by community-syndication | Jan 27, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
The latest round of research is out from Gartner, and they have positioned Microsoft in the Leaders Quadrant of all three Application Infrastructure Magic Quadrants. The Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for SOA Composite Application Projects , Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for New Systematic SOA Application Projects, and the Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Back-End Application Integration Projects.
In my humble opinion, placement in the Leaders Quadrant validates Microsoft as a leading provider of platform technology for service orientation and integration. We believe that these reports highlight the depth of our offering in these spaces and recognize our potential for future innovation.
For more information on today’s news, please click here for details on the press release.
On the legalese:
The Gartner Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2008 by Gartner, Inc., and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
The Magic Quadrant graphic was published by Gartner, Inc., as part of a larger research note and should be evaluated in the context of the entire report. The Gartner report is available upon request from Microsoft Corporation.
by community-syndication | Jan 27, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Our Australian Govt. has been busy over Christmas by finally legalising RFID UHF Reader
Frequencies and Power Output!
Previously the ‘work around’ was to operate under a Scientific (Experimental)
‘License’ – these were controlled by GS1 – a global standards body.
(Things here are made a little more complicated as one of the Mobile Phone companies
licensed a slice of the UHF Reader bandwidth – or maybe the mobile phone company got
there first and readers came second….it’s getting late.
So all reader configurations had to respect their range – around 926MHz)
Drilling in a bit further the stipulations were:
1. The Reader could not exceed 2W without paying more License $$ for the 2-4W Range.
<1W didn’t even blip on the RFID police’s radar.
2. The Site/Venue needed a ‘Site’ License to operate these Readers (once again my
experience was <1W no questions asked)
Well *finally* the Govt. passed a bill legalising the 4W UHF Readers.
Details can be found here – December 18th 2008.
http://www.comlaw.gov.au/ComLaw/Legislation/LegislativeInstrument1.nsf/framelodgmentattachments/9C97DFB874C6B8E2CA25753E007B7955
by community-syndication | Jan 26, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
For those who deploy BAM activity definition using the Tracking Profile Editor, it may come as a surprise when denied access to the BAM portal……(read more)
by stephen-w-thomas | 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.
by community-syndication | 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.
by community-syndication | 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.
by community-syndication | Jan 25, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
It has been 17 months since my last post. I didn’t mean to stop blogging but right after wrapping the BizTalk project in September 2007, I was given an irresistible opportunity to join Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS)…
…(read more)
by community-syndication | Jan 25, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Happy Chinese New Year!
It has been 17 months since my last post. I didn’t mean to stop blogging but right after wrapping the BizTalk project in September 2007, I was given an irresistible opportunity to join Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS)…
…(read more)
by community-syndication | 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? ;-))
by community-syndication | 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.
