Microsoft Press is giving away 40% Discount on its 25th Anniversary

Microsoft Press is giving away 40% Discount on its 25th Anniversary

Microsoft Press is giving away 40% Discount on selective 25 books to celebrate their 25th Anniversary.
Some of the books include:
Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 2nd Edition
Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Step by Step 3rd Edition,
Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5
MCTS Self Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-503): Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Windows Communication Foundation Book/DVD/CD Package
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 T-SQL […]

Hosting WCF Services in Windows Azure

Hi folks,


Windows Azure is Microsoft’s cloud services operating system, based on Windows Server 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 SP1. Azure is currently in a Community Technology Preview stage and you can register and try it out for free on this page.


Many of you may have wondered what is the experience of hosting WCF services in the Azure cloud. We have created a full set of samples on our newly launched Code Gallery site:



  • WCF Azure Samples

The samples show hosting WCF services for use by Silverlight clients and ASP.NET AJAX clients, as well as REST WCF services built using the new WCF REST Starter Kit.


You may also find some useful workarounds on the WCF known issues page.


 


Cheers,
-Yavor Georgiev
Program Manager, Connected Framework Team


 


 

Improve performance by disabling tracking

By default tracking in BizTalk is enabled for a couple of components that are useful during development and testing, but mostly overkill for a process that is solid, and has been running for a while.

The first thing is to create a separate host that is dedicated solely for tracking:

The other things to increase performance is to disable tracking in orchestrations:

The third thing is to disable the pipeline tracking:

BizTalk Blog Docs

Saravana Kumar has just published the BizTalk Blog Docs site on BizTalk 24/7.

This is a really cool looking new resource which aggregated some of the popular blog articles and presents them in a structured format which is similar to the MSDN Library

http://blogdoc.biztalk247.com/default.aspx

My profile on BizTalk Blog Docs is: http://blogdoc.biztalk247.com/michael-stephenson

BizTalk BTSDeploy issue

If you ever receive the following error,

“Error: btsdeploy is not recognized as an internal or external command”

Reason: This usually happens if the BizTalk server is not able to recognize the BTSDeploy.exe command, this can happen if you had recently installed the BizTalk server and have not restarted the machine.

Solution: restart the machine after successful BizTalk installation

Note: BTSDeploy is deprecated and has been replaced by BTSTask with the new release, but is included to support scripts that administrators have developed for previous versions of BizTalk Server.

BizTalk Server 2009 RTM is available on MSDN!

BizTalk Server 2009 RTM is available on MSDN!

Microsoft has released the much talked about version of BizTalk Server 2009 (previously known as BizTalk Server 2006 R3) for MSDN subscribers on friday.
The following are the different versions available on MSDN:

BizTalk Server 2009 Branch Edition (x86) – DVD (English)
BizTalk Server 2009 Developer Edition (x86) – DVD (English)
BizTalk Server 2009 Enterprise Edition (x86) – DVD […]

Issue with the first release of MUrl sample and Twitter

I ran into an issue working with the AWESOME MUrl sample trying to reach Twitter from inside Intellipad (running in “MUrl mode”). I’m doing this post for the benefit of others that may run also into this, there are actually two solutions

If you haven’t seen MUrl in action, please see my previous post about it and do check it out. Bottom line is that the sample is a DSL (written in “M” of course) for doing REST client requests, and “MUrl mode” lets you do those requests right from inside Intellipad. Super cool

Where I ran into an issue was that although I was able to query Twitter no problem with MUrl from Intellipad, when I tried posting I would get an “Expectation Failed” error message. I was somewhat amused that somehow it seemed that I was not living up to some service’s expectations 🙂 but mostly I was annoyed that I could not do this. After a bit of looking around, I found this post that explained what was going on.

I made the code change to the MUrlRuntime.cs file as shown below:

Alternatively, you could make the equivalent change by adding this to the ipad.exe.config:

<system.net>

<settings>

<servicePointManager expect100Continue=”false” />

</settings>

</system.net>

Technorati Tags: Oslo,M,MUrl,DSL

(for the benefit of people using search engines, other text in the error message was “Expect: 100-continue”, and some text from Twitter saying “we only allow the 100-continue expectation”)

BizTalk 2009 RTM Prerequisites

BizTalk 2009 RTM Prerequisites

 
The pre-requisites CAB files available at the moment for BizTalk 2009 on Windows Server 2008 are:
32bit: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=81432
64bit: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=81423
 
These CAB files have version 8.0 of ADOMD.NET in them.  If you run into a problem with the RTM version of BizTalk 09 asking for version 10 of ADOMD.NET, you can download […]