by community-syndication | May 11, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
This Thursday (May 13th) I’m going to be doing another online LIDNUG chat session. The chat will be from 10:00am to 11:30am Pacific Time. You can learn more about it here and join the chat at the appropriate time with this link.
I do these chats a few times a year and they tend to be pretty fun. Attendees can listen to me talk live via LiveMeeting, and can submit any questions they want to me. I then answer as many of them as I can in the 90 minutes.
We’ll probably talk a lot about the new features in VS 2010, .NET 4, Silverlight 4, Windows Phone 7, ASP.NET 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2 this week.
Hope to get a chance to chat with some of you there!
Scott
P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu
by community-syndication | May 11, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
During a recent setup of BizTalk setup, I was getting a failure that the setup could not connect to the SSODB.
I thought it was odd, because the SSODB had not been created.
It appears that the SSOSQL.dll was properly registered during the install.
To register the SSOSQL.dll, open up the Visual Studio Command prompt and path to the SSOSQL.dll directory (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Enterprise Single Sign-On) and key in regasm SSOSQL.dll
by community-syndication | May 10, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
This is the twenty-fourth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the VS 2010 and .NET 4 release.
Today’s blog post covers a very small, but still useful, feature of VS 2010 – the ability to “pin” projects and solutions to both the Windows 7 taskbar as well VS 2010 Start Page. This makes it easier to quickly find and open projects in the IDE.
[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu]
VS 2010 Jump List on Windows 7 Taskbar
Windows 7 added support for customizing the taskbar at the bottom of your screen. You can “pin” and re-arrange your application icons on it however you want.
Most developers using Visual Studio 2010 on Windows 7 probably already know that they can “pin” the Visual Studio icon to the Windows 7 taskbar – making it always present. What you might not yet have discovered, though, is that Visual Studio 2010 also exposes a Taskbar “jump list” that you can use to quickly find and load your most recently used projects as well.
To activate this, simply right-click on the VS 2010 icon in the task bar and you’ll see a list of your most recent projects. Clicking one will load it within Visual Studio 2010:
Pinning Projects on the VS 2010 Jump List with Windows 7
One nice feature also supported by VS 2010 is the ability to optionally “pin” projects to the jump-list as well – which makes them always listed at the top. To enable this, simply hover over the project you want to pin and then click the “pin” icon that appears on the right of it:
When you click the pin the project will be added to a new “Pinned” list at the top of the jumplist:
This enables you to always display your own list of projects at the top of the list. You can optionally click and drag them to display in any order you want.
Cool Keyboard Trick with Windows 7 Jump Lists
A cool trick that Scott Cate taught me about is the ability to activate Windows 7 jumplists from the keyboard without having to use a mouse.
Simply press the Windows key + the Alt key + [task tray icon index] and the jump list will appear. For example, above VS 2010 is the 4th program icon from the left on my machine – so if I press the Windows Key + Alt + 4 at the same time then the VS jumplist will appear. You can then use the up and down arrows on your keyboard to select the project you want to load from the jumplist.
VS 2010 Start Page and Project Pinning
VS 2010 has a new “start page” that displays by default each time you launch a new instance of Visual Studio. In addition to displaying learning and help resources, it also includes a “Recent Projects” section that you can use to quickly load previous projects that you have recently worked on:
The “Recent Projects” section of the start page also supports the concept of “pinning” a link to projects you want to always keep in the list – regardless of how recently they’ve been accessed.
To “pin” a project to the list you simply select the “pin” icon that appears when you hover over an item within the list:
Once you’ve pinned a project to the start page list it will always show up in it (at least until you “unpin” it).
Summary
This project pinning support is a small but nice usability improvement with VS 2010 and can make it easier to quickly find and load projects/solutions. If you work with a lot of projects at the same time it offers a nice shortcut to load them.
Hope this helps,
Scott
by community-syndication | May 9, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
It is my honor and privilege to host my friend Michele Leroux-Bustamante at this week’s special combined meeting of the San Diego .NET user group Connected Systems and Architecture SIGs.
If you’re doing anything with WCF (and if you read my blog odds are you must be!) and are in San Diego, then this is a not-to-be-missed event.
See you there!
Combined Connected Systems & Architecture SIG Meeting
Tuesday, May 11th
Michele Bustamante
on
WCF Made Easy with Microsoft .NET Framework 4
and Windows Server AppFabric
Topic
WCF is a flexible and powerful platform for building service-oriented applications, and with that flexibility comes some complexity. As of .NET 4 – configuring, securing, hosting and managing WCF services has never been easier! WCF 4 and Windows Server AppFabric come together to help developers and IT administrators overcome the complexity. Come find out how much easier it is to configure WCF services in .NET 4 including alignment with the ASP.NET configuration model and a reduced configuration footprint. Also learn Windows Server AppFabric features for the IT administrator, finally making it easier for IT administrators to easily access settings they care about such as security and throttling features; providing control over the hosting lifecycle of WCF services; and giving new visibility into faults, exceptions and tracing and diagnostics features to help you manage your service deployments in production un-intrusively.
Speaker
Michele Leroux Bustamante is Chief Architect at IDesign (architecture consulting and training, www.idesign.net) and Chief Security Architect at BiTKOO (providing authorization and identity management software, www.bitkoo.com ). She is also Microsoft Regional Director for San Diego, and a Microsoft MVP for Connected Systems. Michele specializes in scalable and secure architecture design, federated identity, and cloud computing. Michele is a frequent conference presenter at technology conferences such as Tech Ed, PDC, Dev Connections, and NDC; and regularly publishes in several technology journals. Michele wrote the best-selling book Learning WCF – O’Reilly 2007 ( www.learningwcf.com) and is currently working on the second edition to be published in 2010. Visit her blog at www.michelelerouxbustamante.com , or follow her tweets @michelebusta.
by community-syndication | May 9, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Im just sitting on the train to work and had a funny experience with word 2010 that I thought id share.
Im writing a document and all of a sudden like usually happens the train gets a little bit bumpy. Word decides it doesnt like this (maybe it prefers to fly?). Anyway to show its dissatisfaction with the journey it starts adding new rows to my table in the document all by itself.
5 pages of rows later I still cant workout how to stop itso have to kill word.
Thank you autosave
by community-syndication | May 7, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
We have been doing some work with NServiceBus recently and observed some unusual behaviour which was caused by our mistake and seemed worthy of a small post.
The Scenario
In our solution we were doing some standard NServiceBus stuff by pushing a message to a queue using NServiceBus. We had a direct send/receive scenario rather than a publish/subscribe one.
The background process which was meant to collect the message and then process it was a normal NServiceBus message handler. We would run the NServiceBus.Host.exe which would find the handler and then do the usual NServiceBus magic.
The Problem
In this solution we were creating some automated tests around this module of the integration process to ensure that it would work well. We had two tests.
Test 1
This test would start NServiceBus.Host.exe using the Process object, then seed a message to the queue via our web service fa%u00e7ade sitting above the queue which wrapped NServiceBus. The background process would then process the message and the test would check the message had been processed fine.
If all was well then the NServiceBus.Host.exe process was stopped.
Test 2
In test 2 we would do a very similar thing except that instead of starting the process the test would install NServiceBus.Host.exe as a windows service and then start the service before the test and once the test was executed it would stop the test.
The Results of the Tests
Test 1 worked really well, however in test 2 we found that it didn’t really work at all, instead of doing the background process we were finding that between mqsvc.exe and NServiceBus.Host.exe the CPU on the machine was maxed and nothing was really happening.
The Solution
After trying a few things we found it was the permissions on the queue were not set correctly. Once this was resolved it all worked fine and CPU was not excessive and ran just like the console application.
I think the couple of take aways from this are:
- Make sure you set the windows service for NserviceBus Generic Host to the right credentials
- Make sure you have the queue set with the right permissions
- Make sure you turn on the right logging configuration in NServiceBus
Thanks to Ahmed Hashmi on my team who got this working in the end.
by community-syndication | May 7, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
As promised to those who attended the user group last night, here is a link to the demonstration code I used in my talk on WF 4. There was a great crowd at the event and I appreciate all the great questions during and after the presentation. If anyone would like a copy of the slides, use the Contact link to the right to send me email and I’ll send them along. Thanks for attending and congratulations to the first winner in the drawing who took home a 1 year subscription to Pluralsight On Demand!
by community-syndication | May 7, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
The text below is based on the beta release of BizTalk 2010. It might not (completely) apply to the RTM release. No doubt that, of all the new and changed BizTalk 2010 features, the enhancements to the BizTalk mapper are the most salient. For the current and previous BizTalk versions a lot of BizTalk developers […]
by community-syndication | May 7, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
The text below is based on the beta release of BizTalk 2010. It might not (completely) apply to the RTM release. This blog post is part of a series of blog posts about my favorite new features in the BizTalk 2010 mapping tool. You can find an overview here. Functoid intellisense is a visual improvement […]
by community-syndication | May 7, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
The text below is based on the beta release of BizTalk 2010. It might not (completely) apply to the RTM release. This blog post is part of a series of blog posts about my favorite new features in the BizTalk 2010 mapping tool. You can find an overview here. In this first post we are […]
