by community-syndication | Aug 15, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Today marks a big day for many people in the IT community with the much anticipated availability of the latest versions of a number of Microsoft’s flagship products. While official launch events will be happening over the coming months, anyone with an MSDN Subscription should be able to download the following from around 10:00am PST today.
- Visual Studio 2012
- Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012
- .NET Framework 4.5
- Windows 8
- Windows Server 2012
Personally I have been running pre-release versions of Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server and Windows 8 for a number of months and I’ve got to say I have been very impressed by how stable and complete these offerings have been.
For many organizations, there’s often a long held understanding that we don’t install new versions as soon as they come out. Some organizations even go as far as having a policy that they won’t consider a new release until the first service pack. While I understand where many of these policies have come from over the years, I really suggest organizations re-evaluate this.
The following graphic summarizes what I think is at the heart of a company’s decision. Do the benefits offered out way the costs and the risks with the new release? I’m not being na%u00efve here and I understand there are a huge number of things to consider in making this decision. I’m just focusing on one small aspect of the decision making process and in doing so, hoping to at least have people re-evaluate any long held decisions that simply say “hold off for a while”.
Microsoft, like almost every software vendor, has had some not-so-great releases of software over the years. This has been something that has led to this culture of waiting for a while after a new release. This attitude fails to acknowledge a number of things that have changed over the years including:
- the much improved internal processes Microsoft teams use for developing software
- the changes to methodologies and frameworks used by Microsoft product teams that foster a high quality focus throughout the entire development cycle
- the fact that cadence of business is increasing rapidly and we need to adopt almost anything that can help us reduce cycle time to keep us competitive
- the fact that Microsoft dog-food their releases internally much more than ever before
There are many more factors I could include in this list but in the interest of keeping this article to a more convenient size for reading, let’s leave it at that for now.
A call to action
The next round of products is due to become generally available to MSDN Subscribers around 10:00am PST today. Download and have a serious look at the great benefits offered by these new releases. Take a copy of the source from one of the projects you are working on and try opening it in Visual Studio 2012 and take it for a spin.
Over the coming weeks the internet will be flooded with blog posts, tweets, videos and more detailing the various new features. Take a minute to read these and see how others are benefiting from what’s in these new releases. Naturally you’ll also want to keep an eye out for any issues or problems people are having to see if they might impact you. I don’t expect we won’t see too many of these.
Should you adopt Team Foundation Server 2012, don’t forget we have a great range of TFS 2012 courses you might wish to consider.
by community-syndication | Aug 14, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Thelatest version of BizTalk is available(CTP). This Technology Adoption Program (TAP) is for BizTalk Server 2010 R2, the 8th BizTalk Server release from Microsoft. Download details are here :- Survey and Download of BizTalk Server 2010 R2 (CTP) BizTalk Server 2010 R2 delivers enhancements in the following feature categories: Electronic Data Interchange Updated standards support […]
Blog Post by: DipeshA
by community-syndication | Aug 14, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Good reference on MSDN documentation for guidance on good coding practices for SharePoint:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa973248.aspx#sharepointobjmodel__otherobjectsthatrequiredisposal
The SharePoint Dispose Checker Tool can give false positives (or negatives) so this documentation should provide additional guidance
Blog Post by: kadasani
by community-syndication | Aug 13, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
One of the things that I volunteered for in my job as Product Manager at Tier 3 was the creation of release notes for our regular cloud software updates. It helps me stay up to date by seeing exactly what we’re pushing out. Lately we’ve been using Trello, the sweet project collaboration from Fog Creek […]
Blog Post by: Richard Seroter
by community-syndication | Aug 13, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
With Hyper-V now available on Win8 it’s more important than ever.
VOTE here: https://connect.microsoft.com/WindowsServerFeedback/feedback/details/390443/hyper-v-needs-usb-support
The more votes…the more importance this issue has.
Let’s get it in there.
p.s. I’m aware of the ‘workarounds’ after having to plug 183 usb devices into a virtual
environment. Hours I’ll never get back
Blog Post by: Mick Badran
by community-syndication | Aug 9, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
I recently did a presentation (link here) on the topic of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for my previous employer and thought that I’d share the application I built for the demonstration. While I’ve played with Node.js a bit before, I thought I’d keep digging in and see why @adron won’t shut up about it. I also figured […]
Blog Post by: Richard Seroter
by community-syndication | Aug 9, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Hey, Here are some links for those who like reading. Microsoft publish a list of technical books frees. You can found books about : Azure Windows server 2012 Windows 8 Sharepoint 2013 Windows phone Office and many more (I’ve checked there is no BizTalk book ) the books are dispatched in three link : http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/11608.e-book-gallery-for-microsoft-technologies.aspx […]
Blog Post by: Jeremy Ronk
by community-syndication | Aug 9, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
We have set up two training sessions in Norway. Location is Stavanger and our offices there, the dates are December 3rd – 5th 2012 and March 11th- 13th 2013. sign-up can be done in the form below our at our companywebsite. This course requires a basic knowledge of BizTalk administration and takes a deep dive
Blog Post by: Tord Glad Nordahl
by community-syndication | Aug 8, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
We have a simple PS script to switch Auto-Start on for WCF services running under AppFabric 1.1:
Import-Module ApplicationServer
Set-ASApplication -SiteName “Default Web Site” -VirtualPath “/x.y.z” -AutoStartMode “All” -EnableApplicationPool
Runs fine, unless you are running it from an MSBuild task:
<Target Name=“Setup“>
<Exec ContinueOnError=“false“ Command=‘powershell.exe “$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\SetupAppFabric.ps1”‘ WorkingDirectory=‘$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)‘ />
</Target>
, and running MSBuild from the x86 framework on an x64 environment. We get this error:
Set-ASApplication : AppFabric configuration cmdlets require AppFabric Server Worker to be installed on the local machine in order to configure the local WCF and WF services. If you need to administer WCF and WF services locally, install the Worker component and try again. If you need to administer WCF and WF services remotely, use PowerShell remoting features to connect to the remote machine. … + FullyQualifiedErrorId : AppFabricNotInstalled,Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Management.Commands.SetASApplicationCmdlet
The fix is to run MSBuild from the x64 framework (as Callum says), which will run PowerShell from x64 and load up the AppFabric dependencies correctly. But to complicate things, that broke some of our other tasks that required the x86 environment, so we ended up running the build in x86 and shelling out to x64 just for the AppFabric stuff:
<Target Name=“Setup“>
<!–AppFabric cmdlets need PS2 run in x64 env; other build tasks need x86, so shell out to x64 for this:->
<Exec Command=‘%SystemDrive%\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\MSBuild.exe “$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\Build.proj” /t:SetupAppFabric‘/>
</Target>
<Target Name=“SetupAppFabric“>
<Exec ContinueOnError=“false“ Command=’powershell.exe “$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\SetupAppFabric.ps1″‘WorkingDirectory=‘$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)‘ />
</Target>
Ugly, but no way around it till our other tasks are x64-compatible.
Oh, and be sure to set your execution policy in the x86 and x64 PowerShell environments if you are running scripts in both.
by community-syndication | Aug 8, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Our new 5.0 feature coming in October 2012 release.
The idea behind process monitoring is simple, you are expected to receive certain amount of messages via your receive location or expected to send certain amount of messages via your send port in your BizTalk environment. If that doesn?t happen then there is a business implication and someone needs to be notified. That?s exactly what process monitoring all about.
Let?s take a look at some example scenarios.
- Your trading partner sends you some files via FTP every day. If you receive the file, everything works smoothly, but what happens if there is a problem on your partner end (ex: some firewall patch) and you didn?t receive any messages from them for couple of days.
- Similarly on the transmit/send side, you are supposed to send so many messages per hour, or per business day to your back end systems like SAP or to your trading partners.
- You may want to keep an eye on the sales threshold, for ex: you expect to receive certain volume of messages in your system every business day from your trading partner(s).
BizTalk360 process monitoring is designed to help customers tackle the above scenarios, without any custom development. You can configure it within few minutes, you can read the full story and detailed options in our blog. Sample screen shot below:
/Nandri
Saravana Kumar
