Australian Technical Workshops

by community-syndication | Nov 18, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Microsoft Technical Workshops, across Australia, empowers businesses of any size, IT Professionals and Developers, with the skills and knowledge needed to:

* Make the right technology decisions

* Deploy effectively

* enable customers to realise their full potential

ATTEND a Technical Workshop, to improve your business and increase you skills. For details on these Workshops, please click on the below URL:

Microsoft Technical Workshops

Teched EMEA 2008 Wrap-up

by community-syndication | Nov 18, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I had a great time at Teched EMEA last week in Barcelona. I gave several talks on emerging technologies in the Connected Systems space and had a great time interacting with everyone at the show. This is always one of my favorite conferences of the year.

If you're looking for my demos, you can download them here.

Also, if you weren't able to get a Pluralsight On-Demand invitation code from one of us during the show, contact me directly and let me know which session you attended and we'll get you one via email.

Also, they've announced the locations for next year's Teched events. Teched US will be held in Los Angeles, May 11-15, 2009. And Teched EMEA is moving to Berlin! (sometime in November 2009)

Back to Life, Back to Reality

by community-syndication | Nov 18, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Back from PDC08, back from TechEd EMEA 2008, session done yesterday at the Architect Forum 2008. The trip to PDC08 was very interesting, on the same level as the 2005 edition, now focused – obviously – on cloud computing. TechEd was interesting for me especially because of the Architecture track, which was the best I’ve ever attended, but the best was being at the Ask The Experts BizTalk booth: we had several people going by with interesting questions and challenges, and I got to do several contacts. Yesterday in Lisbon I did the afternoon session at the Microsoft Architect Forum 2009, representing GASP and together with Jos%u00e9 Ant%u00f3nio Silva and Nuno Godinho as the developer. The topic, obviously, was around the cloud.

I have several posts to do, I’ll try to add them in the next few days.

Solving the "If-Then-Else" problem in a map – part II

by community-syndication | Nov 17, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Hi all

This is the second post in a series about solving the “If-Then-Else” problem in a
map. In my first
post I discussed how to use BizTalks built-in functionality to solve the problem.
Neither of the three proposed solutions really seem nice to me, so I wondered how
difficult it might be to code a custom functoid that does the trick. It turned out
to be unexpectedly hard, and this post tries to clarify my findings and explain them.

So, to continue from my previous post, to me the best solution is to code your own
functoid, that mimics the value mapping functoid, but adds an “else” part. So basically
just a third parameter to the value  mapping functoid that is returned in case
the first parameter is false.

For information about how to program a custom functoid, please visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa560879.aspx –
I wont go into details about that here. I will just comment on the issues I have had
with creating this particular functoid.

The final solution should give me the possibility to have a map like this one:

YES, I know my icons are very bad… Anyway, three inputs: a boolean and two values.

So, getting to the code, my first try looked like this:

— BEGIN CODE
this.SetMinParams(3);
this.SetMaxParams(3);
this.Category = FunctoidCategory.ValueMapping;
this.OutputConnectionType = ConnectionType.AllExceptRecord;
AddInputConnectionType(ConnectionType.AllExceptRecord);
AddInputConnectionType(ConnectionType.AllExceptRecord);
AddInputConnectionType(ConnectionType.AllExceptRecord);
— END CODE

I have removed irrelevant lines, such as setting up the resources, setting the ID,
and so on.

First of all, in the code of a custom functoid, you need to specify which category
the functoid should belong to. The possibilities are listed at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.biztalk.basefunctoids.functoidcategory.aspx.
I hadn’t really looked at this list, since I thought that the intellisense in VS.NET
2005 was good enough. Since my functoid is an advanced value mapping functoid, I chose
he value mapping category. This turned out a but different than I thought. It turns
out, that the category you assign to a custom functoid not only determines where in
the toolbox it should be placed, but also sometimes some extra functionality is added
to the functoid. Given my map above, I had expected that the created XSLT would just
call my functoid with the three parameters and then my code would do the rest. But
the generated XSLT looks like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-16″?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl=”http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform” xmlns:msxsl=”urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt”
xmlns:var=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/var” exclude-result-prefixes=”msxsl
var s0 userCSharp” version=”1.0″ xmlns:s0=”http://eliasen.eu.BizTalk.TestProject.InputSchema” xmlns:ns0=”http://eliasen.eu.BizTalk.TestProject.OutputSchema” xmlns:userCSharp=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/userCSharp”>
  <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration=”yes” method=”xml” version=”1.0″ />
  <xsl:template match=”/”>
    <xsl:apply-templates select=”/s0:InputRoot” />
  </xsl:template>
  <xsl:template match=”/s0:InputRoot”>
    <xsl:variable name=”var:v1″ select=”userCSharp:LogicalEq(string(qualifier/text())
, &quot;Jan&quot;)” />
    <ns0:OutputRoot>
      <xsl:if test=”string($var:v1)=’true'”>
        <xsl:variable name=”var:v2″ select=”IfTrue/text()”
/>
        <OutputField>
          <xsl:value-of select=”$var:v2″
/>
        </OutputField>
      </xsl:if>
    </ns0:OutputRoot>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

I have removed all the lines associated with the equals-functoid as that included
three inline c# methods which are irrelevant. Anyway, as you can see, my functoid
is not being called at all. Because I chose the ValueMapping category, the generated
xslt assumes it is actually a built-in value mapping functoid and it totally overrules
the logic inside the functoid.

So, this really came as a surprise to me… but well…it makes sense when you think
about it, naturally. Some of the types of functoids just require logic that goes beyond
the code inside a functoid.

So, the ValueMapping category just didn’t work for me. Then I thought; “Oh, who cares?”?
I will just use the String category instead, because those certainly do not have weird
functionality around them… they get input and return a string as output, that is
it. And the functoid will just appear in the String group in the toolbox in VS.NET.

That gave me a new headache, that was another surprise; You cannot connect the output
of a logical functoid to the input of a string functoid. So… I was stuck.

One of my solutions would accept the output of a logical functoid as input, but my
functoid logic was overridden. The other simply wouldn’t accept the output of a logical
functoid as input.

I have tried the following FunctoidCategories:

So, basically, I haven’t been able to do it… for now. Either I cannot connect a
logical functoid to my custom functoid, I get an error either at compile time or something
goes wrong semantically at runtime.

I haven’t given up 100% yet… but I must say, that the task has turned out to be
a whole lot more difficult than I thought it would be.

Look out for a part 3 in this series… if it comes, I will have solved this issue
🙂

—

eliasen

Modeling Cartoon

by community-syndication | Nov 17, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Somehow I missed this earlier.  Hilarious 
Modeling explained for managers 😉

Check out my new book on REST.

My three favorite PDC08 Sessions

by community-syndication | Nov 16, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

PDC08… It happened, I was there, and now it's over. I've been watching some of the sessions that I didn't catch, some of the ones I did just to see what I missed, as well as some additional related content published by channel9 and other…(read more)

Update on Silverlight 2 – and a glimpse of Silverlight 3

by community-syndication | Nov 16, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

FunctoidCategory of custom functoids – Part I

by community-syndication | Nov 16, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Hi all

I am doing a lot of functoid implementation these days, and therefore, I have for
instance decided to find out what these FunctoidCategories are and where in the toolbox
the different categories belong.

In the toolbox, we have the following groups of functoids:

• String

• Mathematical

• Logical

• Date/Time

• Conversion

• Scientific

• Cumulative

• Database

• Advanced

I still remember my first custom functoid – I was really expecting that in my code
I could decide in which group my functoid should appear and maybe even create my own
group. But that isn’t the case. There are 24 different FunctoidCategories that I can
assign my functoid, and only the above 9 groups. You can read more about the different
functoid categories here.
Basically, I will just give a very short resum%u00e9 of this information and then I will
match each category to a group in the toolbox, so you have this information for future
reference.

So, this is what I know:

To see this for your self, download

. Unzip the zip file, copy the dll to “%BTS%\Developer Tools\Mapper Extensions”, where
%BTS% is the installation folder of BizTalk. Then go to VS.NET 2005 and reload the
toolbox. If you want use one of the functoids, remember to also GAC the dll. All the
functoids have the exact same implementation, but they do not generate the same XSLT
by the mapper because of the chosen category. Perhaps a new blog post on that later
on…

—

eliasen

Controlling authentication with the WF 3.5 SendActivity

by community-syndication | Nov 16, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Someone emailed me a question about whether or not you can specify credentials when
using the OOB SendActivity in WF 3.5 because they heard that you had to write a custom
activity to accomplish this.  You do not have to write a custom activity. 
While it is true that the SendActivity links to a named endpoint, and if you use the
configuration file to configure your endpoint you can’t specify specific credentials
(a username and password for example),  WF 3.5 has a OOB WorkflowRuntime Service
named the ChannelManagerService.  The ChannelManagerService (which I described
in my article on MSDN – here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc626077.aspx) 
allows you to pre-populate some or all of the endpoints you want the SendActivities
running inside of your WorkflowRuntime to use.  So you definitely can programmatically
configure an Endpoint that the SendActivity can use without having to write a custom
activity.

Check out my new book on REST.

Differences between KB articles and download numbers

by community-syndication | Nov 15, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Does anyone know why there is a difference between the KB article and the download number (KB949846 and download 342509)?