Tulsa TechFest 2008

by | Oct 13, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Holy smokes, did I have a blast at Tulsa TechFest!  It was a great couple of days hanging out with some great speakers, like Randy Walker, Caleb Jenkins, Zain, Chris, Phil and many more.  I did presentations on three different topics.  The first of these was called Building Services That Rock, the second was Intro to C# 3.0, and finally an intro to Parallelism in .NET.  All were well received, I believe, and I thank David for having me out to speak again.

This was my first time back since the original Tulsa TechFest in 2006.  In the year between I went to Heartland Developer Conference.  I’ve had a fantastic at both events, but Tulsa TechFest’s enormous size in comparison to HDC and never ending topics is just immensely compelling.  At this one conference I could have seen talks on Robotics Studio, Expression Blend, C#, VB, LINQ, Sharepoint, Silverlight, and TDD.  When I say I could have seen these, I mean without conflicts, attending all keynotes, and that is just one possible path through this conference extravaganza.

Seriously, if you’ve not ventured to Tulsa TechFest, check it out next year.  And keep your eyes here for an announcement soon about Dallas TechFest 2009.

Cross-Application Subscription

by | Oct 13, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Applications in BizTalk 2006 for me are just logical buckets that allow you place like-minded artifacts (maps, schemas, orchestrations etc.) together, so your environment when viewed through the BizTalk Admin Console looks clean and tidy and can be easily managed.
Although resources (BizTalk Assemblies) and ports can be moved between applications, they cannot exist in multiple […]

More Cool Tricks with Live Mesh

by | Oct 13, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

We’re now just a few short weeks away from PDC, which promises to yield a bumper crop of announcements. Aside from the Oslo/Dublin stuff that regular readers of my blog know I follow closely, there will also be cloud-related announcements. One thing I would expect is that Live Mesh will either get more features/capabilities, or that it may become part of something larger. Either way, I’m a big fan of the existing offering, and am eagerly waiting to see where this leads.

Here’s a few things I’ve done lately that I think are pretty cool use-cases for Live Mesh:

Share, REALLY share

I started a new project recently, and I was given a client machine to work with (for security reasons, we cannot plug our laptops in to the network). The first thing I did was set up a folder on my desktop that I would use as a place to archive documents. Then, I synched it with my Live Mesh desktop. Next, I shared it locally (inside the network, a conventional folder share) with my fellow team members so they could also access it, so a colleague could drop a file in there, and it would propagate to my Live Mesh desktop-in-the-cloud. Lastly, from my Live Mesh desktop, I invited my colleagues and gave them rights to the folder so that they could also access the content from remote locations. Now,you may be wondering…. we already have MOSS and a project portal set up for collaboration. In addition, we also run Groove, so I could have used that to replicate content. So, why did I do this? Because it was a geeky way to test the functionality. I could also share the Live Mesh folder with anyone, even people who may not have Groove, or may not have rights to our MOSS portal. All in all, it was really cool, and quick to set up.

Almost like being there…

I have been in pretty intense travel mode for most of the year (when I go home now I call it a “visit”). This poses some interesting life logistic challenges, such as something arrives in the postal mail at home when I’m on the other side of the planet. So… using Live Mesh, I took my “public scans” folder and synched it with my Live Mesh desktop. I then synched that to a folder on my notebook. Now when something comes in the mail, I can tell my wife to put it on the scanner, and then using Live Mesh’s remote desktop functionality, take control of my machine at home and scan the document. Once it has been scanned, it replicates up to my desktop and then to my notebook. Very cool!

And now, mobile….

Lastly, I discovered that there’s a mobile Live Mesh experience (http://m.mesh.com). So, using my Windows Mobile phone, I can get to my Live Mesh desktop, navigate to my “public scans” folder (or, of course, any other folder in my Live Mesh desktop), and see the PDF that was scanned and replicated above.

Clearly, I’m having far too much fun with Live Mesh, and I am eagerly awaiting whatever comes out of PDC around this…

Technorati Tags: Live Mesh,Cloud Computing

Message creation

by | Oct 13, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

InMarch Yossi Dahanblogged aboutvarious ways to create messages from scratch in an orchestration. In his post (in the comments) he also mentionedhe would be very interested in the performance characteristics.
I shared this interest with him an decided to spend some time on a small test solution to measure the performance. Because I wanted to be […]

Encryption Pipeline Component now on GitHub

by | Oct 12, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I’ve been working on organizing the code for my old custom Symmetric
Encryption Pipeline Components for BizTalk Server 2006 and I’ve posted the updated
code on a new GitHub repository.
Be aware that I renamed things a little bit and cleaned other parts of the code.

The code includes both the encryption and decryption component, some basic tests using PipelineTesting,
and the Windows Forms Configuration Utility that stores the crypto keys used by the
components in a custom Configuration Application in Enterprise Single Sign-On.

Countdown to Oslo: Introducing "M" and "Quadrant"

by | Oct 10, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Robert Wahbe and I were out on the road this week meeting with press and members of the dev community to talk more about Oslo. For those of you who have been following Oslo, the timing won’t come as a surprise: almost exactly one year ago, we announced it at the SOA BP Conference. Our goal? To make it easier to build apps using models and to break down silos of application development.  That means that whether you write the user specification, write the code, or have to manage the application, the model for what the app should do is shared.  Any of us that have written or managed apps know that getting everyone to think about requirements in the same way can be a huge challenge. Ultimately, for developers and others in the application lifecycle, this will mean more productivity, transparency and flexibility. For partners, it will mean more opportunities to design domain-specific apps (e.g., through the creation of DSLs, etc.).


 


One of the things we promised when we made that first announcement was to deliver a CTP of Oslo at the PDC – a commitment I’m very proud to say we’ll keep.  In less than three weeks, the those attending the PDC will get a first-hand look at the three technologies that make up Oslo:


 



  • A language – codenamed “M” – that helps people create and use textual domain-specific languages (DSLs) and data models

  • A relational repository – that makes models available to both tools and platform components

  • A tool – codenamed “Quadrant” – that helps people define and interact with models in a rich and visual manner

Now, in case those two codenames sound new; they are.  While we’ve talked about both the tool and the language before, today is the first time we’ve publicly referred to them by their codenames: “Quadrant” and “M” which you’ll see reflected in the CTP packaging.


 


The upcoming CTP was a pretty hot topic during a conversation Robert and I had with a group of developers during dinner a few nights ago. Readers probably know some of these folks already: Shashi Raina, Don Demsak, Marc Adler, Nick Landry, Ambrose Little and Bill Zack. Across the board, these guys seem eager to get their hands on the bits to see for themselves what Oslo is all about (obviously pretty encouraging for me and the rest of the team). The language(“M”) in particular seems to be of interest, which is consistent with what we’ve been hearing over the past year. Here’s why when we talk to developers about “Modeling” many have the same immediate reaction.  They say something like “modeling isn’t for me, I’ll leave the pretty pictures to the business folks and architects.  I write code and live in a text editor.”  


 


Which is where “M” comes in.  We respond by saying that modeling and writing code are not mutually exclusive, in fact, they are intertwined. “M” gives developers the ability to model applications in text rather than graphics.  Nothing against graphics, we have a great tool for that too – Quadrant.  “M,” will add the text component that has been missing in the industry so far.


 


The dinner conversation did get very engaged in a few spots, especially when we started discussing the idea of bringing business analysts and other users closer to the application via the more visual part of the equation, a.k.a. Quadrant. For instance, most people only think about having business analysts interacting in application design. Oslo will allow folks to go well beyond that – if a developer delivers a set of DSLs, an end user could potentially compose the application they need in real time. Most at the table saw the value (and business opportunities) in this, but a couple expressed some distaste at the idea of analysts and others directly interacting with an app. Makes me wonder if everyone else is as passionate about this? 


 


XAML was another big topic of discussion, with some lively debate over its full potential and role in the Microsoft platform as well as the ability to target other non-MSFT runtimes.


 


I’ll be talking about all of these areas in more detail over the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, only about 17 days to go until that Oslo CTP is available