TechEd 08 – see you there – RFID and Workflows….

by | Aug 8, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

 Register
– here

Folks I hope you’re heading to TechEd this year – it’s a brand new breed! Why….????

Because myself and my team are covering the entire event with RFID tags, we’ll
give you tags – enabling you the delegate to ‘live’ the technology!!! (seen
Tron lately) we’ll set up some great RFID interactive capabilities.

Sample card TechEd tag


It all started when… I went to MS and said…”I’ve got an idea….” and the teched
committee(s) saw the plan and loved it (there were some sleepless nights there as
well :).

I’ve been to over 10+ yrs of TechEd (sometimes 3 a yr, US, Oz + NZ) and I figured
it should be a chance to play with the technology! Hands on – get dirty. Build,
break, play + learn…all that stuff.

As a MS Ptr Readiness trainer/Regular teched speaker – I appreciate the value of sessions
but as a delegate I would be looking for the show me/talk to me/let *me* see
how it’s done…. a bit like plasticine to mould and meld the way that I
(as a delegate) would need it!!!!!

So in light of this – Breeze is providing a (huge) BizTalk RFID based RFID Event System
that you guys can interact with/we’ll walk you through the making of, setup
& how the system is put together. We’re getting some posters made up
and myself as a trainer, would want to share the knowledge around this system.

Let’s see what the system does…..(as of 5pm today…nothing like moving targets…
🙂

The vision we have is:

  1. You walk into a room and the welcome screen will say “Hi Paul” (and you’ll fade out,
    do something special…we’ve got a couple of ideas here). This component actually
    is a ‘real-time visual display’ of out in the field events. In our case it’s people
    walking past readers…or it could be boxes, trucks, palettes etc. Built in Silverlight
    2 harnessing the WCF Eventing Services in real time. (We’ve been able to crank our
    code up to 150 people walking past *exactly* the same spot)

    Fellow Breezer…. Scotty (a
    member of the BizTalk Virtual TS team) has a blurb on some of the details on the initial
    RFID/Silverlight nuts ‘n bolts

    (we’ve also got a webcast on how this is created)

  2. So you guys as an interactive experience as you walk in the room with various graphs
    (developers in the room, it pros…) and charts – some DRAFT IDEAs
    All done in Silverlight

    We’ve actually got MS Shane Morris on the case here – he never gives
    up a chance to get down and dirty with Silverlight.

    Check out his thoughts
    at the moment     – big thanks Shane 🙂

    So there may be an ‘Avatar’ thingy that gets displayed up on the screen (as Shane
    mentions)…..a quiet secret …..you want to ‘pimp your avatar’???? Come
    and see the Breeze room and we’ll make it happen…    only those who rock up
    – I’ve got a Windows Mobile App that will do it for you…..

  3. Some other areas that may/may not make the final show are having things like:

    1. ‘Information Points’ – areas that you could simply be standing near, talking to someone
      and a screen may show where your collegues are, or what you may have in common with
      the person you’re talking to. e.g. belong to community User Groups; where the next
      sessions of interest are for you.
      These may be distributed throughout the conference.

    2. As you go to a session – if you stay longer than 15 mins (for e.g.) the system contacts
      Commnet and makes a session eval available for you to fill out (could be done while
      you’re sitting in the session 🙂

    3. Breeze will have a room that will be driving all this – be sure to come and
      see us.       Our guys will be more than happy to take you through ‘the bunker’

    4. No more hold ups at the doors (hopefully 🙂 with people individually reading your
      barcodes, you can just walk straight in (imagine if skiing chairlift lines were like
      that 🙂
  4. The other major component to the system is an Exhibitor System which
    is run on a PDA equipped with a Kenetics
    RFID Reader built on BizTalk RFID 1.1 Mobile (still in beta – nervous who me?).
    The Kenetics crew have been very helpful and when I embarked on this application I
    was given the H/W and a C++ DLL…..”What..you don’t know C++?” – not since uni folks….developed
    the RFID component in 4 days!!!

    1. The application is for when exhibitors on the floor, they scan your RFID Tag and you
      can continue the conversation. The scan range is around 2-10cms.

    2. There is also local SqlCe storage, with store/fwd capabilities. I’m using SqlCe merge
      replication to keep the data safe centrally – which proved to be interesting.

    3. Currently – the MS Stand and the HP stand will have the devices, the RFID
      Reader + this mobile App       (the other exhibitors are still reading barcodes)
  5. TechEd Event information is to be made available through Analysis Cubes so you guys
    can pull up a pivot table (looks impressive to your boss) and play with the event
    data. Things like attendance in sessions, audience breakdown by interest or by technology
    etc. – it would be great to do something like an ‘Amazon’ – such as if you’re a .NET
    developer having…. “Other people who are also .NET developers went to these
    other sessions….”

    So as a delegate I can get a ‘group feel’ for what sessions I should be seeing
    next – sometimes there’s a time where non of the sessions are on my immediate agenda,
    it would be great to have this information available to help me make my decision on
    what session I should see in that time slot.
    (e.g. 85% of SQL developers chose this session….)

  6. There’s a whole bunch of H/W coming from Kenetics which we’ll be giving a session
    at TechEd on how we built it all!!!

  7. Lastly I thought I’d just mention a quick blurb on the RFID info.
    – there *may* be some apprehension about a delegate getting a ‘tag’ and the whole
    “big brother is watching” thing. Let me dispel a couple of rumours

    1. tags are similar to barcodes – they simply contain a number. read differently but
      from that respect the same (imagine if you could go into your favourite sporting store,
      and say “I’ll have a new shoes” and they knew your size, your brand, and whether it’s
      in stock instantly – now you could even have a self-serve kiosk around that as well!!!)

    2. Your tag can’t be read from satellites – lots of physics comes into
      play here…namely a big one of power. If you think about when TV stations need to
      broadcast to space, they have a large dish somewhere, 50 guys peddling bikes to generate
      the power and then they transmit bursts.

      So…no. – simply cover the tag with your hand and you can’t be read. (water and radio
      waves don’t go that well)

    3. My vision is to make this *your* teched – as you can see we’re being transparent and
      open about the system and how it works. Any time drop in and we’ll show you through.

 

ON ANOTHER NOTE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT – my workflow session I’m delivering –
you’ve got rare oppty….

SOA305

Getting Workflows Running and Talking in Your Applications

04/09/2008 2:00PM-3:15PM

Once you understand the basics of Windows Workflow
Foundation (WF) and can put together a workflow using the built-in activities, you
will need to know how to get that workflow running in a variety of hosting environments
and communicate between the workflow and the host application or the outside world.
This session gives you a solid foundation to get started with these techniques. Gain
a better understanding of how workflows exist in a hosting process and how to control
the hosting services. Learn about the various forms of communication that can exist
between a running workflow and the hosting application as well as with outside Web
and WCF Services. Also, learn about the persistence and tracking features of WF.

– I’ve got a technical session on Workflow Foundation.
– Of course you’re planning on seeing my session 🙂 – WHAT
DO YOU WANT ME TO COVER? WHAT DO *YOU* WANT TO KNOW ABOUT?

(You’ve got the opportunity to provide feedback and while I’m still ‘building’ the
session – hopefully I can incorporate your needs!)

More later and I’d love to hear your thoughts on above with a comment or two…..be
great to see you at TechEd!!!!

Over and out

 

Mick.

BizTalk RFID Printing: Successfully adding your Zebra Printer to RFID Manager

by | Aug 7, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

There I was with the a new toy – Zebra R110Xi Printer and a 600 page instruction
manual, including a 300 page Zebra programming language reference and an RFID section……..so
do you spend time with the manual? or unwrap and plug it in and see what happens.

I did the latter – I wasn’t printing on labels (yet) where some care needs to be taken,
loading unloading etc.

Let’s get this puppy into RFID manager I thought…… you’d think “grab the provider
and away you go”…..you’d think…… 🙂

1. Grab the Zebra provider from here – http://www.zebra.com/id/zebra/na/en/index/rfid/rfid_microsoft_biztalk.html?WT.mc_id=1778
(at the bottom of the page)
2. Expand out the Zip and in there is some documentation about installing SNMP
networking services on the RFID Server – do this pretty straight forward step
(it seems the Zebra provider uses SNMP to gather more info about the printer)
3. Install the Zebra Provider in the usual manner…..outlined in the install
document.
4. Next Add a Device through the RFID manager. You will need the IP Address of
your printer and the Port number – default 9100

5. I got a FAILED to COMMUNICATE to Device ….tried again and again…here
we go I thought…….maybe those 600+pages are looking promising?
6. I then did a quick hunt and found that the printer had a Web Interface (instead
of trying to set 6 million properties through the front panel and a <- and ->
key) – cool. The web was the go!
7. http://10.1.0.55 (temp IP address of my device) brought I a great Zebra
Home page and I knew I was at the right place.
8. I checked out a few settings but as soon as I wanted to look into ‘Printer Settings’
etc. I was prompted for a password.

9. I was forced to head into the manual and the default password is 1234.
10. So I entered this password in AND…the skies parted, the rays of light shone
through……Mr. Zebra replied with

“Access Granted. This IP Address now has admin access to
the restricted printer pages. Please Click here to proceed.”

11. Hey I thought……..does this mean…..and BOOM – RFID MANAGER WORKED A TREAT
– added the device and got access to the ‘admin’ pages on the printer.

12. Uploaded some *.ZPL templates and ready to tackle the next stage…..actual printing…….

EDI Data Types

by | Aug 7, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I needed a quick reference for EDI Data Types, so here it is.

AN Alpha Numeric String
B Binary Number
DT Date (YYMMDD or YYYYMMDD)
FS Fixed-Length String
ID Identifier, from a pre-defined list of applicable code values
Nn Numeric, with (n) implied decimal places
R Decimal Number (Real Number)
TM Time (HHMMSS), 24-hour clock

Xpath Cheat Sheet

by | Aug 7, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

It seems as though every orchestration I’m trying to xpath something either into or out of a message in BizTalk. So I’m creating a simple cheat sheet that I can refer to.

To set a single value inside a message:

xpath(msg_YourMessage, “Node Instance XPath”) = str_YourValue;

To extract a single value from a Message:

str_YourValue = (System.String)xpath(msg_YourMessage,”string(Node Instance XPath)”);

Note: I like casting the xpath result to a System.String so I can have complete access to all the System.String methods/properties inside of the Expression Shape

Extract a single value from a looping segment by index:

str_Xpath= System.String.Format(“Node Instance XPath[{0}]”,int_Index);

xDoc = xpath(msg_YourMessage, str_Xpath);

Count the number of nodes inside the message:

int_NumberofNodes = System.Convert.ToInt32(xpath(msg_YourMessage, “count(Node Instance Xpath)”));