Machinima, Scott Guthrie and WPF/E

Machinima, Scott Guthrie and WPF/E

by | Mar 7, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

On April Fools day 4 years ago Red vs. Blue smashed onto the Internet.


It has been credited with bringing new popularity to machinima, helping it to gain more mainstream exposure, and attracting more people to the art form.


In the world of user generated content the machinima technique involves synchronising video footage from a game to pre-recorded dialogue and other audio.


Scott Guthrie, stars in a special episode describing ASP.NET AJAX… Check it out at http://channel9.msdn.com/playground/wpfe/rvbplayer (it uses the Feb CTP version of WPF/E).



Incidently… 60,000 unique sites deployed pages using the final ASP.NET AJAX V1.0 bits within the first month of release!.


Scott Guthrie and the DPE team at Tech.Ed 2006 NZ.


Scott Guthrie and the DPE team at Tech.Ed 2006 NZ.


Full series are available at http://rvb.roosterteeth.com

Some more detail on the Business Process Alliance

by | Mar 7, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

If you haven’t seen it yet, you should check out last week’s announcement of Microsoft’s Business Process Alliance.


You can get some more detail on some of the capabilities provided by the alliance partners in this whitepaper.


And, Steven Martin shares some insight on what is needed for BPM to go main stream, how the Business Process Alliance helps, and why customers should be skeptical of vendors that claim to be a “one stop shop” for BPM.


– Kris

Blog Intro – BizUnit Has Now Moved

by | Mar 7, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Welcome to my blog! 


 My name is Ewan Fairweather and in this blog I’ll be blogging about BizTalk and the other technology I work with at Microsoft.  Expect about 80% of the content to be BizTalk related, I’ll include posts on SQL and .NET as appropriate.


I’ve been working for Microsoft for three years now and currently work in the Premier Field Engineering team. In this role I get to work with enterprise customers, helping them to maintain and optimise their BizTalk applications.  This involves providing both proactive (i.e. making sure it doesn’t break) and reactive (helping them fix it when its broken) onsite assistance within the UK and the rest of Europe. I’ve also worked in a dedicated capacity on some of the world’s largest BizTalk deployments, predominantly within financial services.  I hope to use this blog as a means to pass on my knowledge and experience to a wider audience than I alone can reach!


Most recently I’ve had the honour of writing the administration section for the upcoming Professional BizTalk Server 2006 book by Darren Jefford, Kevin Smith and myself.  Although I’m very biased I must say that the content is looking great.  The reviews that we’ve had back of the final versions of each chapter have been very positive. Yossi, one of the key reviewers for the book, has posted his comments here and Darren’s latest post on the book is here.


 Now that my intro is complete, lets move onto my first post.


 BizUnit


This is a flexible and extensible test framework which enables rapid automated testing of distributed systems.  This has been used on many of the world’s biggest BizTalk projects and has been key to their sucess.  It was developed by Kevin Smith whilst he was working on mission critical BizTalk projects for Microsoft Consulting Services.  In my opinion this is a  must do for all large BizTalk projects, I’ve seen many projects that have avoided this type of automated testing fail.  This was originally hosted on gotdotnet, but Kevin has now moved this to codeplex and has added some really great intro text.  I encourage you all to review it at http://www.codeplex.com/bizunit

Screensaver never activates on Vista? It’s the wireless mouse, stupid.

by | Mar 7, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Time for another annoying Vista issue… I recently realized that my screensaver never activates on Vista. It used to work just fine when I had XP on this box. But now for some reason Vista thinks my computer has a human being sitting in front of it all the time. The problem is caused by using a wireless mouse, even a Microsoft-brand wireless mouse like mine. Besides the obvious negative impact on my two LCD’s, this unfortunate problem has probably convinced several of my colleagues that I’ve been ignoring them when they ping via chat in the wee hours of the morning, since chat says I’m always online. Sorry guys.
Anyway, when I first diagnosed this problem there was no solution other than moving back to a wired mouse. Today, when doing a Windows update, I saw the following update that gave me some hope:
Microsoft – Other Hardware – HID Non-User Input Data Filter
And sure enough, after the update, things started working the way they’re supposed to again. So if you’re experiencing this problem, run to Windows Update and make sure you grab this one.

Passed 70-235. Here is my Exam Preparation Diary.

by | Mar 6, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

TS: Developing Business Process and Integration Solutions Using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 was in my TODO list for a very long time. My last exam  was 74-135 BizTalk 2004 Exam way back in April 2005.

So I decided to write the exam on 5th of March 2007. I did some search to gather as much information as I can to prepare for the exam. For this exam I need to pull materials from variety of sources like MSDN, Blogs, WebCasts, Books, MS e-Learning and Product documentation. It took me enormous amount of time and effort to gather all the materials than actually preparing for the exam. I remember doing the same thing for my 74-135 BizTalk 2004 Exam, now I need to start everything again. So, this time I decided to document each and every step I move forward towards the exam goal and here is the outcome BizTalk Server 2006 Exam (70-235) Preparation Diary

As my first article after the launch of BizTalk 24 * 7 I’ve published my exam preparation diary, hoping it will be helpful for people not only taking the exam but also for some one preparing for interview, or in general a good reference, where all the important points related to BizTalk is in one place. It will be helpful for experienced BizTalk people to glance the document and try the exam.

I’ve also highlighted the document on BizTalk 24 * 7 home page.

Disclaimer: BizTalk Server 2006 Exam (70-235) Preparation Diary is my own preparation guide, there is no guarantee you’ll pass the exam, just by reading the article. Keep the article as starting point, do more research, I put enough reference wherever required, so expand your reading with references mentioned. Good Luck.

Nandri!

Saravana