TechEd Barcelona was great!

by | Nov 22, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Two weeks ago I spent a lovely week in Barcelona together with the complete U2U gang, to attend TechEd. It was great to see lots of old friends, students and other familiar faces! Together with my buddy Patrick I had a session about integrating SharePoint with ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight, I’ll dump my demo code on this blog in the next couple of days. For some great pictures check Leon Zandman’s Flickr set, he even has some shots of me and Patrick on stage. Below you can find a slideshow of my pictures of that week.


CodePlex Sample – distributed Pub/Sub model

by | Nov 21, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I recently came across – Distributed
Pub/Sub Project up on CodePlex (judging by its date/time stamp this project has
been there for a little while)

What is interesting is to see where MS are looking to take these sort of systems and
why – the whitepaper is a *must* read.

Coming from the land of BizTalk where we typically eat/sleep/breathe
pub/sub – here is a ‘new’ prototype project designed at building a low latency
distributed pub/sub eventing system (but I won’t mention ESB …. I promise
🙂 )

Check it out – I’d love to know your thoughts

Cheers,

Mick.

Microsoft Virtual PC — full-screen mode on a MacBook Pro

by | Nov 21, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

If you run Microsoft Virtual PC on Windows Vista (running via Bootcamp) on your MacBook Pro (I know, I know), you’ve probably been frustrated by the lack of a real Right-ALT key, which is what you’d normally use to switchin in and out of full-screen mode (the full-screen key sequence is Right-ALT + Enter).


Well, I finally stumbled across a little gem that allows you to remap the “host key“ in Microsoft Virtual PC. The host key allows the “host“ to capture control of the mouse and keyboard from a virtual machine — and by default it’s configured to be Right-ALT. You can remap the “host key” as follows:



  1. In the Microsoft Virtual PC console window, select File | Options

  2. Select Keyboard

  3. Then in the right pane, click on the “Current host key“ text box and press the new key you want to map. I pressed the Right-Apple key on my machine.

  4. Press OK and you’re done

Once you’ve done this, you can press Right-Apple + Enter to toggle full-screen mode on your MacBook.

Windows Live Community Builder – a no brainer…

by | Nov 21, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

We have laucnhed the *Windows Live Community Builder* service. It allows businesses, non-profit organisations or anyone who wants to create a community service to create customised, branded online experiences. It can include email services, member services, calendaring, contacts, mapping features etc 

How much does it cost? $0, zilch, nada, nothing.

Check it out at: http://partner.live.com/communitybuilder.

SOA & BPM Conference 2007 MVP Dinner Pictures

by | Nov 20, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

A few weeks after the SOA & BPM Conference 2007, I finally had the opportunity to upload a few pictures to our blog.  What a week!  It started with the announcement of “Oslo”, continued with many great discussions at the attendees reception and Ask The Experts and was packed with breakout sessions as well as focus groups and design reviews with our MVPs. 


Many thanks to those who spoke at and attended this conference and helped make it a success.  To close off a very productive week, our product group welcomed MVPs to a special dinner with our GM Oliver Sharp and many other leaders of our team.  Some pictures from this event are attached (click on the pictures to see them in larger format.)


Looking forward to seeing everyone soon again at future events!


Best Regards,


Marjan Kalantar



   



 

Visual Studios 2008 and BizTalk – Think Again

by | Nov 20, 2007 | Stephen's BizTalk and Integration Blog

Yesterday, Visual Studios 2008 and the .Net Framework 3.5 was released by Microsoft.

I, of course, immediately download the Team Suite edition from MSDN and installed it on a Virtual Machine.  Then, went about my daily business of opening up a BizTalk project to get some work done. 

The project conversion wizard opened and ran but the projects were unable to open inside Visual Studios.  This really wasn’t a big surprise and doesn’t cause me much pain since none of my projects are working with Visual Studios 2008 yet.

I found a news group post that said a patch for BizTalk might be coming out at some point to allow it to work with Visual Studios 2008.  But I have not heard anything about a timeline.

To summarize, have fun working with Visual Studios 2008 but keep in mind you might have a hard time doing BizTalk development.