Microsoft Cloud Services now has a new name Windows Azure

by | Oct 27, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Today at the Microsoft PDC 2008 Ray Ozzie announced Windows Azure, formally know as Cloud Services. Windows Azure is now available as a CTP (Community Technology Preview) just go to www.azure.com to download the SDKs and signup for an Windows Azure account.

Windows Azure will include what was previously called BizTalk Labs / BizTalk Services which in Azure is called .Net Services.

Please go to www.azure.com and signup for the CTP and make sure that you give Microsoft your feedback on Windows Azure.

PDC08 Day Zero – I’m a “Connected Systems” MVP!

by | Oct 27, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I’ve just heard that my MVP status has officially been switched from “BizTalk Server” to “Connected Systems Developer”. I’ve been considering the switch for a while, and the kick off at PCD seems to be perfect timing for this. It will allow me to focus more on WCF, WF, and the Oslo and related technologies, whilst still being involved in the BizTalk Server community (BizTalk is the most connected system there is right?). Over the past few months I have been getting more involved with the WCF/WF side of things, and the imminent (I’ve heard its Tuesday sometime) release of the Oslo bits will mean I can focus on the new technologies.
In a way it’s sad to be breaking one of the strong ties I have had to the BizTalk community, but I’m really looking forward to working (playing) with the new technologies, and working with the development community to help to add some context and public information as to using the bits. It will be like back in the day with BizTalk 2004 beta, where there was no real documentation and all the best information was in the blogs.
PDC registration began at 08:00, and it seemed like quite a lot of the Swedish attendees were there on the dot. This year there are over 300 attending from Sweden, the third highest country after the US and Canada, not bad for a nation of 9 million. (Just to settle any confusion, I am actually English, but living in Sweden.) As I’m not in the “pre-con” I thought I’d hang around the lobby and hook up with people know. I bumped into Kevin Smith, Jon Fancey, Jon Flanders and a few others. The bad news is I could not get into lunch without the “pre-con” wrist band, and all the soda fridges were locked.
Later on I had dinner with Kent Brown and Cliff Simpkins, who both work on the CSD team, and chatted about all kinds of Oslo, BizTalk, WCF, WF & Dublin related stuff. It’s going to be a very exciting few days when this information all goes public.
After dinner Kent and I headed for the Palermo party. When we arrived it was fairly chaotic, with a queue to get in, and very busy inside. I met up with Joao Martins and Yossi, and took advantage of the free beer (the free food and free swag had all run out by then). The QuickLearn team arrived later on, and I had some time to chat with John and Rob, and some of John’s ex-students from Norway.
PDC Top Tip #2: All the best parties are word-of-mouth
There’s the Official PDC Party, and the Un-official PDC party, but there is also a host of other parties, dinners, and social events going on all week. If you have the right connections, you probably know the score, but if not it’s always asking people you are chatting with what their plans are for later on, there’s a fairly good chance that you might get word of one of these secret events, and maybe even get an invite.
PDC FAQ 02: Where are you guys from?

Announcing the WCF REST Starter Kit!

by | Oct 27, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I am pleased to announce the release of the WCF REST Starter Kit today on CodePlex.  The folks on the WCF team have been working hard on this for several months and it is exciting to see it released. 

WCF has always had, and will continue to have, great support for SOAP and WS-*.  But Representational State Transfer, or "REST" is becoming popular these days in many circles and we want WCF to have great support for both web services programming models.  Because of the extensibility of the WCF architecture, it turned out to be fairly straight-forward to support REST-style services as well, making WCF the one-stop shop for building services.

We introduced support for REST in .NET Framework 3.5, and enhanced it in SP1.  But there were still lots of scenarios where we saw opportunities to simplify building REST-style services in WCF and so the team set out to make major strides in this area for WCF 4.0. 

The REST Starter Kit is a preview of features that are being considered for WCF 4.0, released early on CodePlex so you can download it, look at the code, play with it, and give us feedback so we deliver the right REST features in WCF 4.0

We’ve spun up a new area of the WCF Dev Center focused on REST capabilities in WCF and especially the WCF REST Starter Kit: www.msdn.microsoft.com/wcf/rest.  You can find everything you need here to learn about building RESTful services with WCF.  There are links to download the Starter Kit from CodePlex, a White Paper and series of screencasts by Aaron Skonnard from Pluralsight on using the Starter Kit, overview documentation, release notes, and even hands on labs.  We also have links to great background materials on the web for learning the history and motivation of REST. 

In addition to helper objects that provide new functionality (such as caching and help pages for RESTful services) there are project and item templates to make it super easy to create your first RESTful service and get it up and running quickly.  In fact, you can pretty much hit F5 on the auto-generated code and have a running service.  Then you can watch Aaron’s screencasts to understand what the code is doing and how to modify the code to customize the service to your requirements. 

There are also more advanced samples in the kit you can use to learn more about REST.  And this all runs on .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, so you can work with the Starter Kit with the bits we ship today.

All right, enough talk.  Go download the WCF REST Starter Kit, give it a run, and let me know how you like it.

Blogical Sftp Adapter – New release

by | Oct 26, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Johan Hedberg has updated the Sftp adapter with various features such as:

  • Supports file Rename on top of the default Delete behavior for Receive, with macro support – you can specify eg. %SourceFileName%.old for rename name.
  • Support for a temporary filename on Send, with macro support, as well as a temporary folder.
  • Added VerifyFileSize property to Send Adapter – for situations where you have the need to perform an extra check of the file sent, that it is in fact the size you expected.

Download from Codeplex

PDC08 Day Minus One

by | Oct 26, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

One of the most important aspects of attending conferences for me is the networking opportunities. As I am currently an MVP in BizTalk Server, still a fairly minority technology, it’s usually only at these events that I get to meet up with the people who really know the technology (apart from the BizTalk User Group Sweden of course). There are quite a few of the MVPs and “influencers” out this year, and I’m looking forward to catching up on old times and having intelligent and informed discussions about what’s hot at PDC.
I’d been wanting to go to “Magic Mountain” on Saturday, so I was overjoyed when Johan Lindfors suggested I hook up with a few of the guys from Microsoft Sweden and head up there. On the way up there we had a very interesting discussion on BizTalk vs. Dublin, which will be a very hot topic at this PDC.
Johan, despite heavy peer pressure, decided to play caddy with the backpacks and water bottles whilst we took to the rides. We bought an $80 “Thrill Pass” that allowed us to push in at the front of the, sometimes two hour, queues for most of the big rides (a very very un-Swedish thing to do, we recovered our Karma somewhat by giving them away to a group of kids when we left so they could get a few hours use of them), and managed to get round all the coasters except X2 (I really wanted to, but the “Thrill Pass” didn’t apply there) and Viper. Tatsu was the best, with Goliath a close second. We took Tatsu again for the last ride, everything started OK, but leaving the station someone hit the emergency stop, and we were left hanging face down, just outside the station for 20 minutes whilst security chanced an intruder around the area under the track. Luckily we were only 5 feet above the ground; it could have been 170.
PDC Top Tip #1: Network with Microsoft People
They know all the best events and parties at the conferences, and have a lot of inside info on the latest technology.
Later on I headed to the Sheraton down-town and met up with Yossi Dahan, who had just arrived on a flight from the UK. We had a long chat about the current status of “Oslo”, and our expectations for the PDC, and also the “Dublin vs. BizTalk” discussion. Yossi started with BizTalk about the same time as I did, about five years ago, and we chatted on the evolution of BizTalk from an almost unknown project that most people could not install, to a mature and comprehensive integration platform that drives the heart of some of the world’s largest companies. An interesting discussion to have with nine hours jetlag after a couple of beers.
Robert “Boss” Hogg joined us on the way between his room and dinner with some other UK people, it was great to see him again.
PDC FAQ 01: Will “Dublin” replace BizTalk
The short answer is “No”, at least not for a long time. I could spend a couple of pages trying to justify this argument, but Charles Young has posted the best overview of this on this, and there is no way I could come close to explaining it as well as he does. As far as existing customers and developers are concerned, after PDC it will be BizTalk as usual for the foreseeable future. It’s a real shame Charles is not in town for PCD, I think Microsoft should have flown him out and had him on the “Ask the Experts” booth to address the BizTalk related questions.
If you are at PDC, head for the Palermo Party tonight, it sounds like the place to be. I’ll be the guy with the “Bloggers Guide to Oslo” t-shirt, so feelfree to introduce yourself if you have any Oslo and related questions.
Don’t forget to check BloggersGuides.net daily for links to the best news and blogs regarding Oslo and related stuff. I have Camtasia on my laptop, so I may even have a chance to get a webcast done if I can get my hands on those bits

Arrived in LA for PDC 2008

by | Oct 26, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Even though I had a non upgradable seat on QF93, it turned out to be a good flight, the plane was only about 2/3 full and I had an empty seat between myself and Adam Long (CTO @ QSR) who I ran into at the airport waiting for the flight to leave and ended up setting next to on the flight.

I then arrived a my hotel at 9:00am and was plesently suprised when they said the my room was ready for me, I was then off to the convention center to register, a quick process since not many people were arriving as early as I did.

PDC sessions start tomorrow, so check back from my daily updates.

GiveCamp Kiva Lending Team

by | Oct 26, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Just a quick update, that several of the micro-finance loans I made as part of the GiveCamp Kiva team have recently made their first payment back, which allowed me to begin to re-invest most of those funds in another loan.  I’m backing the Yon Dial 2 Group, from Senegal.  Here are their details:

Palmarin (http://www.sem-fund.org/palmarinfr.php) is a village rich in fruits and vegetables. Nevertheless, lack of structures specialized in transformation incite people to import fruit and vegetables juices at very high cost. This why this group of women, confronted with difficulties in conserving and disposing of fresh products (cabbages, tomatoes, carrots) are seeking a Kiva loan to create a local fruit and vegetable transformation unit. They will sell the transformed products to touristic businesses and meet a large customer demand.

Remember if you’ve like to become part of the GiveCamp lending team at Kiva and help make a difference around the world for less than the cost of a video game, then check out the team here.