IASA’s CITA-P certification replaces Microsoft MCA

by community-syndication | May 14, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

As reported by IASA, the Certified IT Architect at the Professional Level (CITA-P) has now replaced Microsoft’s Certified Architect (MCA) program. The information about the new certification can be found here.

A curiosity: %u00abIn the six years of the MCA program, 113 solutions and infrastructure architects completed the certification. The CITA-P adoption path has been much quicker as 23 IT Architects have already gone through the certification. With the MCA grandfathering, upcoming boards scheduled in Ireland, India, and the US, IASA expects to double that number this calendar year.%u00bb

Deterministic GUIDs – Part 2

by community-syndication | May 13, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

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

23 months after the original post on Generating Deterministic GUIDs, I still find myself doing it fairly often and still using the same code (MD5 may not be suitable for secure scenarios, but it’s fine for generating GUIDs for normal development use).

This post contains a Silverlight widget which generates GUIDs for you on the fly:

Hit GUID to get a random GUID (from a call to Guid.NewGuid()), or enter text in the box to generate a GUID from the MD5 hash of its contents. It’ll ask you for permission to use your clipboard, and if you agree the GUID it generates will be pasted into the clipboard.

The code (VS 2010) is on github here: Silverlight Guid Generator.

Not much to it, only noteworthy point is that Silverlight doesn’t have a native MD5 provider, but there’s an implementation of the algorithm on MSDN Code Gallery – Silverlight MD5 – which is correct and produces the same hash as the provider in the full .NET framework.

Passthrough Objects – Duck Typing++

by community-syndication | May 13, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

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

Can’t see a genuine use for this, but I got the idea in my head and wanted to work it through. It’s an extension to the idea of duck typing, for scenarios where types have similar behaviour, but implemented in differently-named members.

So you may have a set of objects you want to treat as an interface, which don’t implement the interface explicitly, and don’t have the same member names so they can’t be duck-typed into implicitly implementing the interface. In a fictitious example, I want to call Get on whichever ICache implementation is current, and have the call passed through to the relevant method – whether it’s called Read, Retrieve or whatever:

A sample implementation is up on github here: PassthroughSample.

This uses Castle’s DynamicProxy behind the scenes in the same way as my duck typing sample, but allows you to configure the passthrough to specify how the inner (implementation) and outer (interface) members are mapped:

– or using some ugly Lambdas to avoid the strings :

– or even in config:

Possibly useful for injecting stubs for dependencies in tests, when your application code isn’t using an IoC container. Possibly it also has an alternative implementation using .NET 4.0 dynamic objects, rather than the dynamic proxy.

SQL to Informix error Msg 7343, Level 16, State 2

by community-syndication | May 13, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I was pushing data from a SQL table to an Informix table using an openquery statement in a trigger and would get the following error.

Msg 7343, Level 16, State 2, Procedure MyProcedure, Line 166

The OLE DB provider “Ifxoledbc” for linked server “INFORMIX” could not INSERT INTO table “[Ifxoledbc]”.

The following is an example of the T-SQL I was trying to insert. Its been generalized.

insert into openquery(INFORMIX,'select column1,column2,column3,column4,column5,column6,column7,column8,column9,column10,column11,column12,column13,column14,column15,column16,column17,column18,column19,column20,column21,column32, column33 from mytable')
Values ('somedata'
           ,'somedata'
           ,'anumber'
           ,'anumber'
           ,NULL
           ,'2010-03-16 00:00:00.000'
           ,'1'
           ,NULL
           ,NULL
           ,NULL
           ,'2010-03-17 19:00:00.000'
           ,'aname'
           ,'B%u00c3KER'
           ,'an address'
           ,NULL
           ,'acity'
           ,'astate'
           ,'azipcode'
           ,NULL
           ,NULL
           ,NULL
           ,NULL
           ,'astatuscode')

I narrowed it down to value:’B%u00c3KER’. I did a little more testing and Informix won’t accept the following characters.

I grabbed this table from the following link.

http://www.addressmunger.com/hex_ascii_tables/

Does anyone know why Informix won’t accept these characters? I don’t have access to the informix side of things, and I have only an basic knowledge of Informix so input on this problem would be nice.

Microsoft Canadian Leadership Summit Day #1

by community-syndication | May 13, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I recently had an opportunity to attend the Microsoft Canadian Leadership Summit in Redmond and thought I would share some of my findings. The Leadership Summit allows Microsoft Canada to invite key customers and partners to discuss technology trends that are relevant to the Canadian business climate.  Below is a recap of some ad hoc notes that I made through-out the presentations.

Why use Microsoft products?

• Standardization allows you to reduce costs
• Flexibility is required to change directions as the economy demands it
• Microsoft technologies allow you to manage costs and have agility
• Microsoft provides building blocks that allows you to fill the gaps between legacy applications, 3rd party and core Microsoft offerings no matter whether they are on-premise or in the cloud.

Pressures continue to Intensify

• New generation of workers
• Security and Compliance continues to be a challenge as more and more integration occurs
• Mobile and Distributed Workforces are increasing in numbers
• Innovate without additional resources

Consumerization of IT

We use to go to work to have a more advanced IT Experience

• Fast network download speeds
• Stable email environments

Now people at home have more IT capabilities at home than in the office

• Video conferencing
• IM
• Facebook
• Wireless Access points

Customers can use Microsoft products to provide a balance between improved collaboration while implementing security and management of those services.  Some examples of these technologies include the Social networking features in SharePoint 2010 and Office Communication Server (OCS).

The Cloud

• Decision to move to the cloud should be a business decision and not a technology decision
• Need to trust in enterprise-class services that Microsoft provides
• Delivering consistent connected experience across devices (PC, Mobile phone, Laptop, Consumer devices)
• Microsoft has had success with a lot of large “house hold” companies moving their assets to the Azure cloud.  Announcements will be made shortly
• Understanding Canadian Federal and Provincial privacy laws continue to create challenges

Low Cost Computing

• More companies are able to leverage low cost platforms for mission critical applications.  Windows Server is an enterprise ready OS that is much more affordable than other enterprise offerings.  Migrating your traditional AIX/Oracle environments is feasible , and achievable , on the Windows Platform
• Technology exists to maximize the efficiency of your IT infrastructure
• Take advantage of new ways to acquire and deliver technology

Microsoft’s Commitment to Customers

• Over 1 Billion active Windows Users
• 500 Million Office users
• $9.5 Billion invested in R&D
• Long Term, tenacious and Partner-Centric

Business climates are changing faster than they have before

• Every minute on YouTube, 24 hours of video is uploaded by users
• Starbucks – Office Online
  • Growth through stores
  • More cross selling and up selling
  • needed to extend technology into the store level
  • Microsoft Online Services – Email and SharePoint Team sites available to 19000 employees in-store to allow employees to collaborate on  how to grow the company$

Deep investments in infrastructure

• $2.3 Billion invested in cloud infrastructure
• Geo-replicated data to multiple data centres
• public and private cloud flexibility
• 30 000 engineers working on cloud services

Microsoft’s Commitment to services excellence

• Financially backed uptime guarantees
• SAS 70 and ISO 27001 compliant
• carbon footprint innovation
• Rapid innovation model

Office 2010 launch

Some key features:

• Ignore conversation – will remove current user from all future Distribution Lists emails and place related emails into the deleted folder
• Pictures of email recipient, from “My Site” show up in the bottom of compose email message
  • click on the picture and you see additional context from Facebook, LinkedIn and SharePoint
• SharePoint 2010 Search –
  • refined search and meta data
    • filter by author, date and other meta data
  • Specify content in links i.e. PowerPoint
  • Preview slides before opening document
  • People Search
• PowerPoint over the web
  • high fidelity without the need of Live Meeting
• SharePoint – My Site
  • status updates, similar to Facebook
  • tagging competencies allows you to easily search and identify an expert in the related competency
  • Post on “Note board’ – much like Facebook’s “wall”
  • Enriched Org chart including pictures and metadata
    • surfaced using Silver Light
  • Improved Blogging capabilities
  • Tags and Notes
    • tag pretty much anything in SharePoint – blogs, documents which create a Tag Cloud
    • follow tags via newsfeed
  • Offline capabilities – use  SharePoint workspace
• SharePoint 2010 wide scale adoption – early adopters include:
  • Global Crossing
  • Sony
  • Associated Press
  • Six Flags
  • Telus
  • Constellation Energy
  • Energizer
• 8.6 Million Beta Downloads
• 80 % Beta users encouraged others to download
• 450 Customers in early adoption program
• Edmonton Oilers (Professional Hockey) use SharePoint to collaborate on potentials players by aligning video with meta data and statistics 
  • Player Dashboard
  • Current prospects
  • Player video page
• Oiler organization feels that SharePoint 2010 is very intuitive and straight forward to use
  • leverage messaging and collaboration features
• 1000 Microsoft Partners are developing SharePoint 2010 solutions
• 20 000 Microsoft Partners partners trained
• 500 000 developers are using SharePoint

Microsoft Online Services

Why Customers are embracing the cloud:

• Reduce CAPEX & OPEX
• Predictable & Pay per use subscriptions
• Focus on Market differentiation
• Energy Efficiency
• Latest versions with no server upgrades
• Choice, Flexibility and Resource Agility
• Merger, Acquisition and Divestitures
• Up and Running quickly

Interesting quote from a Gartner reference":

“By 2012, 20% of businesses will own no IT Assets”.  Quite frankly I have a hard time believing this statement.

Microsoft Azure data canters include: Chicago, San Antonio, Northern Virgina, Dublin, Amsterdam, Singapore

No plans for Canada to have a data centre

• Concerns about privacy and laws due to provincial jurisdiction

Customers moving to cloud

• McDonalds
• Rexel
• Staples
• Eddie Bauer
• Phillips
• GlaxoSmithKline
• Blockbuster

Microsoft Online Services

• 40 million Online paid seats
• more than 5oo government agencies
• Over 50% of the fortune 500
• 9000 business customers

Team Explorer 2010 ’narks’ Enterprise Single Sign-On

by community-syndication | May 13, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

This post discusses how to fix a broken Enterprise Single Sign-On (ESSO) installation following an install of Visual Studio 2010 Team Explorer.

Invoking Concurrent programs and working with BizTalk Oracle E-Business Adapter

by community-syndication | May 13, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Invoking Concurrent programs and working with BizTalk Oracle E-Business Adapter In my current project I had to call a concurrent program in the Oracle E-Business Suite which would generate a report of all the employs payroll of the month. We were automating the payroll process in our organization and the whole solution involved getting and […]

Fun Visual Studio 2010 Wallpapers

by community-syndication | May 13, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Cisco VPN Client Version 5.0.01.0600

by community-syndication | May 12, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Alright I have been working on a remote server connected via VPN on Cisco’s VPN client.

I noticed early on that I couldn’t browse to any page when connected to the VPN. I would always get something like the following:

This was usually preceded by a login for the proxy server.

After banging my head against a wall for way too long I went into IE LAN settings and unchecked “Automatically detect settings.”

And I can now browse to anything I want. Nothing like a stupid VPN to ruin the internet for you.

BizTalk: Calling SAP RFC_READ_TABLE with the BizTalk Adapter Pack

by community-syndication | May 12, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Wow! I’m finally through the other side… what a quest and I thought I’d share some
of the details with you.

RFC_READ_TABLE rfc can be used to call into SAP and retrieve table
data – *sort of* (and that’s a big sort of) like a ‘DataSet’.

Using it requires a little work and understanding.

In your either BizTalk project or other project from VS.NET:

1. Add the SAP bits to your VS.NET project – ready for action
   1. select ‘Add Adapter Service Reference’ (for BTS projects -> Add New Generated
      Item->Consume Service Adapter…)

   2. On the Binding Wizard Screen select sapBinding and configure the
      appropriate connection string details such as:
      

      string
      sapUri = “sap://CLIENT=800;LANG=EN;@A/sapsrv/00?GWHOST=sapsrv&GWSERV=sapgw00&RfcSdkTrace=true”;
      <You need to stick your own sapURI above – that is more or less a sample>>
      

   3. Click on the Connect and under RFC->OTHER , select RFC_READ_TABLE (or
      you can type it in the box to search)

   4. Click Ok to generate the proxy and other details.

   5. Either your BizTalk Project or your non-BTS project has now all the relevant details
      to communicate to SAP.

      I tend to build out all this functionality first in a Console App just
      so I know what is needed within the BTS environment, also I find it much quicker to
      test/debug etc. here.

2. Ok – onto the code. I’ve got 2 routines for you, one that uses the Proxy Classes built
   by the wizard in the last step, and a routine from ‘first principles’.

   One of the things that I really like about the BTS Adapter Pack and
   certainly in this case, is that depending on the shape of the XML you pass to the
   adapter, it determines the table and type of operation that it is to do.

   Both of these examples below you could wrap into a functoid/helper/whatever and use
   directly from code.

3. Proxy Code – version 1 – here I define some parameters and make a straight call to
   the table CSKS.
   
   NOTE: Use FieldNames not Field Labels (took me a
   few hrs on that one 😉

   using
   LOBTYPES = microsoft.lobservices.sap._2007._03.Types.Rfc;>
   

   private
   static void GetDataFromSAP()
   { 
   
        RfcClient clnt
   = new RfcClient();
   //myproxy client
        string[]
   data = GetAppDetailsForCurrentUser(“SAP”);
        clnt.ClientCredentials.UserName.UserName = data[0];
        clnt.ClientCredentials.UserName.Password = data[1];
        LOBTYPES.TAB512[]
   rfcData = new microsoft.lobservices.sap._2007._03.Types.Rfc.TAB512[0];
        LOBTYPES.RFC_DB_OPT[]
   rfcOps = new microsoft.lobservices.sap._2007._03.Types.Rfc.RFC_DB_OPT[0];
        LOBTYPES.RFC_DB_FLD[]
   rfcFlds = new microsoft.lobservices.sap._2007._03.Types.Rfc.RFC_DB_FLD[]
        { 
            new LOBTYPES.RFC_DB_FLD()
   {
   
            FIELDNAME = “KOSTL”,
            LENGTH=10
            },
            new LOBTYPES.RFC_DB_FLD()
   {
            FIELDNAME = “DATBI”,
            LENGTH=8
            },
            new LOBTYPES.RFC_DB_FLD()
   {
            FIELDNAME = “DATAB”,
            LENGTH=8
            }
        };
   try
   {
     clnt.Open();
     clnt.RFC_READ_TABLE(“;”, string.Empty, “CSKS”,
   50, 0,ref rfcData, ref rfcFlds, ref rfcOps);
     Console.WriteLine(“RFC
   RESPONSE\r\n\r\nData:” + rfcData.Length.ToString());
   }
   catch (Exception ex)
    {
      Console.WriteLine(“ERROR:
   “ + ex.Message);
    }
   }>
   

4. More from first principles so this is to give you more of a BTS picture.
   NOTE: The use of the ‘%’ sign to get a wildcard match on a KOSTL
   field, despite in the SAP Client UI the users enter a ‘*’

   private
   static void GetDataFromSAPV1()
   {
       string[]
   data = GetAppDetailsForCurrentUser(“SAP”);
       SAPBinding binding
   = new SAPBinding(); 
   //A reference to Microsoft.Adapters.Sap is needed.
       //set
   up an endpoint address
       string sapUri
   = “sap://CLIENT=800;LANG=EN;@A/sapsrv/00?GWHOST=sapsrv&GWSERV=sapgw00&RfcSdkTrace=true”;
       EndpointAddress address
   = new EndpointAddress(sapUri);
       try
       {
          
   ChannelFactory<IRequestChannel>
   fact = new ChannelFactory<IRequestChannel>(binding as Binding,
   address);
          
   // add credentials
           fact.Credentials.UserName.UserName
   = data[0];
           fact.Credentials.UserName.Password = data[1];
          
   // Open client
           fact.Open();
          
   //get a channel from the factory
          
   IRequestChannel irc = fact.CreateChannel();
          
   //open the channel
           irc.Open();
          
   string inputXml = “<RFC_READ_TABLE
   xmlns=’http://Microsoft.LobServices.Sap/2007/03/Rfc/’ xmlns:ns1=’http://Microsoft.LobServices.Sap/2007/03/Types/Rfc/’>”
           + “<DELIMITER>|</DELIMITER>”
           + “<QUERY_TABLE>CSKS</QUERY_TABLE>”
           + “<ROWCOUNT>10</ROWCOUNT><ROWSKIPS>0</ROWSKIPS>”
           + “<DATA
   /><FIELDS>”
           + “<ns1:RFC_DB_FLD><ns1:FIELDNAME>KOSTL</ns1:FIELDNAME></ns1:RFC_DB_FLD>”
           + “<ns1:RFC_DB_FLD><ns1:FIELDNAME>DATAB</ns1:FIELDNAME></ns1:RFC_DB_FLD>”
           + “<ns1:RFC_DB_FLD><ns1:FIELDNAME>DATBI</ns1:FIELDNAME></ns1:RFC_DB_FLD>”
           + “</FIELDS>”
           + “<OPTIONS>”
           + “<ns1:RFC_DB_OPT><ns1:TEXT>KOSTL
   LIKE ‘1234%’ AND BUKRS EQ ’63’ AND KOKRS EQ ‘APPL'</ns1:TEXT></ns1:RFC_DB_OPT>”
           + “</OPTIONS>”
           + “</RFC_READ_TABLE>”;
          
   //create an XML reader from the input XML
          
   XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create(new MemoryStream(Encoding.Default.GetBytes(inputXml)));
          
   //create a WCF message from our XML reader
          
   Message inputMessge = Message.CreateMessage(
                       
   MessageVersion.Soap11,
   
                        http://Microsoft.LobServices.Sap/2007/03/Rfc/RFC_READ_TABLE,
   
                       
   reader);
          
   //send the message to SAP and obtain a reply
          
   Message replyMessage = irc.Request(inputMessge);
          
   //create a new XML document
          
   XmlDocument xdoc = new XmlDocument();
          
   //load the XML document with the XML reader from the output message received from
   SAP
           xdoc.Load(replyMessage.GetReaderAtBodyContents());
          
   XmlNodeList nds = xdoc.DocumentElement.SelectNodes(“//*[local-name()=’WA’]”);
           foreach (XmlNode nd in nds)
           {
                  
   string[] parts = nd.InnerText.Split(‘|’);
                  
   Console.WriteLine(“CC={0}
   From: {1} To: {2}”, parts[0], parts[1], parts[2]);
            }
            xdoc.Save(@”d:\sapout.xml”);
            irc.Close();
            fact.Close();
       }>

   catch (Exception ex)
   {
           
   Console.WriteLine(“ERROR:
   “ + ex.Message);
   }
   }>