Note to self: Remeber BOOTREC.EXE

by | Nov 27, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

There I was rebuilding a new VPC Image (which I’m running in Virtual Box) and the
base VHD is a parent of 16GB.

For an install of Win2008, VS.NET 2010, SQL2008… it’s pretty much game over with
a full disk.

I spent the last 3 days shifting files around to clear space

So tonight I bit the bullet and Ghosted the partition over to a 200GB – much
better 🙂

This issue I had was that the boot environment was different and ‘in the good old
days’ we’d change the BOOT.INI and bobs your uncle.

Welcome to Vista and beyond…as you know we have the BCD Store

There’s a very common tool (blogged about everywhere) called BCDEDIT.EXE which
if GUIDs are your think and long command line options, you can ‘manually’ manage the
Store (there’s also a bunch of 3rd party apps that say ‘lets do this from the UI’
– I’m in recovery mode)

For the life of me I couldn’t remember the tool I used last time this happened to
me, which I said ‘don’t forget Mick’.

BOOTREC /rebuildbcd

Too easy…then if you can’t sleep you could also crack onto BCDEDIT.EXE to ‘customise’
some aspect. (e.g. booting up off multiple logical CORES)

Bootrec

Bootrec

Bootrec

I will not forget Bootrec

Presenting in Europe Next Week

by | Nov 27, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I’m off to Europe next week to do a bunch of technical presentations.  I’m presenting for 5-6 hours in a bunch of different cities, and will be doing talks that cover: ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010, ASP.NET MVC 2, and Silverlight 4.

Below are details on the different cities I’m visiting, and how to register to attend the talks:

I’ll also be attending the BizSpark Camp in Paris on December 8th and will be doing a presentation there as well:

Hope to see some of you at once of these events in person!

Scott

P.S. In addition to blogging, I’m also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

My ESB Toolkit How-to Videos are now on MSDN

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

Hi all. I’ve always used Skydrive and this blog to host my ESB Toolkit how-to videos but I have had a number of people ask me to find a better place for them to live. Well, I am now pleased to say that we are moving them to the ESB Toolkit page on MSDN. If you browse over to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-ca/biztalk/dd876606.aspx and check out the video section, you will see the first three videos from my series. In order to post these to MSDN, I had to re-film them use a better resolution and screen capture rate. I also had to sanitize some of the sample data that I used. Therefore, only three are currently available since I haven’t found the time to redo all of them yet. I hope to migrate the remaining ones to the MSDN required format soon. Also, I plan to do at least one more in the series which shows how to create new messaging level services that can snap into the ESB environment.

So in short, if you’ve come here to download any of the videos, I encourage you to try the MSDN site first.

Cheers and keep on BizTalking

Peter

Code Gallery Reshuffle

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

[Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman]

I’ve been posting code samples and walkthroughs on MSDN Code Gallery for a while now – keeping them distinct from CodePlex which I use for fully-fledged projects and tools. CodePlex uses TFS for source control, but the Code Gallery only lets you post up individual files, so until now I’ve been creating releases as ZIP files containing the source.

Now I’ve centralised the source for all those samples in a public repository on github at sixeyed/codegallery. The clone URL is: git://github.com/sixeyed/codegallery.git. If you’re new to git, the Illustrated Guide to Git on Windows is a good starting point.

For future work, I’ll continue posting the source ZIPs as resources on MSDN Code Gallery, but the master will be on github.

Early Retirement for SSO Config Tool

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

[Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman]

As Saravana Kumar has blogged, Microsoft have released an MMC snap-in for SSO configuration. It has pretty much all the functionality of the SSO Config Tool I put together a while ago, including:

  • UI for configuring values in an SSO application store
  • MSBuild task to import/export SSO settings from XML
  • .NET class for accessing SSO values

The .NET wrapper is pretty rudimentary, and one thing the snap-in doesn’t do is generate a wrapper for typed access to SSO values. The snap-in lets you read values like this:

boolcacheEnabled =bool.Parse(SSOClientHelper.Read(“SSOApp1”, “CacheEnabled”));

– whereas SSO Config Tool generates a class per SSO application, which lets you read values like this:

boolcacheEnabled =SSOApp1.CacheEnabled;

Overall the snap-in is a better management tool, so I suspect I’ll switch to it the next time I’m setting up config in SSO.

I’ll look to extracting the functionality for generating the typed wrapper into a standalone T4 template.

Using UML vs. ADL (Arbitrary Diagramming Language)

Using UML vs. ADL (Arbitrary Diagramming Language)

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

At my company, we highly encourage our architects and developers to communicate their design models through UML.  We have a standard set of diagrams that we regularly use to convey aspects of a given solution, including:

Component diagrams for system dependency, functional decomposition and data flow
Use case diagrams for business and system scenarios
Sequence diagrams for a […]

BizTalk remote administration

BizTalk remote administration

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

Every application needs management. Ideally an application should provide two ways of management. First an administrator needs a (graphical) console to be able to do single or ad-hoc actions like changing configuration, responding to error conditions, etc. Second there should be a way for an administrator to create and run scripts. Scripts allow administrators to […]