RFID @ TechEd Wrap Up – "Breeze Event Tracker"

by | Sep 11, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

The system we built has made it through its maiden event and was still capturing reads
well into the later afternoon (until we got round to tearing it down….technically
called ‘Bump Out’….with all the moving bodies and parts, it’s no wonder they call
it Bump Out!)

 I grabbed a couple of SilverLight screen shots to show what the system
is capable of – in the hectic pace of last week I didn’t manage to grab some
screen captures of the system in action, these screen shots come from the courtesy
of Eileen
Brown’s Blog (she is responsible for running MS Events in the UK + a founder/advocate
for Women in IT)

Walk-In Displays – these walk in displays were up on the big screens
as delegates entered/exited their sessions. Pretty cool!!!.

>


These screens are delivered via a browser and are what we call the ‘Walk-in’
Display. Here you can see 3 people leaving the room with the graph in the
background showing some delegate profiling data around attendance of previous TechEds.

>

Here we’ve got an enter and a leaving of the session. Something we didn’t get time
to do at this show was to play on the scope for customisations with these avatars.
We had over 120 textures + bitmap type surfaces set for this, but during the show
this ‘feature’ got bumped further down the list. (Hats, scarves, hair type, colours
etc. you know the stuff)

We had fun with a couple of names though – ‘@Coatsy’ was one, ‘The
Stig’ was another.

The beauty about these screens was that people outside the conference got real time
stats about the rooms and could see the ‘Walk-in’ displays in near real time. (Late
night trouble shooting with my friends in MS Corp – this proved a great tool)

In testing performance of our SL Services over the internet – I had a link to the
UK where we had a technician monitoring the various walk-in displays and giving feedback.
All worked pretty well.

(At this point we don’t have an upper limit on the number of individual ‘Walk-in’
display sessions that run concurrently – each open browser receiving events in near
realtime is an additional WCF Service instance + a SQL connection. Not sure how much
benefit SQL Connection pooling will give as these connections are active pretty much
all the time)

This screen is from the ‘Speaker Charts’ which are designed to give
the speaker various breakdowns of up to the minute information of their audiences.>

 

Overall the Breeze Boiler room (HQ) got great attendance from the
delegates wanting to know the “whats/whos/whys” on the Breeze Event Tracker
System.

We’re currently still analysing the results but some interesting numbers are:

(1) In a 16 hr period for one room, we got 345000 reads…….(this maybe picking
up the persons in the back row while sessions are on – our business logic takes care
of these)

(2) We experienced a very particular ‘known’ problem (don’t you love it when you experience
an issue for the first time and describe it, only to be told it’s ‘known’ – well telling
us that ahead of time would have been great :). The problem arises from Tags being
physically close together, and two tags respond ‘around’ the same time. In very special
circumstances this confuses the Reader and instead of getting 12byte TagIDs we got
16, 18 or sometimes 20 byte IDs where the 2 tagIDs were ‘spliced’.

It occurred in very special cases – but we got it. That particular read should be
discarded as it fails the CRC check.
In peak time, out of 8000 reads we got around 2 of these cases.

Couple of phone calls to India and our Intel R1000 Provider was ‘patched’ and as a
PlanB we had the current provider being wrapped by another .NET class to catch that
particular exception.

(3) SCOM2007 couldn’t have worked better!!!! I dropped on the BizTalk
RFID Mgmnt pack and it was a breath of fresh air. All the Readers, Devices, Processes,
Providers and RFID Servers out on the network appeared as healthy items in lists (mostly).
From the mgmnt pack I was able to see the number of Tags Read, settings, when the
last heartbeat was heard etc etc. from all the devices over the conference – certainly Mission
Control.

(4) We had various ‘Show’ type issues such as power cords being unplugged; cables
being cut; cabinets that housed the equipment in each room collapsing….so all in
all it was filled with fun and excitement. We did have a couple of Network issues
where at the conference there were several networks implemented for different regions/events
at the conference. e.g Public Delegate WiFi; Networks within each of the Break out
rooms – we were on our own VLAN and these network layers above us, proved a little
troublesome from time to time.

 

Various Licensing arrangements of this system are available – from
the software components through to the hardware. Feel free to ping me for more details.

Here’s a video of a screen capture that I *did* manage to do.


YouTube – Breeze
Event System – TechEd 2008 WalkIn Display Demo

Is Oslo just like Access?

by | Sep 11, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

eWeek publlshed a couple of articles on Oslo very recently. They are

The Origins of Microsoft’s Oslo Software Modeling Platform

Microsoft’s Distributed Destination: Oslo

I found the background material on how it all started to be quite interesting and also to hear that its been in the works for more than a decade. At least, thats how the […]

Add Gacutil to the Right Click Menu

by | Sep 10, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I’ve used this quite a bit on BTS 2004. Instead of deploying projects through Visual Studio, sometimes I want to just overwrite the DLL in the GAC, restart BizTalk, and start using it.

Here’s one of the easier ways to do this:

Create a .reg file with the following text.

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\dllfile\shell\gacutil\command]

@=”c:\WINDOWS\\Microsoft.NET\\Frame%u00adwork\\v1.1.4322\\gacutil.exe /i \”%1\” “

Double click the .reg file and right click on the strongly named .DLL to see the new menu item.

The Road to Oslo #2 – Product Outlines

by | Sep 10, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

History
Back in 2005 Eddie Churchill, one of the BizTalk team members presented a couple of Channel 9 video titled “First look at Solution Designer” and “Biztalk’s sexy new XSLT Mapper”. These videos showed very early prototypes of want may go on to form a part of BizTalk Server vNext. The BizTalk Solution Designer and the new mapper looked like great tools, and I remember many BizTalk developers looking forward to using them in BizTalk applications. Unfortunately they never made it into BizTalk, and the BizTalk team continued with the development of future versions of BizTalk Server and pretty much stuck with the same developer toolset.
About the same time in 2005, Microsoft announced Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF at the time, later changed to WF), and ever since then there has been speculation that WF would replace the orchestration engine in BizTalk Server, with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) forming the communication layer. BizTalk Server 2006 R2 saw the introduction of WCF based adapters, and a new adapter framework that is based on WCF, but so far there has been no use of WF in BizTalk Server.
Oslo Unveiled
In October 2007, two years after Eddie’s presentation and the announcement of WF, Microsoft publicly unveiled the “Codename Oslo” strategy at the SOA/BPM summit in Redmond. They announced that there would be a “Universal Editor”, a graphical tool that could be used by architects and analysts to model SOA and integration applications at a high level. This “Universal Editor” may lift some of the ideas from the BizTalk Solution Designer, but it is expected that it will be much less technical in nature as it’s aimed at modelling applications rather than implementing them. They also announced a number of other technologies that would be included in the Oslo wave of technologies.
%u00b7 BizTalk Server “V6”
%u00b7 System Center “V5”
%u00b7 Visual Studio “V10”
%u00b7 BizTalk Services “V1”
%u00b7 .NET Framework “V4”
Since then there has not been much public information shared about Oslo, there have been a few rumours circulating regarding some of the Oslo technologies.
Oslo at TechEd
TechEd US in June saw pretentions and interviews by David Chappell and Jon Flanders that were touching on Oslo technologies but not going into any deep technical details on what would be delivered. David gave a good overview of the Oslo technologies, and Jon provided some useful information for developers who are wanting to gear up for Oslo.
In the TechEd Fishbowl interview, David Chappell mentioned that Oslo would consist of three main components.
%u00b7 A storage repository and visual modelling tool
%u00b7 A new version of Windows Workflow Foundation
%u00b7 A process server to host WCF services and WF workflows
This was the first public indications of the development of the Oslo platform from Microsoft that has come since the SOA/BPM summit in October last year.
September Announcement
On 5th September 2008 there was an announcement in the BizTalk homepage regarding the future directions of BizTalk and Oslo, featuring a Q&A with Oliver Sharp, and an updated BizTalk Roadmap.
BizTalk Server 2006 R3 has been renamed to BizTalk Server 2009. This decision makes a lot of sense. BizTalk Server 2006 R2 was basically the same server runtime and development tools as BizTalk Server 2006, but with the addition of features for WCF, WDI, RFID, and BAM interceptors for WF and WCF. BizTalk Server 2009 will see improvements in the developer tools, support for the 2008 wave of developer tools and server platform, as well as enhanced EDI and UDDI functionality. Microsoft also announced that there would be continued development of the BizTalk platform in the future, with a release cycle roughly every two years. This is very good news for existing BizTalk customers and developers as it confirms the commitment to continue development of BizTalk Server for the foreseeable future.
One of the proposed features for the version after 2009 is improved developer productivity enhancements, mentioning complex mapping. So one day we may see some of the ideas from Eddie Churchill’s “Sexy New XSLT Mapper” finally make it into the product.
The September announcement also changed the scope of codename Oslo in a significant way. Last year Oslo was described as a large collection of differing technologies, at PDC David Chappell described Oslo’s three main components as modelling tools, a process server, and a new version of WF. According to the announcement, Oslo now consists of just the modelling components.
%u00b7 A modelling tool
%u00b7 A modelling language
%u00b7 A storage repository
This is confirmed by Douglas Purdy in his “What is Oslo?” blog post. “That is it.That is all Oslo is.Oslo is just the modelling platform.”
This makes a lot of sense, as previously there were a large range of existing and future technologies that were under the Oslo umbrella. This “wave of technologies” included server products, modelling tools, and improvements in the .net platform. Having a clear definition of Oslo representing the modelling aspects of these technologies provides a much clearer definition of what Oslo is.

As for the process server, the new workflow version, BizTalk Services, and the other developments, we will have to wait until PDC at the end of October for further confirmation. It should be a very exciting conference.