by community-syndication | Feb 16, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
In many scenarios, you will write a business rule against a type and expect the rule engine to separately analyze and act upon each instance of the type that is asserted into the engine. For example, if you write a rule against a .NET type and assert three .NET objects of that type into the rule engine working memory, the rule engine performs match-conflict resolution-action phases on each .NET object separately. In some scenarios, however, you will want to analyze multiple instances of a given type simultaneously in a rule. This sample demonstrates how to analyze multiple instances of a type in a business rule.
(Download the attachment, and then go through the readme.doc first)
by community-syndication | Feb 16, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
So the BizTalk 2004 Technical Articles page is one that’s at the top of my browser’s bookmarks list. It’s still very relevant for BizTalk 2006 design/development. Today I bumped into the BizTalk 2006 Technical Articles page, which I swear hasn’t been there that long. Individually I’ve seen some of these white papers, […]
by community-syndication | Feb 16, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
It’s seems
RFID is everywhere all of a sudden and it wasn’t that long ago that no one knew what it was. Just the other night there was a whole news special on it called
Spy Chips–apparently there’s a group of protestors out there convinced that corporations/government plan to
track our every move with this technology. Thanks to Hollywood it doesn’t seem far-fetched, plus without the conspiracy angle, it would be much too boring for prime time news.
I’m not convinced that RFID will amount to much any time soon. There are some big barriers. Prices need to drop and the technology will have to improve significantly first. Sure, there are some perfect scenarios where RFID fits like a charm (toll/bus passes, high-value asset tracking, etc) but for the vast majority of businesses, especially the big supply-chain warehouse scenarios, the benefits aren’t as clear to me.
How does RFID differ from traditional barcodes? Barcodes are only capable of identifying the type of a product whereas RFID chips can carry much more information, and they can therefore identify specific instances of a product and where it currently is. Bar codes need line-of-sight for a read whereas RFID just has to be within a certain range. These differences promise to increase the amount of potential automation in inventory tracking and warehouse management systems but what’s the real business ROI in this case? Is it going to save the business significant money or just make it easier to track things? And if the latter, how many of these businesses really care about having that level of automated tracking?
It seems to me that barcodes work pretty well for the majority, at least given the current cost/complexity.
Wal-Mart has been one of the biggest proponents. Several years ago they decided to adopt RFID as a way to streamline their supply chain and therefore asked all of their suppliers to kindly comply if they wished to continue doing business with them. Fully implementing an RFID solution within a typical warehouse is easily a multi-million dollar project between hardware, software, training, etc. So what did these Wal-Mart suppliers do? They simply figured out a way to manually slap RFID chips on outgoing palettes and called it good. They just didn’t see the benefit for them to absorb the cost of embracing RFID internally. But it kept Wal-Mart happy.
Having said all this, I do believe RFID will gain traction as price/complexity come down over the years ahead. But it’s going to take some pioneers to blaze a trail for the rest of the industry and prove its worth. And I bet there are enough bigger-ROI candidates out there to fuel the effort. We’ll see.
It’s interesting to note that Microsoft is adding some compelling RFID support to the R2 release of BizTalk Server 2006. I had the privilege to watch a presentation on it yesterday and was impressed with how easy they’re trying to make it for developers — something Microsoft is typically good at — so that’s promising.
I’m very interested to see how much traction RFID gets from enterprises already using BizTalk Server 2006.
What’s your take?
by community-syndication | Feb 16, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
The article describes how BizTalk Server 2006 integrates with Web services standards via the SOAP, WSE 2.0, and WCF (new in R2) adapters that come with BizTalk.
In a future piece, I’ll cover the R2 WCF adapters in depth.
by community-syndication | Feb 16, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
My first article in the
Foundations column on Windows Workflow Foundation is now live on the MSDN Magazine site. I find tracking to be one of the most powerful features of WF and easily the most frequently used extension model, outside of custom activities, to solve real business problems. The article was fun to write and I’m having fun finishing up the next installment on the ActivityExecutionContext. That one should be published in the June issue.
Enjoy and as always, any feedback is welcome.
by community-syndication | Feb 16, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
One of my students in the November Windows Workflow class suggested that we have an RSS feed for our public courses so people can easily stay up to date on where and whenwe are offering courses. Now you can thanks to Aaron. You can get to the blogor right to the RSS feed. These entries will also show up in our Pluralsight aggregated feed, so if you are already subscribed to that, you will get the entries through that RSS feed also. Other suggestions are always welcome and I look forward to seeing you in a class soon!
Note that right now we have a single class on the feed, my Applied BizTalk Server class coming up in March. We didn’t want to flood the aggregate feed with all of our upcoming classes so we will add them in gradually.
by community-syndication | Feb 15, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
We’ve received a bunch of requests for an RSS feed containing our upcoming course schedule. Hence, check out our new Course Schedule Announcementsblog! Whenever we schedule a new public course, the details will automatically appear on this blog. So if you’re interested in our training dates and locations, subscribe now.
If you’re already subscribed to our popular aggregated feed (includes all Pluralsight blogs), don’t worry about subscribing to Course Schedule Announcementsbecause it will be included in the aggregated feed.
by community-syndication | Feb 15, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
by community-syndication | Feb 15, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Did you ever see the error message “LNK1104: cannot open file ‘c:\Program.obj'”? No need to say that you are not that kind of a programmer who generates OBJ files in the root of disk C:… So, what’s up and how to fix that?
Either
use short 8.3 path in additional dependencies, or put the long path
into “Linker | General | Additional Library Directories” and simply the
name of the library without path into Additional Dependencies.
I
realize that getting such a message is a sort of shock (I’ve got it
today myself and still feel it :-)), here is the secret:
“C:\Program.obj” is the long path like “C:\Program Files\Microsoft
Platform SDK for Windows Server 2003 R2\Lib” cut after the first space
and appended with the default extension “.obj”.
by community-syndication | Feb 15, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Exposing BizTalk interfaces as webservices is very easy using the ’BizTalk Webservice Publishing Tool’. In almost all cases this tool generates a correct functioning web service which does not need any code modification.
However, there are situations where tweaking the code of the generated web service is necessary. Recently I needed two different BizTalk interfaces to expose the exact same WSDL. Because the two interfaces had different names for namespaces and artifacts, the generated webservices and WSDL were not the same.
You can solve this by using the SoapExtensionReflector. The BizTalk Webservice Publishing Wizard generates a class called ’WsdlExtensions.cs’ for every webservice that is generated. By including this file in the generated VS.Net webservice project and adding the type in the ‘soapExtensionReflectorTypes’ section of the web.config (see header comments of
WsdlExtensions.cs), you’re able to control the generated WSDL for the webservice.
By default this file is generated with code for XML schema replacement in the WSDL, but you can use this to change other parts. For example, to override the SOAP service name, you can use:
public override void ReflectMethod()
{
ProtocolReflector reflector = this.ReflectionContext;
reflector.Service.Name = “MyNewServiceName”;
}
After recompiling the web service the service name in the WSDL is changed to the new value.
