We’ve just encountered an obscure MSDTC/SQL Server issue that I thought would be beneficial to the wide-community.
Following a failover of our (Windows Server 2008) cluster, we started to encounter unexpected errors when BizTalk attempted to perform any tasks that required a distributed transaction, even though everything appeared to be running correctly:MS-DTC was running and we […]
When you install the SharePoint Adapter Web Service for BizTalk, and browse to the BTSharePointAdapterWS.asmx Web Service, you will be prompted with an error that makes it seem like your installation of this Web Service was not successful:
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.
Exception Details: System.InvalidOperationException: Request format is unrecognized
In fact your Web Service may be functioning correctly as mine was. The issue is that the Service metadata is disabled by default. To enable the Service metadata, you will need to update the web.config of the BTSharePointAdapterWS Application
Comment out, or remove the <remove name="Documentation"/> line in order to enable displaying the Service metadata.
Metadata will now be displayed correctly.
Over the next few weeks Microsoft is sponsoring a number of free Web Camp events around the world. These provide a great way to learn about ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET MVC 2, and Visual Studio 2010.
The Web Camps are two day events. The camps aren’t conferences where you sit quietly for hours and people talk at you – they are intended to be interactive. The first day is focused on learning through presentations that are heavy on coding demos. The second day is focused on you building real applications using what you’ve learned. The second day includes hands-on labs, and you’ll join small development teams with other attendees and work on a project together.
We’ve got some great speakers lined up for the events – including Scott Hanselman, James Senior, Jon Galloway, Rachel Appel, Dan Wahlin, Christian Wenz and more. I’ll also be presenting at one of the camps.
Below is the schedule of the remaining events (the sold-out Toronto camp was a few days ago):
Many locations are sold out already but we still have some seats left in a few of them. Registration and attendance to all of the events is completely free. You can register to attend at www.webcamps.ms.
Hope this helps,
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
On the 2nd and final day of the Canadian Leadership Summit, I focused on Dynamics xRM and Windows XP to Windows 7 Migration.
xRM/CRM
In the context of “xRM”, the ’x’ stands for “anything” meaning if you have a requirements to track relationships then Dynamics may be a good fit.
Relationships with many different entities
Dynamics CRM Global Customer list
Dynamics xRM Deployments
Rapid Deployment
The session contained a video that included a complete Sports team management application built in less than 24 hours on the xRM platform by 4 Microsoft employees during the World Partner Conference in the summer of July 2009. Surveys were posted on Twitter asking for ideas and requirements as to what people would like to see built. The deliverable included a semi-detailed design and fully functional system within the allotted time. The team then presented the solution to the attendees of the conference. I have found a LiveMeeting of this event here. Use Meeting ID 8B74CC to view the content.
CRM Key Capabilities
CRM 5 – The Road Ahead
Here are some of the themes that Microsoft is focusing for the next version of the software:
Simplicity
Innovation
Value
SharePoint and XRM are Complementary
SharePoint and XRM have overlapping capabilities. SharePoint has evolved beyond just storing Word documents. It has become a platform that is capable of performing some tasks that a CRM is capable of . On the flipside CRM, has some lightweight document management features. The end result is that the two platforms work better, together. If you owned both sets of technology, it makes sense to leverage both solutions to build the total package.
The next portion of the session involved Christian Gosselin, the CRM Practice Leader for CGI in Quebec, Canada. CGI is a very experienced CRM implementer with over 50 Certified professionals on platform.
Christian, discussed some of the Business and IT Challenges that make CRM a viable option:
Typical Organizational Challenges
IT Challenges
xRM as a platform
xRM was built from a platform perspective and then added the application as opposed to some other vendors building the CRM application and then duct taping the platform around it in order to make it extensible.
xRM is a complete business application platform:
Related Microsoft Technologies
One Platform, many Applications
Organizations use xRM for a variety of applications including:
Benefits of building on Dynamics xRM
Real Life Projects
Christian then described some of the projects that his organization has been involved in:
Dynamics CRM as a business application platform generally saves 50-70% of the development time as opposed to custom development
Windows XP to Windows 7 – A roadmap for success
The next area that I focused on was migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7. A key component to a Windows 7 migration is the Windows Deployment kit wizard. We saw a 7 year old upgrade his Windows XP system, with data, to Windows 7 using this wizard. I should note that his father works for Microsoft in the Windows division so I suspect he had a little help.
When configuring the Windows Deployment kit, a wizard will walk you through the various options including:
Advice
Microsoft’s Environment overview
How did it go?
How was it possible?
Early Adopters of Windows 7
Recommended Deployment Tools
While putting together a POC, I wanted one side of my parallel shape to only pick up pdf documents when the file was not marked as an error from the HL7 pipeline marking the message with a parse error:
But how could I access it?
You need to reference the following assembly in your project:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft BizTalk 2009 Accelerator for HL7\Bin\Microsoft.Solutions.BTAHL7.HL7Schemas.dll
Once you do that, you can add the following filter:
In addition to now having WF 4 offered as a private on-site course, we have several upcoming public offerings of our Double Feature course which has been updated to .NET 4. I’m excited to be teaching the course at the end of July in Boston and to cover the new features in WCF including configuration enhancements and REST improvements. The bigger change, of course, is the entirely new WF 4 programming model. In these open enrollment classes, we will be covering the new programming model, activity development and the runtime services such as persistence and tracking. We’ll also cover the convergence of these two technologies in Workflow Service and the new message correlation capabilities introduced in .NET 4.
So, if you are interested in an intense week of training in the Boston (July 26) or SoCal (Oct 11) area on these two great frameworks, register or save a seat before the classes fill up!
I’ve been trying out Pivot in the last few days, downloaded from here. Pretty amazing thing, crossing the power of DeepZoom with structured information. I can’t help but imagine the application of these technologies to information stored in business databases, intranets, or even as a navigation metaphor in your computer/file system or code. There will be a Silverlight version this year, and there’s an Excel Add-In to generate the custom Xml that feeds the system.
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
[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.
[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.