by community-syndication | Dec 4, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Business Process Trends had an article posted by Steve Minsky who gave the example:
- If a customer has good credit then assign a credit rate of 6
- If a customer has good credit then assign a credit rate of 8
These rules, however syntactically correct, contradict each other; they would cause the arbitrary assignment of a credit rating of “6” to some customers and “8” to others. This intermittent kind of business logic error is extremely difficult to diagnose with even state of the art testing tools. After the system goeslive, it may be months with unknown losses of customers or unprofitable accounts until the error is detected and corrected.
Extremely difficult yes, but Acumen Business has put this functionality inside their Rule Manager. Discover your anomalies in Biztalk policies with the brand new Rule Manager here.
Note: that rules that use facts from assemblies in the GAC are causing problems on the rule anomaly algorithms. This hopefully will be addressed soon.
by community-syndication | Dec 4, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
If you are able to join us on our UX tour of NZ this week I’d love to see you, http://gobeyond.net.nz
I promised we were following some major new announcements well you can keep track of them here.
The summary,
We have a couple of site refreshes, http://www.microsoft.com/expression – http://www.microsoft.com/design
We have released Expression Web, and new Ctps of Expression Blend and Expression Design. Also if you are a professional photographer an know of iView Media Pro it is now Microsoft Expression Media.
Also for those of you that have been waiting for your first early look at WPF/E (Cross platform/ browser WPF subset) it has now made it’s first Customer Technology Preview.
Enjoy and come join us this week for a demo.
by community-syndication | Dec 3, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Lots of cool things about R2 in the pipeline and one of them is BizTalk’s deep integration
with WCF.
What does that mean for you? If you havent already, start looking at WCF as going
forward I believe that the majority of BizTalk solutions will be incorporating WCF
in a big way.
I’m currently writing a course for R2/WCF/WF stuff and I thought I’d jot down a table
so WCF things stick in my mind.
WCF Endpoint = Address + Contract + Binding
WCF Binding = Transport + Message Encoding
WCF Contract = Message/Data details
WCF Address = <moniker>://<server>:<Port>/<endpoint URI>
Binding Types
-
BasicHTTPBinding – Maximum interoprability through conformity to
the WS-Basic Profile 1.1
-
WSHttpBinding – HTTP communication in conformity to the WS-* procotcols.
-
WSDualHttpBinding – Duplex HTTP communication, by which the receiver
of an initial message will not reply directly to the initial sender, but may transmit
any number of responses via HTTP in conformity to WS-* protocols.
-
WSFederationBinding – HTTP communication, in which access to the
resources of a service can be controlled based on credentials issued by an explicitly-identified
credential provider.
-
NetTCPBinding – Secure, reliable, high-performance communication
between WCF software components across the network.
-
NetNamedPipeBinding – Secure, reliable, high-performance communication
between WCF s/w components on the same machine.
-
NetMSMQBinding – WCF communicating over MSMQ
-
MsmqIntegrationBinding – WCF entities communicating via MSMQ
-
NetPeerTcpBinding – WCF entities communicating via Windows Peer-To-Peer
services
(ones that are missing at the moment – ‘Interprocess Communication Binding’ IPC, was
in the early betas…..and SQL Server Service Broker)
by community-syndication | Dec 3, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
I’ve just posted to the Commerce team blog on how to use Fiddler to capture SOAP packets that are sent between CS2007 business user applications and Web services – a very handy troubleshooting technique.
http://blogs.msdn.com/commerce/archive/2006/12/03/using-fiddler-to-capture-soap-messages-between-the-cs2007-web-services-and-clients.aspx
I’ve got another blog post in the works on DateTime handling in the various Commerce Server subsystems and just need to collect a little more information on Data Warehouse DateTime handling before I post that.
I likely won’t be posting to this blog very frequently, if at all, so you can simply check the Commerce Team Blog for all the latest from me and the rest of the fine folks on the Commerce team.
ciao,
-David
by community-syndication | Dec 2, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
David McGhee and I were tasked with giving a RFID session at the recent Microsoft
SOA Conference here in Sydney.
How hard can it be I thought?…..David got it all under control……me….I’ll stick
my hand up for the ‘demo dolly’ and give a 15-20min demo (or that’s what I thought)
Enter the world of RFID readers (it can write to the tags as well…so dont be mislead
by the ‘reader’)
We needed tags! So the UMD folks in Melbourne responded fantastically given the phone
call in the afternoon, we had tags in our hot little hands the following morning –
well done guys!!!
Armed with my trusty Intermec RFID mobile Reader (IP4) and 30MB worth of install files
for their SDK – I thought I’m armed and dangerous.
“What to give a demo on?”
David & I chatted about this and came up with:
(a) delegate registers at 9am on the day (we were still ‘writing’ peoples
IDs at 8.45am that morning – talk about cutting it fine 
)
(b) when they walk into sessions/halls etc.up on the screen flashes their
name somehow and says ‘welcome’
(c) for a ‘lucky’ door prize – as the person walks past the reader for the
session, it randomly writes back to the tag to indicate they were a winner (this is
the optional extension – just in case I couldnt sleep)
So David decided to built the ‘welcome’ up on the screen component.
Were are both a big fan of MSMQ so……a simple queue with the persons details in
the message was cool for David to flash up on the screen. I always believe a picture
tells 1000 words and people arent really going to be too interested in what happens
at the back end…..colours, lights action is where it’s at.
David joined me in the sleep deprivation stakes (we both have little ones at home…reality
hits home).
We had a dodgy ‘ad-hoc’ wireless network coming off my laptop, RFID Services running
as a virtual image on my laptop, a mobile RFID PPC reader that wanted to connect to
any wireless network going and David’s MS Corp policy locked down Vista laptop – saying
“here’s a public workgroup mode MSMQ……sure you can send to it 
)
What a receipe!!! Did we pull it off……oh yeah!
David’s application:
(a) was written in XAML, WPF
(b) Said ‘Welcome’ in not just English, but 32 different languages – EVEN Japanese!
Little squiggle characters etc. (I just took his word for it that it said ‘Welcome’)
(c) looked great!
(d) had a whole stack of animations and bubble paths that floated showing each persons
details for 6 seconds. Max of 4 bubbles on the screen at any one time.
(e) listened to a local private MSMQ.
Micks application:
(a) wrote a PPC application that did nearly all the functions (took 1 week) with the
RFID reader – using the Intermec BRI apis.
(b) plugged the Intermec IP4 reader into Microsoft RFID Services (Sept CTP) and grabbed
the provider from Rob (Intermec US based developer – sensational help from those guys)
– did what I did in (a) in around 30 mins.
(c) Wrote a ‘process event handler’ to process each of the tags coming through and
obtain the corresponding delegate details. Finally wrote to MSMQ ready for the UI.
(I want to move some of this into the BizTalk Rules Engine that ships with RFID services)
Issues:
The bits I was using were all pretty rough and ready – the provider, rfid services
etc. Quite frequently things would have some pretty major exceptions – due to what
I was trying to do, through to not all the expected data being present during a tag
read.
Whenever an Exception occured it usually meant that the reader needed to be ‘warm
booted’
Fantastic relationship
There are so many ways to setup RFID Services with readers, from the readers being
pretty ‘dumb’ to have a serious amount of intelligence on the reader and RFID services
just goes off what the reader ‘says’.
I decided to go for the latter and here’s why
(1) When we read tags on mass, this is usually done via Async RFID Reads (from the
perspective of RFID Services). During this mode, our Reader was constantly checking
if a tag was in the area, so no write back to the tag was possible as the reader was
saying ‘I’m reading, go away’.
(2) We could set this reader up to Poll – every 5secs or so, shoot out a pulse and
say “who’s there?” – problem this was still an Async read.
(3) Rob helped out greatly here – when I decided to let my Pocket PC App do the ‘reading’
and send back ‘READ Tag notifications’ to RFID Services. This allowed me to during
the event processing (c.f. a biztalk pipeline) – open up a connection back to the
reader (through Intermec APIs) and tell the Reader to Write a tag! (I actually didnt
get this part done, but we’re close)
All in all – what an experience. Learnt alot in the area of hardware, jiggles, and
tweaking cables to get things ‘just right’
And I’ve got to say I’ve had some wonderful help from Anush (MS RFID Services Product
manager), Matt and Rob (from Intermec) – really
refreshing to get such good and responsive help.
Thanks all!
When I get the code packaged and some screen shots – I’ll post.
by community-syndication | Dec 1, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
The BizTalk Server Developer Center has been updated to highlight integration with WF and WCF.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/biztalk/
Windows Workflow and BizTalk Server 2006 Code Sample
This sample demonstrates how to integrate Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 and Windows Workflow Foundation through Web services.
Reference Application Pack for Retail
This white paper, along with the sample application, showcases integration using service orientation with BizTalk Server 2006, Windows Communication Foundation, and Microsoft Business Scorecard Manager.
Windows Workflow Foundation Overview
Windows Workflow Foundation is the programming model, engine, and tools for quickly building workflow-enabled applications on Windows. It consists of a namespace, an in-process workflow engine, and designers for Visual Studio 2005.
Windows