Microsoft Expression Blend 2 September Preview
There are a bunch of new features in the September Preview of Blend 2 try them out for yourself.
Enjoy!
BizTalk 2006 R2 Launch in Sydney – recap
What a great event – BizTalk, BizTalk and more Biztalk.
It was great to see all those who attended and especially those from the user groups
(Sydney, Brisbane and Melb)
I personally had a great day – the weather was great. It was sunny, it hailed and
then in true fashion the sun was out again.
So this means that BizTalk 2006 R2 is now RTM – grab it from here
Scott (another BizTalk super hero) & I put together a great RFID Demo (I can say
*great* being not too bias).
Come 2am the morning before the launch Scott & I were wondering ‘was there going
to be a demo?’. In true show style it all came off on the day 🙂
I’ll blog about the demo shortly….it went down a treat
There were some great sessions (I wasn’t able to get to them as I was a ‘booth babe’
for the day).
The thing that I was most impressed about on the day……was the amount of
support from the Corp BizTalk team. Well done guys!!! 
The team had been on the road launching R2 in 3 world wide locations (in
Taipei they were treated almost like rock star status!).
We had Oliver Sharp (BizTalk PM) and major figures in his team – the guys were great
and always willing to lend an ear. (Some of them were off surfing at
Bondi the following day – that’s the way it’s done !! 🙂
In mentioning the team I can’t fail to mention MR. RFID of MS – Anush Kumar. What
a great genuine guy. He’s always got a brilliant story to tell around Microsoft
RFID Services. RFID, Integration, surfacing, WCF, BizTalk, BAM, TagEvent data – these
are all words he uses. This is a huge Microsoft story – and what the RFID team has
achieved it the last 3-4 years both on the hardware/software space is amazing. Standardising
readers (c.f. ODBC and ODBC drivers) and providing momentum to standards bodies on
various tags and their formats.
R2 here we come….time to update some VPCs.
As promised to many here are my links from recent presentations
Links from my recent Mashup the Web presentations…
All Blacks Silverlight Gadget
Photosynth – Nasa
Silverlight Space Invaders
Image Search (filter:face)
Tafiti
BackgroundMotion
Zero Gravity
Media Preview
Terra TV
French Rugby
Demo Applications…
Evermore Reflection Video – Silverlight 1.0
News Feeds…
VisitMix
SilverlightCream
Arturo
Shane – Wireframing in Blend – Starter Project
Aussie Remix videos
Expression Encoder…
Clarkezone
Community…
If you are lucky enough to live in Wellington Nas has set up a user group for designers called http://zamdes.com. The Expression team at Microsoft is also kicking off a global design event in Auckland on the 4th of October called “Expression around the Clock”. Places are limited but please spread the word and register at http://www.microsoft.co.nz/expression for the free half day Auckland event otherwise follow along on the global website http://expressionevent.com.
If you haven’t already please subscribe to the Microsoft Designer UX newsletter that we will start sending out once a month. You can subscribe by visiting http://tinyurl.com/2uwnpe and filling in the email template.
MS-HUG Day 1
Wanted to recap the list of things I walked away with today from the conference at MS-HUG:
Keynote address
Bill Crounse, MD, Director Worldwide Health Microsoft Corporation
Well, I got to listen to Bill (no not that Bill) and it was interesting, I learned today that CMS will significantly curtail the payments of procedures for in hospital infections. This will have rippling effects for the providers, and will spurn the pay for performance initiatives and quality of care initiatives as hospitals will now have to foot the bill for those issues.
Winning Trust, Minimizing IT Resources: Key to Forming RHIOs
Mark Singh President Clinicore Solutions
Kathleen Sullivan CEO Salient Health Solutions/SEMRHIO Consultant
Being the architect I am very much aware of what is going on (I had better!), however it was interesting because most of the questions were focused on the business model, the revenue generation process. This is the next phase in our process, but having a working process in place I feel is the key to success as we now have 3 hospitals up with minimal IT resources.
Reference Implementations for Healthcare: HCE and iHE XDS.b(sorry the link does not work as of yet)
Roberto Ruggeri Senior Technical Strategist for Microsoft Worldwide Health Microsoft Corporation
Randy Fusco Technical Strategist for Microsoft US Health Providers Microsoft Corporation
This was a great presentation where I learned about how much Microsoft is looking for us to help. For those who write blogs and to those who read blogs (you know who you are) it was a call to action! Yes you!
On http://solshare.net you can download the code and start to try it out and using their forum, you can submit bugs, ask for enhancements, etc.
I asked if there was a list of known issues, in which Roberto told me that no, this was a feature, that we get to start our own list and he will see if we really know what we are doing! (j/k) Seriously, he said that there is no existing list of issues, so I would assume that you can post those known issues/fixes directly on the solshare.net site.
Lunch
I went out to eat with Eric Battalio, Muhammad, and Liza from the documentation team, and wow, I learned a lot! The first and most important thingI learned is that those comments that you can leave on the documentation site actually go to someone. My suggestion is that if you want to start a dialog with the documentation team (which by the way, they would LOVE), it would be nice to have some type of post submission question asking if you (the feedbacker) would like to be contacted by Microsoft and what email they can contact you.
In the interim, just put your email address in the comments so they can contact you directly, Iassume that there will be something in the worksaddressing this issue.Below is an example of something I have had on the back of my mind recently.
Improving Patient Safety Using the Microsoft Common User Interface (MS-CUI)
Andrew Kirby Director of Solutions Development Center Microsoft Corporation, UK
Like the CHF, this is very much a work in progress and since it is very early on in the development, it is more of a guideline and they need as much feedback as possible. However there are no immediate plans for a reference implementation to build off of other than the first implementation in England.
What’s New in BizTalk Server 2006 R2
Stuart Landrum Program Manager, BizTalk, Microsoft Corporation
Well, it was the first time I had met Stuart face to face, had been on some conference calls with him, so it was good to meet him. He explained the new features with the HL7 accelerator (now officially branded 2.0). There was very little pictures of the product so the discussion went rather quickly and ended early with few questions, I had to ask a few questions to get people in the asking mood, but it did not go much further than that.
Closing Keynote: Using IT to affect efficiency and safety changes in the erioperative process
Conclusion
Paul St. Jacques, MD Associate professor and Director of Perioperative informatics Vanderbilt University
This doctor was actually kind of funny. I am not sure if he meant to be, but if it was not for his phones (yes plural) that added a little static to his voice, or his low ranking on the pay for performance ratings that he refuse to show on the list of many doctors ranked (it was too small to see), it was a good presentation that ended on a high note, even though he essentially had to ask us to laugh, even though there wasn’t really anything funny about his presentation. He did use one of my all time favorite phrases, while describing the hospital system that he works in, he described it as a level 1 trauma facility that is “soup-to-nuts” – where did that come from and should we be saying that phrase as professionals?
The interesting thing that I thought that he was going to joke about was his workflow from a patient pre-registration process through surgery completion. look closely for anything wrong with this picture
nope, not the fact that they are using SQL Server 2003 (must be a special version of SQL Serverthat I am notaware of)
The real problem with this picture is that there is a little girl that starts the surgery process, and when the workflow is complete, thegirlis actuallyHenry Kissinger! Either that process took a really long time (and something major wrong happened), or this is a plastic surgeon’s billing dream come true!
Talk to you all tomorrow!
My BizTalk vNext Wish List
Congrats to the Connected Systems Division for getting BizTalk Server 2006 R2 out the door. Now that we’re done with that, here’s my humble “wish list” for BizTalk Server vNext. I realize that development is well under way, but, hopefully some of these requests can make it in.
Design Tools
High level modeling tool. Nothing […]
ASP.NET 2.0: Build provider and master page issue
I had an unpleasant time yesterday afternoon re-stabilising an ASP.NET 2.0 application after it went berserk. I don’t do that much coding in ASP.NET these days, but when I do, I seem to run into lots of problems.A fellow developer on the same project wasn’t very helpful or sympathetic – he sat there and informed everyone in a loud voice that he’d just come off another project where he’d built a much larger ASP.NET app without any problems at all. Yes, thanks for the support!
I had several problems layered on top of one another, including those strange issues where Visual Studio 2005 seems to get into a complete mess somehow with assembly references.I also saw evidence of Visual Studio putting incorrect duplicate file references into the project file.Killing every bin and obj folder and deleting the entire contents of the Temporary ASP.NET Files folder helped no end.However, I had one problem that I couldn’t clear for ages. Certain .aspx pages constantly reported errors associated with their @Page directives. One page, in particular, constantly reported this error (even after I had re-built the page from scratch), and others intermittently reported the same error! The error message stated that:
“There is no build provider registered for the extension ”. You can register one in the <compilation><buildProviders> section in machine.config or web.config. Make sure is has a BuildProviderAppliesToAttribute attribute which includes the value ‘Web’ or ‘All’.”
Why on earth would I need to register a build provider for non-existent file extensions? The problem seemed also to manifest itself in an inability to find a master page unless I provided a fully qualified path name. Another strange thing was that sometimes a different error would be reported by Visual Studio saying that part of the path to the web application directory could not be found. Needless to say the path was correct and present. The problem survived cleaning down the project and rebooting the system.
I tried everything I could think of to solve the issue. Nothing worked until, by trial and error, I hit on a solution. In Web.Config, I added the following buildProviders extension entry to the compilation element:
<compilation debug=”true”>
<buildProviders>
<add extension=”*” type=”System.Web.Compilation.PageBuildProvider”/>
</buildProviders>
</compilation>
Success! The problem disappeared. I then had the presence of mind to IMMEDIATELY go back and comment out the buildProvider entry.The problem did not come back! Whatever happened when I added the build provider seems to have solved the underlying issue.
I can’t explain the cause, but I can see a few reports of the same delinquent behaviour when I Google. Hopefully this will be of help to someone out there. I really do hope Microsoft has put some effort into stabilising Visual Studio 2008 rather than just concentrating on adding features.
Also, before someone asks, yes, I do have Visual Studio 2005 SP1 installed, and yes, I am using a Web Application project rather than a Web Site project.
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Finally Arrives!
I apologize for being noticeably quiet for the past few months but it's been a very busy summer with lots of work and little free time for blogging.
The BizTalk (Connected Systems Group) team has done an excellent job and shipped the latest version of their flagship product BizTalk Server 2006 R2. In many ways this is much more than just an"R2" release, especially with all the new adapters, accelerators and partners (like GXS that we work with) involved. Not to mention built in support for EDI, AS2 and RFID. In other ways it's a great "upgrade" release from BizTalk Server 2006 since all your old BTS2006 assemblies and projects should work perfectly on "R2".
Click here for a larger view
Click here for a larger view
As you can see from the screen shots above, all aspects of BizTalk Server 2006 R2 run just fine on Windows Vista with the exception of those features that require Windows SharePoint Services. I know this feature seems small but I have a very hefty new Dell D830 notebook as my main development machine and it's just a lot more productive developing under Vista and then testing on a Win2K3 virtual machine.
And in case you're wondering what I've really been up to for the past few months you can read about it in the following Microsoft case studies (shameless personal plug)
Industrial Seal Maker Eliminates the Uncertainty from Electronic Invoicing
Global Distributor Avoids Cost, Risk While Upgrading Mission-Critical Data Warehouse
Seal Maker Expects $5 Million Revenue Boost from Internet Ordering System
The only thing lacking in BizTalk Server 2006 R2 is support for development running under Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 but I expect the BizTalk team will issue a service pack sometime after Visual Studio 2008 ships later this year or early next year.
On a final note, I'd just like to say thanks to Mitch Stein MSFT] and Richard Hughes [MSFT] as well as the PSS folks for all their support and help during our testing and deployment. You folks ROCK!
Technorati Tags: BizTalk Server 2006 R2
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Finally Arrives!
I apologize for being noticeably quiet for the past few months but it's been a very busy summer with lots of work and little free time for blogging.
The BizTalk (Connected Systems Group) team has done an excellent job and shipped the latest version of their flagship product BizTalk Server 2006 R2. In many ways this is much more than just an"R2" release, especially with all the new adapters, accelerators and partners (like GXS that we work with) involved. Not to mention built in support for EDI, AS2 and RFID. In other ways it's a great "upgrade" release from BizTalk Server 2006 since all your old BTS2006 assemblies and projects should work perfectly on "R2".
Click here for a larger view
Click here for a larger view
As you can see from the screen shots above, all aspects of BizTalk Server 2006 R2 run just fine on Windows Vista with the exception of those features that require Windows SharePoint Services. I know this feature seems small but I have a very hefty new Dell D830 notebook as my main development machine and it's just a lot more productive developing under Vista and then testing on a Win2K3 virtual machine.
And in case you're wondering what I've really been up to for the past few months you can read about it in the following Microsoft case studies (shameless personal plug)
Industrial Seal Maker Eliminates the Uncertainty from Electronic Invoicing
Global Distributor Avoids Cost, Risk While Upgrading Mission-Critical Data Warehouse
Seal Maker Expects $5 Million Revenue Boost from Internet Ordering System
The only thing lacking in BizTalk Server 2006 R2 is support for development running under Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 but I expect the BizTalk team will issue a service pack sometime after Visual Studio 2008 ships later this year or early next year.
On a final note, I'd just like to say thanks to Mitch Stein MSFT] and Richard Hughes [MSFT] as well as the PSS folks for all their support and help during our testing and deployment. You folks ROCK!
Technorati Tags: BizTalk Server 2006 R2
Some new BizTalk links
Some interesting links:
BizTalk Server Database Optimization White Paper – This is an excellent MSDN write-up on how to optimize your BizTalk systems. The title is somewhat incorrect as it describes how to optimize the hardware (which RAID level to use, turn off hyperthreading), the Network (usage of subnets), the OS (Registry and other settings) , […]
Canadian BizTalk 2006-R2/SOA Conference
Microsoft Canada is host a R2 launch conference in conjunction with a SOA conference. The conference will be held Calgary, Toronto and Montreal. The details and registration links are below. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||