George Reese of enstratus just wrote a great blog post about VMware’s cloud strategy, but I zeroed in on one of his major sub-points. He mentions that the entrance into the IaaS space by Google and Microsoft signifies that PaaS isn’t getting the mass adoption that was expected. In short, Microsoft and Google moving into […]
Blog Post by: Richard Seroter
This case is my favorite kind of case, one where I use my own tools to solve a problem affecting me personally. The problem at the root of it is also one you might run into, especially if you travel, and demonstrates the use of some Process Monitor…(read more)
Blog Post by: Mark Russinovich
First of all I’m very humbled, delighted, pleased (much more?) to receive the news yesterday that my MVP (Most Valuable Professional) status is been renewed for 2012. If you are following lot of blogs, then you might have seen this message in few places now. Basically Microsoft got 4 renewal cycles (January, April, July, October) in a year to bring new MVP’s on board and renew the existing ones who contribute to the selected community continuously.
Over the years I have heard people asking me, do you need to write a certification, or complete a course, or even do you need to know people in the product team etc.. For those of you who are not aware of the program, MVP award is an industry award provided by Microsoft to the influential people in the community. Microsoft got a full team ( I’ll say a complete division) to work with the community, their main role is to identify influential people in the community across various technologies like BizTalk, SharePoint, C#, Azure etc. There are MVP leads in most of the countries (90 according to official page), I believe for smaller ones a single MVP lead look after few countries. My MVP lead is Claire Smyth who looks after UK and Ireland.
Being an MVP is something very special, first of all you get the industry recognition straight away. There are only 4000 MVP’s world wide across all Microsoft technologies, that’s a tiny number compared to the 100 million people who participate in technology communities (source: http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/gp/aboutmvp). If you want to look at the BizTalk MVP numbers, there are only 32 BizTalk Server MVP’s worldwide, may be out of 60k BizTalk developers ( I just made up 60k given there are 12,000 BizTalk customers)
Personally for me the biggest advantage is knowing the top BizTalk talents in the world one to one. It’s more than that, most of them are very close friends now.
I have mentioned in the past, the birth of BizTalk360 was primarily driven by a chat over coffee at MVP Global Summit in 2010 with bunch of BizTalk Server MVP’s. You can read about the story here.
Apart from that I got couple of solid stories where my MVP status helped us in BizTalk360
Technical Help: BizTalk360 comes in two flavours Enterprise and Standard edition (tied to BizTalk server enterprise and standard editions). How do we identify the edition of BizTalk server? One way to do it is look into the registry setting (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\BizTalk Server\3.0) in the machine where BizTalk server is installed. But reading a registry from a web application can get into all kind of permission issues, also we support remote environment management that means reading remote registry settings (Forget it!! :-)). We approached Microsoft internal product team members and we identified a way to resolve it from the BizTalk database. Unfortunately we won’t be able to reveal this in public post, sorry guys 🙂
Marketing Help: Couple of emails got us a promotional link in Microsoft BizTalk ISV site http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/isv-hardware.aspx?SortField1=ISV&SortField2=All. This is incredible, I send an email to my internal contact MVP contact in Microsoft, asking how we can list BizTalk360 on the ISV website, a week later we were there, this is simply incredible.
Congratulations to all the MVP’s who got renewed for 2012, and the new one’s coming on board. Thoroughly enjoy your time during your award period, I’ll see you all in the next MVP summit 2013.
Nandri!
Saravana Kumar
I spent some time this week researching what would be needed to update some of my Visual Studio 2010 extensions to support Visual Studio 2012. I’ve now managed to do so, and would like to share what I found in case anyone else finds it useful. Warning: This post was written and tested with the […]
Blog Post by: Tomas Restrepo
This week I attended TechEd Europe in Amsterdam. Accompanying me was Mikael Sand, a BizTalk professional from Sweden. I have met Mikael a couple times before and we always have some good discussions over BizTalk, beer, politics and sports. This time I have asked him some questions for the BizTalk Community Series and here is his story.
Mikael Sand, a 30-something integration architect specializing on the Microsoft stack. He lives just south of Stockholm with his wife Catarina and 4-year old son Gabriel.
Mikael’s expertise is what he would like to call “the flow of the message”. He is constantly thinking in flows and services. Mikael’s primary tool for implementing these flows is of course BizTalk Server and quite often he resorts to using that for all the work he does, so I guess the short answer is Mikael is an architect.
Mikael’s opinion on BizTalk is:
“BizTalk as a product is, what I would like to call “incomplete”. There are still a lot of room for improvement with tooling, tracking for instance. The schema editor has looked the same since the 2004 version.”
“What I like about it is the next to no amount of code you usually need to write. Other integration engines I have seen makes you write code and quite often the same code over and over again. This is for instance the case of Azure Service Bus at the moment. A more “configure driven” approach might be on the way.”
Mikael has recently bought a house that now pretty much consumes his free time. What is left he uses to sing as he is a tenor in a local choir. As for sports Mikael does not really follow any particular sport. However, near his old home town of Gothenburg there is a football team that he likes. The “Angels” or “Blue white” has sparked his interest since he was very young. Yet he also likes American football, which he would like to say is his favorite sport. Mikael watches it whenever he can. From time to time he will try to catch a baseball game as well.
To the readers of this blog Mikael would like to say that they have found a very useful resource in the internet when it comes to BizTalk, the past and the future. To the readers of his blog he would say: “Thank you for visiting I really hope I can help. I get quite a lot of hits but I have no idea what they are reading.”
Mikael thanks for your contributions to the community and your story. It has been great fun hanging out with you during the TechEd in Amsterdam.
Cheers,
– Steef-Jan
This blog post is about how you create a REST data store in EPiServer 7 Preview. The new REST data store in EPiServer 7 Preview
The new REST data store in EPiServer 7 Preview allows you much like…
Daniel Berg’s blog about ASP.NET, EPiServer, SharePoint, BizTalk
Following my previous post here’s another small contribution: Item Template for Visual Studio 2010: Custom BizTalk Functoid. The New Functoid Class item template for Visual Studio 2010 allows you to create new Functoids for BizTalk Server 2010 without having to code the entire class and therefore allowing you to focus on what really matters, the […]
Blog Post by: Sandro Pereira
I’m working with a custom WCF adapter, and now we get some issue when pipeline failed validation : here is the MSDN explanation to handle it For a receive location, you can configure one of two error handling options under the Error Handling section on the Messages tab in the Transport Properties dialog box. If […]
Blog Post by: Jeremy Ronk
This blog post is about architectural guidelines for EPiServer CMS and enterprise architecture – mainly integrations patterns. Background
When attending EPiServer Partner days 2012 there was a…
Daniel Berg’s blog about ASP.NET, EPiServer, SharePoint, BizTalk
We have a 5 day BizTalk Server 2010 Developer course scheduled for the 13th – 17th of August in Melbourne.
The BizTalk Server 2010 Developer Training is an update version of the existing BizTalk training that now includes WCF send and receive adapter, a BizTalk Patterns module (correlation, sequential convoy and parallel convoy) and optional EDI components. The course is targeted at beginning BizTalk developer or developers that want to bring their skills up to 2010.
Any question or discuss your BizTalk training needs please contact me