Hi Everyone…….well…this is a first! I never thought I’d actually post something to my own Blog. I think I set this up 6 months ago or so, but after seeing all the wonderful content already being posted to blogs, I thought to myself, what could I probably add. However, I think this is going to be a great avenue to distribute all the goodies we cover in our training courses, as well as other things of interest…
Last week Richard Seroter and I tried to to kill about 60 people by putting them through the extended 5 day MOC course. What does that mean? 14 to 16 hours a day for 5 days, first going through the the typical 5 day MOC (Microsoft Official Curriculum) lab training (this was done in about 3 days), followed by about 2+ days of optional deep dive training.
This was trial by fire…..as the air conditioning in the Santa Monica office was something to be desired …. 🙂
During the last 2 days, we had everyone build a fully functional BizTalk 2004 Farm with high security. This consisted of setting up all the users and groups on an Active Directory box, and installing BizTalk 2004 on two servers with a remote SQL Server….4 servers in our farm. We then went thru all the Perf Tuning stuff, deploying an application and seeing for ourselves all the cool things you can do around availablity with Host Instances. You can find the performance white paper here, Performance WhitePaper.
After that I think we installed the MSMQT and MSMQ adapter side by side and got those bad boys running and functional. Then it was off to the following:
1. Using the Business Rules Engine API to automate our deployment and execution policies from C#.
2. Creating some custom code so that we could call BizTalk maps dynamically from C#.
3. Configuring App Domains and using config files from within our BizTalk projects.
4. Briefly going over Convoys, which I’ll post some good working samples….
5. Parsing REAL messy flat files that I got a thrill doing on a project once..
6. Developing a custom pipeline component to copy context properties into our messages…
I’ve set up an FTP site which I’ll be posting many of these materials to, code samples and powerpoints….so stay tuned. Apparently I can’t VPN out when logged onto the Microsoft Network….so off to starbucks I go for unfettered connectivity….