Creating Transactional Service Operations in WCF Explained
WCF provides several features that enable you to define the transactional characteristics of a service and control the way that client applications use that service.
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How Distributed Transactions Are Coordinated in WCF
Propagating transactions across a process or network boundary is not a trivial task.
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How to Define a Message Contract in WCF?
For most applications, creating data contracts for the parameters or return values is all that is necessary. However, there are times when you must have complete control over the message.
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Got the Best Missing Enterprise Pattern? Win A Copy Of Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform
Packt Publishing has given me a few copies of my book “Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform” to give away on BizTalkGurus.com. Over the next few weeks, I am going to have a few contests. The book is a $60 value and I will cover the shipping costs to the winner anyplace in the world as long as the US Postal Service ships there.
| Contest #1 – Below are the architectural patterns covered in our book. We started with a much larger list and cut it down to what we thought were the top 13 used in the enterprise. Besides the 13 listed below, what is another pattern commonly used in the enterprise? |
How to Enter:
Simply add a comment to this blog post with your pattern idea to enter! Ensure you are a registered BizTalkGurus.com member so I know your email address if you win OR send an email to contest@biztalkgurus.com after you post your pattern. Please ensure you see your pattern show up as a comment on this blog. Due to spam blocker and caching – it might take up to 24 hours. If all else fails, just send me an email.
Entries must be received by 11 PM Monday November 1st Central Standard Time. The winner will be announced a few days later.
The fellow authors and I will review the suggested patterns and what we determine to be the “best missing enterprise pattern” will win a free copy of our book. Who knows, you might even see it written up later on if we release an update to the book.
Included Patterns
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Best of luck! Of course if you do not win a free copy of the book – the book is available on Amazon.com and PacktPub.com.
Looking for more information on our book? Read a sample chapter online Chapter 12 Debatching Bulk Data or watch The Story Behind The Book on YouTube.
StreamInsight V1.1 is released (.NET Sequences / IObservable, side-by-side installation and perf improvements)
The StreamInsight dev team has just released the next version of StreamInsight (version 1.1)!! New features in this release include:
- .NET Sequences – no more custom adapters for common .NET data sources. Using .NET sequences instead of adapters as event sources and sinks, which makes the integration with many existing data sources much easier and lowers the barrier of entry.
- Side by side installation. This enables you to safely upgrade to the new release, while having the option to keep running your existing applications against the former version of StreamInsight.
- Performance and Stability improvements.
Read all about it on the product team announcement.
How to Define a Data Contract for Custom Serialization in WCF?
For the WCF serializer to marshal a complex type, you must define a data contract for it. To do this, start by applying the DataContractAttribute attribute to the complex type definition that you want to pass in a message. Apply the DataMemberAttribute attribute to each field (either a data member or a property) that is to be serialized. All other data fields on the class are ignored.
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Azure Queue Explorer
Having played a great deal with Queues in the past, the opportunity to expand the abilities of a real world solution to use the concept of Queues in the cloud as a great way of doing what Queues do best, hold onto something for someone later on to pick it up, in a managed and ordered fashion.
It seems Azure Queues do just that, and I was so happy that I made a tool that enabled me to manage my Queues:
View and Create Queues
Send and Receive Messages
Peek what messages I Have
Delete Messages from the Queue
I have made this publicly available for all to use and play with, along with the all important source code, it’s no trade secret on how to use them, it’s just nice to have something ready to go that does it for me.
Check out the link here: Azure Queue Explorer
Source code
BizTalk BAM activity Deploy problem – The BAM Star Schema database has not been configured. Run bm.exe setup-databases to configure the database.
When trying to deploy BAM activity into a new BizTalk Environment: “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft BizTalk Server \Tracking>bm.exe deploy-all -DefinitionFile:BAM.SMSExpress.xls” It happened to me the following error: “Microsoft (R) Business Activity Monitoring Utility Version 3.9.469.0 Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Using ‘BAMPrimaryImport’ BAM Primary Import database on server ‘BTS2010LAB01′… Deploying Activity… Done. Deploying View… […]
SharePoint 2010: InfoPath Forms Services is not turned on
Here’s something that I hope to save a few hours to you – InfoPath Forms Services.
I recently ran into this dreaded error – “InfoPath
Forms Services is not turned on” when trying to configure it from within SharePoint
Central Administration -> General Application Settings.
Forms Services is part of SharePoint Enterprise Services (usually
activated via a Farm/Web Application/Site Collection or Site feature) and it relies
upon the State Service.
So on our intranet, we’re revamping some InfoPath forms that were working in SP2007
and a new SP2010 using the database detach/attach method saw the intranet up and runningalmostexcept
for this InfoPath Forms Services.
Most posts on the web talk about simply not having the feature enabled for either
a Site collection, and/or Central Admin (and various other red herrings in my case)
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1237956/infopath-forms-services-is-not-turned-on
http://mundeep.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/infopath-forms-services-is-not-turned-on/
Basically my source of truth was SharePoint Manager 2010 (great tool
from CODEPLEX) which allows
connections to SharePoint via the APIs as a standalone application (tip: make sure
you launch it in ’run in administrator’ mode).
From here I saw that on my install I was missing Forms Services listed
in the Farm’s Service Applications
I initially thought it was some permissions issue and that I couldn’t see the service
under that account (even though I was farm admin), so I launched and checked under
the installer account and got the same result.
My next questions were: How does Forms Services become missing? How do you
manually install/enable it?
In this case, I had a classroom SharePoint 2010 VM easily available and looking at
it through SharePoint Manager, low and behold the Forms Service service
was there!! Listed.
The machine I was having trouble with was a standard clean install, that I didn’t automatically
run the Configuration Wizard on – as I wanted to have control over
the naming of DBs. That was pretty much the difference between the two machines.
So I tried a few things:
a) installing just the InfoPath Web Admin Feature – stsadm -o installfeature
-name IPFSAdminWeb -force and then activating it with stsadm -o activatefeature
-name IPFSAdminWeb -url http://sp2010:10000 -force (no
luck, it just gave me the InfoPath config under the Central Admin)
b) reran the configuration wizard
c) repaired setup
d) tried to run just the InfoPath Forms Services MSI from the install source.
all to no avail.
InfoPath Forms Services – now with ’deeper’ integration with SharePoint
2010, an internal service but with no real apparent way of getting to it.
The Answer:
I got thinking and I decided to attempt a backup of the Service from my VM
and restore just the Service to the intranet Farm.
– Perform a backup of just the configuration
Then from there I did a restore (more in hope than anything) such that this process
would ’inject’ the right settings into the Farm Database.
At this point anything with InfoPath Forms Services on it was a bonus.
In any rate, here’s the backup file in ZIP format from my VM, that you can use to
restore if ever faced with a similar challenge 🙂
InfoPathFormsServices.ZIP
BizTalk 2010 Installation and Configuration – Installing and Configuring BizTalk Server (Part 8)
BizTalk 2010 Installation and Configuration, the last chapter!!! In this section you’ll install BizTalk Server, confirm that the installation succeeded, and then configure BizTalk Server. When you installed SQL Server, setup granted your account Database Administrator rights. Since these rights are also required for installing BizTalk Server, you must do one of the following: Use […]