by community-syndication | Feb 7, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
I’ve been crazy busy lately with BizTalk Server. First, I’m happy to announce that Microsoft has recognized me as an MVP for BizTalk Server (and I got nominated for the Connected Systems group as well)! I’m very pleased and look forward to doing as much as I can in the community this year to earn the reward.
As for teaching BizTalk, I’m doing three deliveries of our Applied BizTalk Server for internal Microsoft groups, two of which are India. So, I’ve just returned from Hyderabad and I’m heading back in a week and a half. It is wreaking havoc on my internal clock, but the groups are great and I had a lot of fun teaching the class. Awesome questions and great discussions as many of these people are working with BizTalk daily and already have some areas they wanted to understand more about.
It was also fun to visit Hyderabad. I’ve been to Bangalore once a year ago, so it was interesting to compare. Microsoft has an impressive facility there and they are continuing to build. A very exciting time for the city and the people from what I could tell. I’m looking forward to my return trip and some more excellent Indian food (the
Biryani was an especially good local specialty available right in the MS dining hall). I also got some lessons in Cricket. I knew nothing going in, and I’m still mostly in the dark but at least not completely in the dark. I have several pieces of information to help me know how it is different from baseball, as opposed to just knowing that it
is different, which is where I started.
I’m also frantically “playing” with some early bits of BizTalk R2. I’ve got some upcoming talks where I am going to be showing BTS with WCF, WF and other technologies under the Connected Systems umbrella. So, I have some demos to get working so I don’t get booed off the stage.:) More on these talks in another post.
Finally, I am doing an open enrollment BizTalk course here in Minneapolis in March. If you want to get the best training on BizTalk Server (modest aren’t I) then sign up on the course information page. I’d like to guarantee that the temperature won’t be below 0 when you come, but who knows. 🙂 Either way, it will be a fun informative week.
by community-syndication | Feb 7, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
I am always looking for this list!
http://geekswithblogs.net/benny/archive/2006/12/24/101980.aspx
by community-syndication | Feb 7, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
One of my favorite recent reads has been
The Change Function, by Pip Coburn. The book attempts to answer the tough question of why some technologies take off and others crash and burn. His theory:
The Change Function = f ( user crisis vs. total perceived pain of adoption )
Basically that change only occurs when a user’s current pain outweighs the total perceived pain of adopting the new thing. “Perceived” is a key word in his formula. The book goes on to explain how some recent/future disruptive technology changes can be analyzed against this idea, as well as some of the flops. Although it takes some getting used to his writing style, I quite enjoyed his ideas.
by community-syndication | Feb 7, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Since Fritz first announced our Double Feature brand a year ago, we’ve delivered several offerings using a few differentcombinations of technologies. Our mostpopular combinations are ASP.NET 2.0 + SQL Server 2005 and Windows Communication Foundation + Windows Workflow Foundation. They really seem to work well for folks who want to ramp-up on multiple technologies with only a single training week to spare.
Our next Double Feature on WCF + WF is scheduled for the week of 3/26 in Waltham, MA. I’ll be teaching this one along with our resident Workflow guru Matt Milner. The event is filling up quickly but there are still some seats left. Check out the course page for more information and registration details.
by community-syndication | Feb 6, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
If you are setting up a self correllating child orchestration, and your orchestration is in its own project, you need to make sure that the port type (some.PortType)that is defined has the Type Modifier set to External.
It makes sense, well, the logic makes sense, the error does not. If you are going to be reusing this orchestration in multiple projects and they are not contained in the same assembly, it needs to be set to Public so that the other orchestrations can implement it.
by community-syndication | Feb 6, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
It’s not the first time that both Patrick and myself are in Africa at the same time, but it’s the first time that we are at the same time in the same country: South Africa! This week Patrick is in Cape Town for the MS EMEA SharePoint 2007 Tour and I’m doing the same thing in Johannesburg.
So far it has been a great week; I’m training almost 30 SharePoint fans and the weather is fabulous (around 30 degrees C). Tonight there was a big thunderstorm and with some luck (I had to take more than 50 long exposure shots) I could snap this photo (full size on Flickr):
Being here is actually very funny and strange: in South Africa it’s summer (it’s in the southern hemisphere) and in Belgium it’s winter (it’s in the northern hemisphere). It’s not only the difference in temperature, but the people here are also in a summer mood! Just imagine: I’m sweating over here in my t-shirt and wife just showed snow falling from the Belgian sky via the web cam …
Technorati tags: sharepoint, u2u, southafrica, johannesburg
by community-syndication | Feb 6, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Ok … so in checking the Microsoft Preparing for Daylight Savings Changes in 2007 page, you’ll now see an update on Feb. 2nd that states:
BizTalk Server entries removed after determination product not directly affected by DST2007 issues.
So, my previous post is moot. You’ve got plenty of things to update, but now BizTalk […]
by community-syndication | Feb 6, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
On 20th March 2007 I gave a short presentation about .NET and the COM-Interop threading apartments at the .NET User Group Bonn.
Slides and more (in German) here.
by community-syndication | Feb 6, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
As you can see from my previous post, I’m really digg’in InfoPath 2007 right now. However, one thing I’ve been thinking about is how hard it would be to host InfoPath 2007 forms engine in a custom app, either via a rich Winforms application or a lighter-weight Web form.
It turns out InfoPath Server 2007 provides a few controls that can be used in either environment. First, they provide a COM component called the InfoPathEditorObject (found in ipeditor.dll) for use in unmanaged code. Second, they provide a .NET component calledFormControl (found in Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.FormComponent.dll) for use in managed Winforms applications. And lastly, they provide a WebForm control called XmlFormView for use in ASP.NET applications. You can read more about hosting the Winforms control hereand the ASP.NET WebForm control here.
None of these controls provide much in the way of designing forms. The COM and .NET components allow you to open form instances, create new form instances based on existing form templates, and fill out forms, but they don’t seem to provide any straightforward approach for creating/designing new form templates, at least not that I can see. Darn.
Also, it’s important to note that using these controls doesn’t remove the need to have InfoPath 2007 installed on the machine running the hosting app — the product must be installed in order for the controls to load. The control dll’s ship with the product and are not redistributable.
This XmlFormView control allows you to embed InfoPath forms within existing ASP.NET applications in order to make them fit within your existing skins/chromes and to provide a more seamless experience.This control only allows users to render and fill-out existing forms. And it requires the embedded forms to be hosted via Forms Server 2007 or SharePoint Server 2007 Forms Services for the browser rendering piece.
The InfoPath team has done a killer job but it looks like I’ve already identified my first big “ask” for InfoPath v.Next — make it easy to host and customize the template design experience within my own apps, and perhaps even provide a simplified template design experience via an Ajax-based designer that I can host within my Web apps for increased reach in user report generation.
Is that too much to ask? 😉
by community-syndication | Feb 6, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
I know this has been posted before but the very best place to find information on Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals (DataDude as Gert Drapers calls it) is on the Database Professional Team Center web site! There are a lot of links to great video content, on-demand webcasts, technical articles and blogs from the team members.
The other great resource for questions, issues and support is the Visual Studio Team System – Database Professionals Forum on MSDN. The DBPro team actively participates in this forum and it's a great place to get answers!
Technorati Tags: Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals, DataDude, VSTEDP
