After a recent MS update, when I attempted to create a new project in Visual Studio 2008, on the left side of the status bar, it stated that the creation of the new project failed.
I followed the instructions from developers point and dot net slackers to no avail.
The solution was to simply repair the BizTalk Server 2009 installation.
Last week we rolled out a new feature within our Pluralsight On-Demand! training library. It’s now possible for subscribers to download the slides associated with each online module in PDF format. This gives subscribers an offline reference while disconnected from our online video library.
You’ll simply find a PDF download icon in the module list as shown in the image above. We hope you find this new feature useful!
Last week while I was on vacation they published my latest whitepaper on MSDN. It covers the various new features found in WCF 4.0. The following abstract will give you a better of idea of the main areas I cover in this 60+ page paper:
A Developer’s Introduction to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) .NET 4 Beta 1
The .NET Framework 4 comes with some compelling new features and welcomed improvements in the area of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). These WCF enhancements focus primarily on simplifying the developer experience, enabling more communication scenarios, and providing rich integration with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) by making “workflow services” a first-class citizen moving forward. The .NET Framework 4 will be released with Visual Studio 2010, which is currently in “Beta 1” – you can download the Beta 1 release from the Visual Studio Developer Center on MSDN.
The good news is most of the WCF changes in .NET 4 focus on making today’s common scenarios easier and making new communication scenarios and development styles possible. As a result, moving your existing WCF solutions to .NET 4 will be fairly seamless in terms of migration. Then you simply decide which new WCF features you want to take advantage of in your solutions moving forward. The rest of this paper introduces you to each of the new WCF feature areas in .Net 4 and demonstrates how they work.
You can grab it here. Enjoy!
Did you know that when doing contract first development and utilize a Boolean data type with a default value (lets just say the default value was set to true), WCF will not serialize out the default value in the message. WCF will only serialize out the value if it differs from the default.
This was an interesting scenario in BizTalk when we were trying to test for the Boolean to be true and we saw that it was actually empty.
Sometimes I wonder with these types of issues if I am the only one in the world that didn’t know that. I am going to make the assumption that this will be news to more people then just me.
We’ve recently added a short course on “Dublin” to our subscription-based on demand library. This is very much an early adopter course using very early bits released last year at the PDC. The intention is not to provide detailed information on specifics around the technology as those will most definitely change, rather I wanted to provide enough information and detail so developers can figure out “What is Dublin?”.
The modules provide an overview as well as showing the tools provided by, or built upon by, “Dublin” to deploy and manage your services.
Hopefully, these early look modules are helpful to you as a developer as you prepare for the next wave of connected systems technologies from Microsoft. As “Dublin” reaches further milestones such as Beta and Release Candidate status, I will be updating the course, and adding more content to round it out with deeper detail.
Enjoy!
Now that POP3 is not a part of Windows Server 2008 it is probably timely to post on a hidden POP3 adapter context property that you can use to decode emails picked up from the file system without actually using the POP3 adapter. I’ve been meaning to blog this for a while since I investigated […]
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Get into Microsoft Tag it, at the recent Teched here, all MVPs had a Tag assoicated with our names, …
Although I was quite happy with my first implementation of my Order Demo (see prior post here that points at videos of completed solution), as BAM is an area of sub-specialization for me and one I feel very strongly about, I wanted to incorporate some BAM tracking in my second version of the demo.
The data I wanted to track was simple: orders that need to be approved or denied get sent to a SharePoint document list, and I wanted to track how long it took someone to act on it, the disposition, etc.
The first way I thought of to implement this was go back to my order schema, and add in some new elements like InterventionStart, InterventionEnd and InterventionDisposition to capture the data. That would have worked, but I really didn’t want to change my source schemas just for this, particularly as there were multiple InfoPath forms built off those schemas that would need to be refreshed. Plus, it would mean carrying around content in a message that may only be used for a specialized activity tracking report. So, I started thinking. there must be a better way. And, I was right.
The way I solved this was by looking at and leveraging the properties surfaced by the SharePoint adapter. For example, timing the duration of an intervention would be a simple matter of tracking “document creation time” (when it was written to the doclist, intervention completed would be the time I picked it up. As a bonus, I could also get other properties, such as what account last modified the document.
The beauty of this approach was that it was completely “touch free”. I didn’t have to go in and modify the document structure, any of the artifacts, nor the InfoPath forms. In fact, I deployed my tracking solution WITHOUT TOUCHING THE ALREADY DEPLOYED AND RUNNING BIZTALK SOLUTION. Pretty cool!
Here’s how the BAM portion of the solution is assembled.
My activity definition looks like this:
My view definition looks like this:
I used the Tracking Profile Editor to do the mapping from the tracking model to the physical data items and their respective collection points. Note that there is no orchestration in the mix, we are doing messaging-only BAM, and the screen shot below shows that I have set the port mapping to be the “ReceiveIntervenedOrders” port, and that the data I am picking up is “InCreated” from the SharePoint adapter properties.
And, that’s all there is to it from the collection standpoint. With the tracking profile deployed, any messages coming in through that receive port get the properties tracked.
Finally, now that we are capturing metrics, I needed to render them, and used my favorite tooling for this: SQL Server Reporting Services hosted in SharePoint. Although I rarely work with SSRS, this is what I was able to quickly cobble together:
A couple of important points to note:
Elapsed time from the point of having the idea to having something working, only about 5 hours. I then spent a couple of hours tweaking the reports. It would have been faster if I were more familiar with SharePoint and Reporting Services.
I heard someone say once that good developers are lazy, as laziness makes them strive for the easiest way to solve problems. In this case, my laziness led me to what I see as a very clean and elegant solution pattern that I can see lots of people taking advantage of.
If anyone out there is doing other cool stuff with BAM and SharePoint, please let us know!