by community-syndication | Mar 9, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Here’s a ‘Thank You’ to all our customers and partners, for creating a Windows Azure platform AppFabric commercial account. The trust you have placed in the Windows Azure platform is tremendously appreciated. As you may remember from our previous announcement, AppFabric will become fully SLA-supported in April, and your account will begin to accrue charges.
In order to help prepare you for the onset of billing, today we are releasing the AppFabric Billing Preview. To use this billing preview, at any time you may visit the AppFabric Developer Portal and download a daily AppFabric usage summary, which will have information similar to that currently available for Windows Azure and SQL Azure. The report will summarize your usage of AppFabric starting today. The Billing Preview will be available until you start seeing actual billing charges in April. We hope you find the billing preview useful in understanding how you will be charged when actual billing starts.
You can find our pricing information here. For additional detail, you can also go to the pricing section of our FAQs as well as our previous pricing blog post. If you have feedback on the billing preview or need further information, please visit our Discussion Forum.
We deeply value your continued investment and are always striving to move further towards our goal of enabling you, our customers and partners, to build and grow your businesses on the Windows Azure platform.
The Windows Azure platform AppFabric Team
by community-syndication | Mar 8, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
After spending hours learning to play the fake guitar simply to get a higher score, I often wondered why someone couldn’t make a game to learn useful skills. Where’s arithmetic Hero? Going-to-bed-on-time Hero? Microsoft Office Ribbon Hero?
Well, at least the last one finally exists. Microsoft Ribbon Hero lets you learn to use the Microsoft Ribbon and earn points while doing it. They even have Facebook integration so you can compete against your friends and coworkers. (My FB account is here, if you want to challenge me)
The premise of the Ribbon is based on sound UI design (it’s even won awards), but it’s so different than what we were used to. If you’re like me, you’ve figured out where your most commonly used items are on the Ribbon, but haven’t fully explored the other features and often have to hunt for that one option that you use so rarely. Well, let’s take that need for points and apply it to learning something we can actually use in everyday life.
Finally, a game you can play in front of the boss. After all, you’re increasing productivity!
by community-syndication | Mar 8, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Happy Monday!
It’s an exciting time here as we start ramping up for launch next month. Within the product group, there has been a flurry of activity as they squash their bugs, and the final polish is being placed on the Visual Studio release. In the business group, we’re busy finalizing web content and launch material that you’ll start seeing over the next few months.
On Friday, in preparation of the release of the new Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) runtime in .NET 4 (WF4), the team has released the first public Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the WF Migration Kit. The original WF migration guidance documents that we started releasing with Beta 1 are now complimented by a tool that will help you migrate common scenarios implemented using WF from .NET 3.x (WF3).
As quote the first two paragraphs of the migration kit’s user guide:
The WF Migration Kit helps users migrate WF3 (System.Workflow) artifacts to WF4 (System.Activities). The high level goal is to migrate workflow definitions and declarative conditions, but not code (such as workflow code-beside methods). Some WF3 workflows will be fully migratable to WF4, while others will be partially migratable and will require manual editing to complete the migration to WF4.
The WF Migration Kit provides an API as well as a command line executable tool, which is a wrapper around the API. Migrators are included for some, but not all, of the WF3 out-of-box activities. The WF Migration Kit offers an extensibility point so that custom activity migrators can be developed by third parties.
The migration kit is designed to help you get started in the automation and movement of common workflow scenarios. Because most of your logic will be in custom activities, the tool has extensibility points for you to automate the migration of your own custom workflow logic and activities.
The CTP release posted up to CodePlex has been released with the source code, under the .NET Pre-Release Components license. You are allowed to download and modify the code for your personal use for migrating your WF code. While it may be added into the .NET/Visual Studio codebase in the future, please treat it as another tool in your WF tool belt. For customers and ISVs with a lot of WF workflows to migrate, we hope it will be a tremendous help.
Enjoy!
BTW – Keep an eye on the WF Pre-Release CodePlex site; more goodies are coming over the next few months!
by community-syndication | Mar 8, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu]
We are continuing to make progress on shipping Visual Studio 2010. I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who has downloaded and tried out the VS 2010 Release Candidate, and especially to those who have sent us feedback or reported issues with it. This data has been invaluable in helping us find and fix remaining bugs before we ship the final release.
Last month I blogged about a patch we released for the VS 2010 RC that fixed a bad intellisense crash issue. This past week we released two additional patches that you can download and apply to the VS 2010 RC to immediately fix two other common issues we’ve seen people run into:
Patch that fixes crashes with Tooltip invocation and when hovering over identifiers
The Visual Studio team recently released a second patch that fixes some crashes we’ve seen when tooltips are displayed – most commonly when hovering over an identifier to view a QuickInfo tooltip.
You can learn more about this issue from this blog post, and download and apply the patch here.
Patch that fixes issues with the Web Forms designer not correctly adding controls to the auto-generated designer files
The Visual Web Developer team recently released a patch that fixes issues where web controls are not correctly added to the .designer.cs file associated with the .aspx file – which means they can’t be programmed against in the code-behind file.
This issue is most commonly described as “controls are not being recognized in the code-behind” or “editing existing .aspx files regenerates the .aspx.designer.(vb or cs) file and controls are now missing” or “I can’t embed controls within the Ajax Control Toolkit TabContainer or the <asp:createuserwizard> control”.
You can learn more about the issue here, and download the patch that fixes it here.
Common Cause of Intellisense and IDE sluggishness on Windows XP, Vista, Win Server 2003/2008 systems
Over the last few months we’ve occasionally seen reports of people seeing tremendous slowness when typing and using intellisense within VS 2010 despite running on decent machines. It took us awhile to track down the cause – but we have found that the common culprit seems to be that these machines don’t have the latest versions of the UIA (Windows Automation) component installed.
UIA 3 ships with Windows 7, and is a recommended Windows Update patch on XP and Vista (which is why we didn’t see the problem in our tests – since our machines are patched with all recommended updates). Many systems (especially on XP) don’t automatically install recommended updates, though, and are running with older versions of UIA. This can cause significant performance slow-downs within the VS 2010 editor when large lists are displayed (for example: with intellisense).
If you are running on Windows XP, Vista, or Windows Server 2003 or 2008 and are seeing any performance issues with the editor or IDE, please install the free UIA 3 update that can be downloaded from this page. If you scroll down the page you’ll find direct links to versions for each OS.
Note that we are making improvements to the final release of VS 2010 so that we don’t have big perf issues when UIA 3 isn’t installed – and we are also adding a message within the IDE that will warn you if you don’t have UIA 3 installed and accessibility is activated.
Improved Text Rendering with WPF 4 and VS 2010
We recently made some nice changes to WPF 4 which improve the text clarity and text crispness over what was in the VS 2010/.NET 4 Release Candidate. In particular these changes improve scenarios where you have a dark background with light text.
You can learn more about these improvements in this WPF Team blog post. These changes will be in the final release of VS 2010 and .NET 4.
Hope this helps,
Scott
by community-syndication | Mar 8, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu]
This a quick post to announce a few upcoming events for those in the UK.
I’ll be presenting in Glasgow, Scotland on March 25th
I’m doing a free 5 hour presentation in Glasgow on March 25th. I’ll be covering VS 2010, ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET Web Forms 4, ASP.NET MVC 2, Silverlight and potentially show off a few new things that haven’t been announced yet.
You can learn more about the event and register for free here. There are only a few spots left – so register quickly.
When the event fills up there will be a wait-list – please add yourself to this as we’ll be encouraging people who won’t be able to attend to let us know ahead of time so that we can add more people to the event.
I’ll be presenting in Birmingham, England on March 26th
I’m doing a free 5 hour presentation in Birmingham (UK) on March 26th. I’ll be covering VS 2010, ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET Web Forms 4, ASP.NET MVC 2, Silverlight and also potentially show off a few new things that haven’t been announced yet.
You can learn more about the event and register for free here.
The event unfortunately filled up immediately (even before I had a chance to blog it) – but there is a waitlist. If you’d like to attend please add yourself to it as hopefully a number of people will be able to attend off of it.
UK Party at MIX
If you are going to MIX and are from the UK send mail to [email protected] (or tweet him @plip) for an invite to a party being organized for UK MIX attendees next Tuesday (March 16th). Knowing the people involved I’m sure the party will be fun. <g>
Cool MIX10 iPhone App
Speaking of MIX (and UK developers), Chris Hardy has posted a cool new MIX10 iPhone application on the Apple AppStore. The free application helps track sessions, rooms, etc. You can learn more about it from Chris’ blog post here. The app works for everyone – not just those from the UK. 🙂
Hope this helps,
Scott
by community-syndication | Mar 7, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Hi all
Today I discovered something, that AGAIN confirms, that BizTalk 2009 was simply shipped
without any form of proper testing of the new Visual Studio .NET project system that
they chose to switch to. I have already described lots of issues here: http://blog.eliasen.dk/2009/07/21/IssuesWithBizTalk2009OnVSNET2008.aspx and
a hotfix has been releases which I have shortly described here: http://blog.eliasen.dk/2010/01/27/HotfixForIssuesWithDevelopingBizTalk2009SolutionsInVisualStudio.aspx.
Anyways, the issue is, that I created a property schema in my project, and in this
property schema I created four properties. I then opened up the orchestration I had
in the same project and created a Correlation Type, that used these four properties.
That gave me this error:
identifier ‘PropertyName’ does not exist in ‘ProjectName’; are you missing an assembly
reference?
So basically, when compiling, the new property cannot be found. Turns out, though,
that if I compile the project and THEN use the properties in a Correlation Type, then
everything works just fine. What a lousy deal
The hotfix mentioned above does not seem to rectify this issue, so this remains an
issue, I think.
—
eliasen
by community-syndication | Mar 7, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
I guess most of my readers are from BizTalk/BPM background. So, some of these post may not be relevant to them. I'm just using the blog as reference archive for all of the issues I'm encountering during my Silverlight learning. So, please feel free to ignore id 😉
Exception Detail:
System.InvalidOperationException was unhandled by user code
Message="The IModuleCatalog is required and cannot be null in order to initialize the modules."
StackTrace:
at Microsoft.Practices.Composite.UnityExtensions.UnityBootstrapper.InitializeModules()
at Microsoft.Practices.Composite.UnityExtensions.UnityBootstrapper.Run(Boolean runWithDefaultConfiguration)
at Microsoft.Practices.Composite.UnityExtensions.UnityBootstrapper.Run()
at UI.App.InitializeRootVisual()
at UI.App.Application_Startup(Object sender, StartupEventArgs e)
at System.Windows.CoreInvokeHandler.InvokeEventHandler(Int32 typeIndex, Delegate handlerDelegate, Object sender, Object args)
at MS.Internal.JoltHelper.FireEvent(IntPtr unmanagedObj, IntPtr unmanagedObjArgs, Int32 argsTypeIndex, String eventName)
InnerException:
Resolution:
Set the following settings on your modulecatalog.xaml file.
Build : Content (Default is page)
Cusom Tool Namespace: (just empty content, default will look something like MSBuild:MarkupCompilePass1)
Event though the extension of the file is xaml, we don't need to compile it. It's just going to be a content file available on the SilverLight app.
Nandri!
Saravana
by community-syndication | Mar 7, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Hi all
I have just installed VMware WorkStation 7.0.1 in order to start building 64bit guest
OS’es in order to try out Windows Server 2008 R2 and SharePoint 2010. Microsoft Virtual
PC does not support 64bit guest operating systems, and since I really appreciate being
able to run guest operating systems in a window on my host PC I saw no other way out
than getting and installing VMware WorkStation.
Now, after installing it, I tried to create my first Windows 2008 R2 virtual machine,
but that failed because I hadn’t enabled Virtualization Technology (VT) in my BIOS.
So I rebooted, entered BIOS and enabled it. That worked fine, and I now have a virtual
machine running Windows 2008 R2 64bit.
BUT, when I then wanted to fire up one of my old Microsoft Virtual PC virtual machines
that I had earlier saved, I got an error saying that the saved file was corrupt. I
had the choice of deleting the saved file or doing nothing. Since I needed the VPC,
I chose to delete the saved file information and hope that I could recreate what was
then lost.
Then, when starting up my next saved virtual machine from Microsoft Virtual PC, I
got the same error. I have now played around with it, and it simply seems that if
I save the state of a VPC and then turn on VT, the file gets corrupted and cannot
be used 🙁 I even tried saving state when VT was enabled, and then I disabled it
and reenabled it. Saved file was again corrupt 🙁
This REALLY sucks! This means that you need to be really careful with when you save
the state and when you do not
—
eliasen
by community-syndication | Mar 7, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Note: This blog post is written using the .NET framework 4.0 RC 1
Most of the time I used compiled workflows in Windows Workflow Foundation 4. Its nice and easy, you design the workflow, compile it and at runtime there is a .NET type you use to create and run workflows. The main drawback is that this approach isn’t very flexible, sometimes you want to be able to change your workflow definition at runtime or store it in a database so recompiling isn’t an option.
Fortunately we can also load a workflow from the XAML file itself and execute the resulting workflow activity. This is done using the ActivityXamlServices class that will let us load the XAML file and return an activity, to be exact it returns a DynamicActivity as a wrapper around your definition.
The simplest option is just to call Load() passing in the file name like this:
Activity workflow = ActivityXamlServices.Load("YourWorkflow.xaml");
If you are using activities, or other types, from the local assembly this is going to fail though and you need a slightly more verbose way of doing thing like this:
var settings = new XamlXmlReaderSettings()
{
LocalAssembly = typeof(SendForManualApproval).Assembly
};
var reader = new XamlXmlReader("YourWorkflow.xaml", settings);
Activity workflow = ActivityXamlServices.Load(reader);
We need to use the XamlXmlReaderSettings to indicate what the local assembly reference in the XAML is.
Enjoy!
www.TheProblemSolver.nl
Wiki.WindowsWorkflowFoundation.eu
by community-syndication | Mar 6, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Tim Bass posted on ’Orwellian Event Processing’.I was involved in a heated exchange in the comments, and he has more recently published a post entitled ’Disadvantages of Rule-Based Systems (Part 1)’.Whatever the rights and wrongs of our exchange, it clearly failed to generate any agreement or understanding of our different positions.I don’t particularly want to promote further argument of that kind, but I do want to take the opportunity of offering a different perspective on rule-processing and an explanation of my comments.
For me, the ’red rag’ lay in Tim’s claim that “…rules alone are highly inefficient for most classes of (not simple) problems” and a later paragraph that appears to equate the simplicity of form (’IF-THEN-ELSE’) with simplicity of function. It is not the first time Tim has expressed these views and not the first time I have responded to his assertions. Indeed, Tim has a long history of commenting on the subject of complex event processing (CEP) and, less often, rule processing in ’robust’ terms, often asserting that very many other people’s opinions on this subject are mistaken. In turn, I am of the opinion that, certainly in terms of rule processing, which is an area in which I have a specific interest and knowledge, he is often mistaken.
There is no simple answer to the fundamental question ’what is a rule?’We use the word in a very fluid fashion in English.Likewise, the term ’rule processing’, as used widely in IT, is equally difficult to define simplistically.The best way to envisage the term is as a ’centre of gravity’ within a wider domain.That domain contains many other ’centres of gravity’, including CEP, statistical analytics, neural networks, natural language processing and so much more.Whole communities tend to gravitate towards and build themselves around some of these centres.
The term ‘rule processing’ is associated with many different technology types, various software products, different architectural patterns, the functional capability of many applications and services, etc.There is considerable variation amongst these different technologies, techniques and products.Very broadly, a common theme is their ability to manage certain types of processing and problem solving through declarative, or semi-declarative, statements of propositional logic bound to action-based consequences.It is generally important to be able to decouple these statements from other parts of an overall system or architecture so that they can be managed and deployed independently.
As a centre of gravity, ’rule processing’ is no island.It exists in the context of a domain of discourse that is, itself, highly interconnected and continuous. Rule processing does not, for example, exist in splendid isolation to natural language processing. On the contrary, an on-going theme of rule processing is to find better ways to express rules in natural language and map these to executable forms. Rule processing does not exist in splendid isolation to CEP. On the contrary, an event processing agent can reasonably be considered as a rule engine (a theme in ’Power of Events’ by David Luckham). Rule processing does not live in splendid isolation to statistical approaches such as Bayesian analytics.On the contrary, rule processing and statistical analytics are highly synergistic. Rule processing does not even live in splendid isolation to neural networks.For example, significant research has centred on finding ways to translate trained nets into explicit rule sets in order to support forms of validation and facilitate insight into the knowledge stored in those nets.
What about simplicity of form? Many rule processing technologies do indeed use a very simple form (’If…Then’, ’When…Do’, etc.) However, it is a fundamental mistake to equate simplicity of form with simplicity of function. It is absolutely mistaken to suggest that simplicity of form is a barrier to the efficient handling of complexity. There are countless real-world examples which serve to disprove that notion. Indeed, simplicity of form is often the key to handling complexity.
Does rule processing offer a ’one size fits all’.No, of course not. No serious commentator suggests it does. Does the design and management of large knowledge bases, expressed as rules, become difficult? Yes, it can do, but that is true of any large knowledge base, regardless of the form in which knowledge is expressed.
The measure of complexity is not a function of rule set size or rule form. It tends to be correlated more strongly with the size of the ’problem space’ (’search space’) which is something quite different. Analysis of the problem space and the algorithms we use to search through that space are, of course, the very things we use to derive objective measures of the complexity of a given problem.This is basic computer science and common practice.
Sailing a Dreadnaught through the sea of information technology and lobbing shells at some of the islands we encounter along the way does no one any good. Building bridges and causeways between islands so that the inhabitants can collaborate in open discourse offers hope of real progress.
