WF 4.0 Custom Activities Webcast

In the third in series of webcasts on CloudCasts looking at Workflow Foundation 4.0 custom activities I’ll take a look at Custom Activity Designers. The designers use Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) to allow developers to easily create stylish and functional activities. Data binding is used to edit activity properties in the workflow designer.
WF 4.0 Custom Activities Part 3 Activity Designers

StreamInsight Musings

StreamInsight Musings

I’ve been spending a fair amount of free time recently looking much deeper into Microsoft StreamInsight which is the complex event processing engine including in SQL Server 2008 R2. I figured that I’d share a few thoughts on it.
First off, as expected with such a new product, there is a dearth of available information. There’s […]

RC docs are live!

The Visual Studio 2010 RC and .NET Framework 4.0 RC went live this week to MSDN subscribers.


Our UE team has made available a bunch of improved topics and new topics along with the RC release.



  • All the samples have a readme / documentation topic. More than ~200 WF/WCF sample readmes were added for this milestone.

  • 131 How To and Conceptual topics have been created since Beta2. Persistence, monitoring, routing and discovery were the areas that the UE team invested in.

  • Documentation for the WF designer!

Here’s where you’ll find the documentation:



We would LOVE to get feedback on our docs and samples. The UE team is working on the RTM doc refresh and plans to do monthly refreshes thereafter – any feedback you have will help us prioritize how we can invest in our docs to make them more useful to you. So please respond back with your feedback, and I’ll work with UE to action it!


Cheers,


Kavita

Get your blog to speak up!

By clicking the    icon above you can have the content of the blog post to be read back to you. Not a very useful feature perhaps, but I thought it was pretty cool. The feature is provided by ReadSpeaker and is easy to implement.

First, register you on the ReadSpeaker site. The advertisement version is free but can only be used for personal websites and bloggers.

Secondly, add the script tag below in the head of your page. I’m using Community Server, so I added it to the theme masterpage.

<script 
    language="javascript" 
    type="text/javascript" 
    src="http://wr.readspeaker.com/webreader/webreader.js.php?cid=[PrivateKey]">
</script>

Then, on your page add the img tag below:

<img onclick="readpage(this.id+escape(document.location.href),1); return false;"
src="http://blogical.se/blogs/mikael/loudspeaker.png" 
id="http://wr.readspeaker.com/webreader/webreader.php?cid=[PrivateKey]&amp;t=blog_free&amp;title=readspeaker&amp;url="
title="Listen with webReader" 
alt="Listen with webReader"/>

If you want to limit the text to be read you can use the comments below:

<!-- RSPEAK_START -->
<p>
    Blog post....</p>
</p>
<!-- RSPEAK_STOP -->

btw, it’s not optimized for reading code, as you might have already found out 😉

Consolidating BizTalk blogs

 


In the past, the product team has been blogging about BizTalk in multiple blogs:


 
















BizTalk Engine


http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalk_core_engine/


Adapters


http://blogs.msdn.com/adapters/


B2B/EDI


http://blogs.msdn.com/BizTalkB2B/


RFID


http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalkrfid/


 


Over time, some of these have become silent and others are updated from time to time. We’ve also heard that it is confusing to look for related information in multiple places. To solve this, we’re going to consolidate all BizTalk product team blogging into this blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalk_server_team_blog/


 


We’ll try to make our blogging more interactive – we’ll respond to comments on articles and ask for your input on features you use and topics you want to hear. We’ll periodically post articles, so keep in touch.


 


Ciao


BizTalk Server Team

Intellisense Crashing fix for VS 2010

[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu]

We shipped the VS 2010 RC on Monday, and have seen some great feedback regarding performance and stability with it.

One issue, though, that we have seen a number of people run into is an intellisense crash that happens very frequently on machines that have UI Automation enabled and certain devices connected.

Crash Symptom

If you are encountering frequent VS 2010 crashes when you are typing in the editor while Intellisense is popping up and/or being dismissed then you are running into this issue.

Why does the crash happen?

The most common cause of the crash happening is that you are running a machine that:

  • Is a Tablet PC (even if you aren’t using the pen)
  • Has multi-touch screen drivers enabled
  • Has an external input device like a pen or Wacom tablet
  • Has a screen-reader enabled

It turns out that a late fix right before the RC shipped modified a UI input code path that unfortunately exposed this bug.

A patch is coming to fix this issue

We are working on shipping a VS 2010 RC patch that we’ll release next week that will fix the issue and prevent it from occurring.  I’ll blog a pointer to the patch once it is available.

How to work around the issue now

There are two ways you can work around the issue now.  One is to disable your Tablet services (read this article for details on how to do this) and/or disable Multi-touch/Pen drivers on your system.  The other is to set a registry key.

You can read about both of these workaround in this VS Team Blog Post.

What if you still see crashes?

Please send me email ([email protected]) if you are still seeing any crashes after trying out these steps (or encounter crashes for non-Intellisense scenarios) – we’d like to make sure we investigate and follow-up any others you encounter.

Hope this helps,

Scott

BizTalk Virtual Training Material

BizTalk Virtual Training Material

Hi folks,

Lately I’ve had several requests from folks whom want to have a play with BizTalk
but don’t want to setup the whole infrastructure etc.

Here’s a great page from MS Virtual Labs that will get you on your way
(some labs are for BTS2006, others for BTS2009, the same principles apply)

Check it out and if you’re ever away from a VM, might be handy a fallback plan.

BizTalk
Virtual Lab Material

There’s 4 pages and here’s a snippet from Page 1

————————————————————–

Click here to bookmark this event.
After completing this lab, you will be
better able to create a new BizTalk project, create an XML schema by using the BizTalk
Editor, promote a schema property, create a flat file schema by using the BizTalk
Editor, validate a schema and generate a sample instance
message, create a strong name and assign it to an assembly, and build a schema project.
 …
4/3/2006 12:00 AM Pacific Time
(US & Canada)- 9/30/2011 11:59 PM | Duration:90 Minutes
Primary Language:   English
Primary Target Audience:   Pro
Dev/Programmer
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032296903&culture=en-US

Click here to bookmark this event.
After completing this lab, you will be
better able to create a schema map by using BizTalk Mapper, add functoids to a map,
validate a map, and build a schema map project.
4/3/2006 12:00 AM Pacific Time
(US & Canada)- 11/30/2010 11:59 PM | Duration:90 Minutes
Primary Language:   English
Primary Target Audience:   Pro
Dev/Programmer
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032296906&culture=en-US

Click here to bookmark this event.
After completing this lab, you will be
better able to define business rules, call business rules from within an orchestration,
build and deploy the business rules project, and start and test the business rules.
5/7/2008 12:00 AM Pacific Time
(US & Canada)- 5/31/2011 11:59 PM | Duration:90 Minutes
Primary Language:   English
Primary Target Audience:   Pro
Dev/Programmer
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032379047&culture=en-US

Click here to bookmark this event.
After completing this lab, you will be
better able to assign an application name to a BizTalk Server project, use the BizTalk
Server 2006 Administration Console to create receive ports, receive locations, use
the BizTalk Server 2006 Administration Console to import
port binding information, bind orchestration ports to physical ports, export a BizTalk
application to an MSI package, import a BizTalk application from an MSI package, and
finally, use the Group Hub to manage suspended messages.
 …
4/3/2006 12:00 AM Pacific Time
(US & Canada)- 12/31/2010 11:59 PM | Duration:90 Minutes
Primary Language:   English
Primary Target Audience:   Pro
Dev/Programmer
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032296904&culture=en-US

Click here to bookmark this event.
After completing this lab, you will be
better able to educate attendees on integrating Commerce Server 2007 with ERP or CRM
systems and external business trading partners by utilizing the new built-in integration
adapter for BizTalk Server 2006. Also, you will learn
how to utilize the new Orders, Inventory, Catalog, and Profile BizTalk Adapters in
detail to achieve high-performing, reliable connectivity between Commerce Server
deployments and other external systems.
 …
4/20/2007 12:00 AM Pacific
Time (US & Canada)- 8/31/2010 11:59 PM | Duration:90 Minutes
Primary Language:   English
Primary Target Audience:   Pro
Dev/Programmer
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032338959&culture=en-US

Click here to bookmark this event.
After completing this lab, you will be
better able to define business rules, call business rules from within an orchestration,
build and deploy the business rules project, and start and test the business rules.NoteBy
registering for this virtual lab, you will receive a
one-time follow up call from a Microsoft representative to inform you of special discounts
and offers related to products and services presented in the virtual lab.
 …
4/3/2006 12:00 AM Pacific Time
(US & Canada)- 11/30/2010 11:59 PM | Duration:90 Minutes
Primary Language:   English
Primary Target Audience:   IT
Generalist
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032313534&culture=en-US

Click here to bookmark this event.
After completing this lab, you will be
able to create a new BizTalk project, create an XML schema by using BizTalk Schema
Editor, promote a schema property, create a file schema by using BizTalk Schema
Editor, validate a schema and generate a sample instance
message, and build a schema project.
 …
12/7/2005 12:00 AM Pacific
Time (US & Canada)- 7/31/2010 11:59 PM | Duration:90 Minutes
Primary Language:   English
Primary Target Audience:   Pro
Dev/Programmer
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032279924&culture=en-US

Click here to bookmark this event.
After completing this lab, you will be
able to configure orchestration properties, create the orchestration to be published,
build and deploy the orchestration publishing project, run the BizTalk Web Services
Publishing Wizard, and start and test the published orchestration.  …
10/24/2005 12:00 AM Pacific
Time (US & Canada)- 2/28/2011 11:59 PM | Duration:90 Minutes
Primary Language:   English
Primary Target Audience:   Pro
Dev/Programmer
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032303224&culture=en-US

Click here to bookmark this event.
After completing this lab, you will be
able to add a Web reference to a project, create a map, create variables for message
instances, create the Web services orchestration, and build and deploy the Web
services project.
10/24/2005 12:00 AM Pacific
Time (US & Canada)- 1/31/2011 11:59 PM | Duration:90 Minutes
Primary Language:   English
Primary Target Audience:   Pro
Dev/Programmer
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032303223&culture=en-US

Click here to bookmark this event.
After completing this lab, you will be
better able to assign an application name to a BizTalk Server project, use the BizTalk
Server 2006 Administration Console to create receive ports, receive locations, use
the BizTalk Server 2006 Administration Console to import
port binding information, bind orchestration ports to physical ports, export a BizTalk
application to an MSI package, import a BizTalk application from an MSI package, and
finally, use the Group Hub to manage suspended messages. NoteBy registering for this
virtual lab, you will receive a one-time follow up call from a Microsoft representative
to inform you of special discounts and offers related to products and services presented
in the virtual lab.
 …
2/3/2006 12:00 AM Pacific
Time (US & Canada)- 9/30/2010 11:59 PM | Duration:90 Minutes
Primary Language:   English
Primary Target Audience:   IT
Generalist
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032296907&culture=en-US

Two New Webcasts from Brian Loesgen

Brian has been busy looking at the integration capabilities of BizTalk, the ESB Toolkit 2.0 and the Windows Azure service bus. There are two webcasts looking at different aspects of this:
Extending the Reach: Using a BizTalk Dynamic Send port to send to Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus
Extending the Reach: Using a BizTalk ESB Off-ramp to send to Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus