Richard Seroter coming to BizTalk User Group Sweden!

Richard Seroter coming to BizTalk User Group Sweden!

by | Jul 25, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Open your calendar and mark the 16th of September!

I think most people know who Richard Seroter is. Even if you don’t follow blogs on a regular basis, I’m sure you’ve come across his articles from time to time. I know Richard as a very smart guy with a great sense humor, and we’re very happy to finally get him to Stockholm.

Richard is the author of the recently released "SOA Patterns for BizTalk Server 2009" book (Packt Publishing) which takes a look at how to apply good SOA principles to a wide variety of BizTalk scenarios. He is also the technical reviewer of the upcoming “Pro BizTalk Server 2009” book from Apress.

Read Johan Hedberg’s review here.

BTW, before the event I plan to post a “Four Questions WithRichard Seroter”!

Topic: BizTalk Server, SOA and the Shift to the Cloud

Session 1: In this session we will discuss the continued relevance of SOA and how to apply SOA principles when designing and exposing services from BizTalk Server.

Session 2: This session shows how to exploit SOA principles when consuming existing services. We will also see how BizTalk can directly engage cloud offerings from the leading vendors.

Richard Seroter is a solutions architect for an industry-leading biotechnology company, a Microsoft MVP for BizTalk Server, and a Microsoft Connected Technology Advisor. He has spent the majority of his career consulting with customers as they planned and implemented their enterprise software solutions. Richard worked first for two global IT consulting firms, which gave him exposure to a diverse range of industries, technologies, and business challenges. Richard then joined Microsoft as a SOA/BPM technology specialist where his sole objective was to educate and collaborate with customers as they considered, designed, and architected BizTalk solutions. One of those customers liked him enough to bring him onboard full time as an architect after they committed to using BizTalk Server as their enterprise service bus. Once the BizTalk environment was successfully established, Richard transitioned into a solutions architect role where he now helps identify enterprise best practices and applies good architectural principles to a wide set of IT initiatives.

Richard maintains a semi-popular blog of his exploits, pitfalls, and musings with BizTalk Server, SOA and enterprise architecture at http://seroter.wordpress.com.

The event will be officially announced on the user group site in the beginning of August.

bLogical SFTP Adapter – Planning for new release

by | Jul 25, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I’ve been doing some minor bug fixes to the adapter, and plan a new release after the summer. So far, the only new feature is support for SSO, as that has been requested many times. However, I’m eager to hear if there are other requests. If there are, I’ll do my best to squeeze them in.

If anyone has done any fixes of their own, PLEASE let me know!

Visit the SFTP adapter site on CodePlex

Two new ESB Toolkit videos now live (incl a really cool BizTalk demo)

by | Jul 23, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

As part of the recent BizTalk Server 2009 “First Look” tour I did in the US Southwest district, I developed a demo application that brought together some of the techniques I have used on client projects over the years, and the new ESB Toolkit 2.0. I did so in what I think is a very approachable and easy-to-understand way.

I recorded two of the demos, and they are now available at MSDN.

In my opinion, the most important of these is the “Order Demo” video. It showcases how we can leverage the Microsoft stack to easily assemble comprehensive solutions that meet business needs. That’s marketing speak for “cool stuff that’s a pattern you can use to do things things you need to do”. This is about 20 or so minutes long, and I would encourage all BizTalk architects/developers to check it out, as it may show you capabilities many don’t know they have. You can even show this one to your manager and they’ll get it! the video is available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/biztalk/cc998440.aspx.

The second video walks through the itinerary designer experience, showing how itineraries can be built and deployed, and rolls in UDDI and design-time resolution. The video is available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/biztalk/dd320596.aspx.

I’m planning to do a blog post around the BAM portion of the Order Demo. I came up with a way to implement that which I have never used before, and I’m guessing many people haven’t thought of it either. As SharePoint usage expands around the world, techniques like this become an increasingly powerful tool.

Excel CSV to string[]

by | Jul 23, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

While building a Excel CSV to Claim application for a client I needed to take a comma delimited record and place it into a string array.

The challenge is that there is a wrap character only for the fields that have the delimiter in the data.

Example:

012346,012346001,SMITH ,SCOTT,J
012345,012345001,”WILLIAMS, III ”,HENRY ,R
012344,012344001,DAHL ,MICHELLE ,T

I could not find an easy way to parse this into an array, this is what I came up with:

public string[] Split(string expression, string delimiter, string qualifier, bool ignoreCase)
{
    string _Statement = String.Format("{0}(?=(?:[^{1}]*{1}[^{1}]*{1})*(?![^{1}]*{1}))",Regex.Escape(delimiter), Regex.Escape(qualifier));

    RegexOptions _Options = RegexOptions.Compiled | RegexOptions.Multiline;
    if (ignoreCase) _Options = _Options | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase;

    Regex _Expression = new Regex(_Statement, _Options);
    ArrayList finalresult=new ArrayList();
    foreach (string result in _Expression.Split(expression))
    {
        string tempData=result.Replace(qualifier, "");
        finalresult.Add(tempData.Trim());
    }
    string[] strArray = finalresult.ToArray(Type.GetType("System.String")) as string[];
    return strArray;
}

I am sure it can be done better, yes, I know, two passes through isn’t quite the best to remove the “ from the quoted field, and I could have done it a little better to remove the spaces, but it does what I needed, and the client was not paying for how fast it runs, he was paying me for how fast I could code it!

Don’t tell me “Can’t”

by | Jul 22, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

This was being sent around our office today that I thought I’d just have to share
with you.

My first thought was ’photoshop’.but one of the South African born Girls here swears
black and blue that this is normal.

Everything about this picture is wrongat any point the goat could say “forget thisI
don’t have the right shoes on”
(he would probably bleat it out to his mates)

Just goes to show.we’re limited only by our own minds

Thought for “Micks Day”

Version 5 of pipeline components library

by | Jul 22, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Hi all

I have just released version 5 of my pipeline components library.

It has the following additions:

  • SuspendAfterMap. In BizTalk 2009 (which is the only supported BizTalk version for
    this pipeline component) there has been added support for recoverable interchanges
    for errors occurring during mapping on receive ports after disassembling. This is
    achieved by setting a specific promoted property to “true”. I have created a pipeline
    component that will do this for you.
  • WriteProperties. This pipeline component serves almost NO purpose at all, except I
    used it for debugging to see what properties existed on a message going through BizTalk.
    It will write out all context of a message to the eventlog, one event at a time.

It has the following new features:

  • Promote. The pipeline component used for promoting a value based on an XPath expression
    and thereby enabling you to promote a specific instance of a reoccurring element has
    been enhanced by a “constant”. So instead of having to set the value of some property
    to the result of an XPath expression you can just enter a constant instead. If you
    enter both a constant and an XPath expression the constant wins. This new feature
    is quite handy if you need to set the value of for instance MIME.FileName to a specific
    value or any other property for that matter.

You can find the newest versions at http://eebiztalkpipelinecom.codeplex.com/

—

eliasen

Version 9.1 of functoids library

by | Jul 22, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Hi all

I have just released version 9.1 of my functoid library. Actually, nothing much new
has appeared. I had accidentally left out the functoid I described at http://blog.eliasen.dk/2009/03/08/SolvingTheIfThenElseProblemInAMapPartIII.aspx from
version 9, so now it is reintroduced – and it has also been added to the documentation.

Find the newest version of the functoids library at http://eebiztalkfunctoids.codeplex.com –
thanks.

—

eliasen