!! Now, because I know there must be some confusion out there, AppFabric is a brand, as I blogged about here . I’ve been doing some posts here lately about extending BizTalk ESB to Windows Azure AppFabric, but that’s not the AppFabric this is about, this is Windows Server AppFabric. It brings together what was formerly codename “Dublin” and codename “Velocity”, and provides a host for WF...(read more)

New white paper “BizTalk ESB Toolkit: Core Components and Examples”

Blog.BrianLoesgen.com — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 05:03:42 GMT

A new white paper was released a few days ago by Microsoft, written by MVP Jon Flanders, on the ESB Toolkit. It’s a well written paper that walks through the architecture, and shows examples, and serves as both an overview and a mini-tutorial. Great place to start if you want to come up to speed on this. He REALLY nails it well in the summary, I would quote it here but that would violate the copyright, so I’ll paraphrase: “hey this is really cool and powerful, and adds tremendous business value”...(read more)

Windows Server AppFabric Beta 2 Available and Feature Complete

QuickLearn Team Blog — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:07:02 GMT

The .NET Endpoint blog announced this morning the availability of Windows Server AppFabric Beta 2, which can be downloaded at http://msdn.microsoft.com/appfabric . According to the announcement , Beta 2 was written to work against the RC of Visual Studio 2010, and is apparently now feature complete: This build represents our “feature complete” milestone. That is, it contains all the features that we plan to ship in Windows Server AppFabric v1 by Q3 of 2010. For this release we focused on building...(read more)

Windows Server AppFabric hits beta 2

Matt's Musings — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:26:34 GMT

You can download the bits and get some great samples in the MSDN development center . AppFabric is the combination of the distributed caching features previously codenamed “Velocity” and the composite application management features previously codenamed “Dublin”. These extensions to Windows Server continue to make it a great platform for building applications. I’m excited about the tooling that AppFabric brings to the management of Workflow Services as it makes it much easier to...(read more)

Getting SQL Server 2008 Management Studio Express installed on Windows 7

Matt's Musings — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:19:05 GMT

This morning I found myself in need of the SQL Server management studio on a new box I built a few months ago. So far, I’ve only installed Visual Studio 2010 RC and the SQL Server 2008 Express that came with it. I was first directed to use the Web Platform Installer which, while it is a great tool, didn’t provide any details with the installation ultimately failed. After trying to run the installer as an administrator directly (outside the Web PI) I was warned that I needed to re-apply...(read more)

Windows Server AppFabric Beta 2 is Available!

The .NET Endpoint — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:00:00 GMT

We are excited to announce that the Beta 2 release of Windows Server AppFabric is now available for download via http://msdn.microsoft.com/appfabric . This is the Windows Server AppFabric build that works with the RC (Release Candidate) build of Visual Studio 2010/.NET 4. Windows Server AppFabric is a set of application services focused on improving the speed, scale, and management of Web, Composite, and Enterprise applications. We encourage developers and IT professionals building ASP.NET applications...(read more)

So I lost a bet…

Mikael Håkanssons Blog — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:11:13 GMT

Apparently, this post has no relevance to BizTalk or any related technology… While under the influence of alcohol. Kent Weare had me convinced we should have this ridiculous bet (but it seamed reasonable at the time), where if Sweden would win the gold medal in the Olympics, he would post a picture of the Swedish hockey team, and if Canada…you get the point…so here it is… …and yes -I’m humiliated!...(read more)

SBUG April 2010

Michael Stephenson — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 23:42:40 GMT

We are just putting together the details for the SBUG meeting in April, the registration page is already open on the following link http://sbugapril2010.eventbrite.com/...(read more)

SBUG May 2010

Michael Stephenson — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 23:41:18 GMT

We have an SBUG meeting in may planned where Udi Dahan (nServiceBus) will join us. Check out the following for details: http://sbugmay2010.eventbrite.com/...(read more)

No Intellisense with VS 2010 RC (and how to fix it)

ScottGu's Blog — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 07:47:24 GMT

[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] Patrick recently posted about something he found odd when installing the VS 2010 RC – which was that code intellisense for C# wasn’t working. When he pulled up Tools->Options and checked under the Text Editor->C# settings he noticed that the reason Intellisense wasn’t working was because his profile had them turned off – and he couldn’t understand why it was...(read more)

Must have hotfixes for BizTalk Server 2009 Developers

Be Logical - writings by Johan Hedberg — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:05:57 GMT

Hotfix for resolving issues with references between projects: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=977428 Hotfix for problem with orchestrations saying “The expression that you have entered is not valid.” when they are in fact valid: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=979153...(read more)

Day-long Azure Conference in San Diego, March 6th

Blog.BrianLoesgen.com — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:15:25 GMT

The San Diego .NET User Group will be hosting our first Azure day-long conference on March 6th. This first one will be more overview level, we’re planning at least one other which will be more focused and deeper for later this year, and then perhaps more after that. For this first one, we will be covering: Azure Intro (David Chou) Azure Development (Daniel Egan) SQL Azure (Lynn Langit) Azure AppFabric (Brian Loesgen) And yes, the way it turned out, all speakers for this are from Microsoft...(read more)