Designing Services for Management & Scale with Dublin Session at the SOA Conference

by | Jan 26, 2009 | Stephen's BizTalk and Integration Blog

If you are headed to the SOA & Business Process Conference in Seattle this week and you have an interest in Dublin (Microsoft’s new extensions to windows to host WCF and WF) make sure you check out my session.  I will be presenting with Kent Brown from Microsoft.

The abstract is below.

Abstract:

Dublin is the code name for the new Windows Application Server features inside Windows. In this session we will take a look at how to build a service to leverage the management tools inside Dublin to gain insight into the health of running services. We will show how simple it is to configure Dublin to custom track custom values inside message payloads. Once tested, deployment and migration of the service to a new environment will be demonstrated.

Received another nice review of my book on REST…

Received another nice review of my book on REST…

by | Jan 26, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

… at blog
critics magazine; and at Amazon I’m
up to 5 reviews (avg 5 stars). Thanks to everyone who has bought the book and special
thanks to those that reviewed it! Good reviews at Amazon are as important as getting
good evaluation scores at conferences these days – so double thanks to everyone.  
Nice way to wake up on a Monday morning :)    


Check out my new book on REST.

Extracting the file name from a message

by | Jan 26, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

A friend from Chile asked about how to extract a filename from a message, after going back and forth, I sent him this code that I use in my EDI logger

        private static string extractFileName(IBaseMessage inmsg)
        {
            string adapterType = (string)inmsg.Context.Read("InboundTransportType", "http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties");
            string ReceivedFileName = "";
            //make sure it is an adapter that we can get a file name from
            if (adapterType == "FILE" || adapterType == "FTP")
            {
                if (adapterType == "FILE")
                {
                    ReceivedFileName = (string)inmsg.Context.Read("ReceivedFileName", "http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/file-properties");
                }
                else if (adapterType == "FTP")
                {
                    ReceivedFileName = (string)inmsg.Context.Read("ReceivedFileName", "http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/ftp-properties");
                }
            }
            return Path.GetFileName(ReceivedFileName);
        }

Since he said he could not find anything out there on how to do it, I figured I would post it for everyone’s edification.

Specifying the user for a service to run as

by | Jan 25, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Mostly a reminder for myself, but hopefully useful to somebody else –

Often it is important to specify a specific user for a service to run as; it appears the setup is completely different when using IIS 5.1 or 6 (and higher).

When using IIS 5.1

  • Set the anonymous user on the virtual directory to the user you want to run as.
  • Disable any other authentication method on the vdir
  • In the web.config turn impersonation ON (<identity impersonate=”true” /> under System.web.)
  • Under System.serviceModel add <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled=”true”/>
  • To the service class add [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)]

When using IIS 6.0

  • In the web.config turn impersonation OFF(<identity impersonate=”false” /> under System.web.)
  • Set the required identity in the app pool your virtual directory runs under.

(which one do you prefer? ;-))

Vendor Favorite: TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio and Snagit

Vendor Favorite: TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio and Snagit

by | Jan 24, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I've really come to appreciate good tools that help me with things I do day to day.  I've decided that I'd like to use my blog to highlight companies and products that I use and enjoy.  Hopefully, by sharing my experience, it will help some of you find great tools that help you be more productive or happy. 

 

There are two products I've been using a lot lately for the work I've been doing for Pluralsight On Demand! and papers I've been writing.  Both are invaluable tools that are well designed and executed.  Both tools are from TechSmith who do a great job of keeping their products up to date and are constantly adding new and useful features. 

 

Snagit provides screen capture, and so much more.  I use Snagit primarily for capturing windows or portions of my screen for inclusion in articles and papers that I write.  The product allows you to create profiles that include what you want to capture, any effects to apply to it and where you want to send the capture. I usually have my images sent directly to the Snagit Editor so I can work with them to do things like highlight a portion of an image by drawing on it, adding effects like the tear-off effect, and saving the image out to a file.  However, the product can do so much more. In addition to capturing windows or regions of a screen, it can capture full web pages including scrolling the web page (Firefox and IE) and including all the content that is not initially visible on the page. Output can go to image files, PDF, or to the printer.  But wait, there's more!  When I say that TechSmith innovates and adds cool new features, I'm talking about things like being able to capture that image, then send it to Team System.  That's right, you capture the web page or window in Snagit, then you can create a new work item or add the image to an existing one.  What a great way to make life simpler for people who are doing testing and need to communicate the problem to a developer.  All in all, this is a great tool if you have any scenarios where you need to capture information on the screen and send it.  Check out all the plug-ins they have for capturing from Office, browsers, and elsewhere. And they have a printer driver so anything you can print you can send to the Snagit Editor and work with it before saving it to your preferred format. 

Camtasia is my tool of choice for recording our screencasts and our content for Pluralsight On Demand!.  Camtasia is simple to use for recording part of all of your screen and for recording PowerPoint  presentations.  You can add in the "talking head" picture-in-picture with a webcam if you so desire and easily create clips.  Then you have the ability to use the editor to slice-and-dice your clips into a presentation before you encode the whole thing.  You can annotate the recording when editing and manipulate the video and audio tracks. You've got various options for the video format and can do things like add a watermark image to the entire recording, cleanup the audio.  I'm a fairly novice user of this tool and I'm sure there are tons of things it can do that I haven't even begun to find yet, but I don't know that I could find a better tool for recording demos and presentations.

 

So that's it for my first set of tools.  If they sound useful, try them out, they both have trial versions you can download before buying and if you do buy them you just enter your key and keep right on going, no need to reinstall. 

New Release of the SmartTools for SharePoint Project

by | Jan 22, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Tonight I’ve uploaded new versions of all the components of the SmartTools for SharePoint project on CodePlex. For those of you who don’t know the SmartTools project: it’s a collection of useful SharePoint extensions, including:

  • What’s New: a customizable web part that can display a list of recently added or changed items of a SharePoint site or site collection
  • Autocomplete Text Field: a field that allows users to pick items from a list by making use of an AJAX autocomplete text box.
  • Enhanced Site Actions: adds extra menu items the the default Site Actions menu, for easy access to commonly used functions
  • Copy Paste: adds copy and paste functionality to Document Libraries
  • jQuery: integrates the jQuery JavaScript library with SharePoint 2007
  • TableRow Highlight: uses jQuery to highlight table rows when the mouse pointer is hovering above them
  • Dock Navigation: adds an overlay to every page of a site to allow users to navigate to the Lists and Document Libraries of that site
  • Charts: show animated Silverlight charts, based on data stored in SharePoint lists and document libraries

This release is created based on lots of suggestions and bug reports of it’s users, so thanks for being part of the community! And keep submitting feature requests, feedback and bug reports. Most of the work went into the newest component: the Silverlight Charts. The Charts are still in beta, and I’ve got some cool ideas to make them even better. But even this beta version offers some cool functionality, you can watch a small screencast here (make sure you switch to fullscreen). If you’d like to download the screencast in high resolution; you hit the download link at the bottom right of the video page on Vimeo.

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