BizTalk Server 2006 R3 Announced!

by | May 6, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Apologies…this post has been in my drafts and i assumed it was published..Well, without any more delay…please find enclosed the announcement on BizTalk Server 2006 R3!

Steven Martin who is the Connected Systems Program Manager has announced the next revision of BizTalk Server named as “R3″. This new version of BizTalk Server is aligned in the […]

Professional ASP.NET 3.5 Book (only $16 on Amazon for a short time)

Professional ASP.NET 3.5 Book (only $16 on Amazon for a short time)

by | May 6, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

One of the things I like to track are book sales on Amazon.com, which provides a useful data point to monitor what developers are interested in on any given day.  I use the www.TitleZ.com site (which is built using ASP.NET) to track specific titles I want to watch – it then generates a report showing real-time Amazon sales ranking data, as well as 7 day, 30 day and 90 day sales ranking averages.

This morning I pulled up my report and saw the usual books near the top of my list, and was about to navigate away when I noticed the eye-popping amazon ranking of the top book -"Professional ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB" by Bill Evjen, Scott Hanselman and Devin Rader.  Its Amazon sales rank was a stunning #95 (of all books on Amazon), which meant it was outselling even Harry Potter (which is pretty much unheard of for any technology book).

It turns out that Amazon is holding a special price promotion for a short time on a few books – and this was one that was selected.  Instead of the usual $54 price, you can buy it for a short time for a ridiculous $16.49.  I’m not sure how long this promotion will last – but if you are looking for a great ASP.NET 3.5 book this might be something you might want to take advantage of:

The book is a great ASP.NET 3.5 book and an excellent end to end resource.  It has been on the best seller list for programming books since it came out in March (usually in the top 5 of all programming titles), and has received glowing reviews (I posted a review of it on Amazon a few weeks ago and gave it 5 stars).

If you are in the market for a good ASP.NET book, you might want to consider taking Amazon up on this offer before it closes (and apologies in advance if the price changes before you read this).

Hope this helps,

Scott

P.S. If you are looking for other good .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 books – I also recommend: C# 3.0 In a Nutshell, LINQ in Action, and Pro LINQ: Language Integrated Query in C# 2008 (all of which average a 5 star rating on Amazon).

.NET 3.5 Framework – some low level big bits, sockets and peer to peer evolutions

by | May 6, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Hi folks,

While freezing in NZ (this week) I came across this this great MSDN article discussing
some of the lower level implementation details around .NET 3.5 Framework.

The part that interests me is the Presence information (right at the end of the article)
where once a connection is setup, you can get presence information about the other
party – right from the .NET 3.5 framework.

If you’ve ever had to try and develop for that other ways i.e. by talking straight
to communicator, or messenger or… etc.

You’ll realise that they each have a slightly different API set, (some accept SIP,
some don’t, some require it, some don’t…) and it’s opening up trouble – cause on
the target deployment machine…can you imagine the production guys when you say “hang
on, I’ve just got to go and download Messenger (from Live)….”

Anyway – here’s the article.

Enjoy – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163356.aspx

Next Melbourne BizTalk User Group Meeting – Tuesday 6th May

by | May 4, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

We will be holding the next Melbourne BizTalk User Group Meeting on Tuesday 6th May 2008 at 5:30pm

The venue and sponsor for the meeting will be Stargate Group at Level 3, 600 Victoria Street, Richmond

The topics will be:

Bill Chesnut from Stargate Group (www.stargategroup.com.au) will do a presentation on “Introduction to Trading Partner Management”

Bill Chesnut from Stargate Group (www.stargategroup.com.au) will do a presentation on “Advanced BizTalk Rule Engine Examples”

Please note we are starting the meeting at 5:30pm and there will be food and drinks supplied

Please rsvp for [email protected] if you plan on attending the meeting.

RAISERROR and the BizTalk Sql Adapter…

by | May 4, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

There has to be a better way to do this – if you know of one, kindly post a
comment.

Until then, here is a technique that will allow you to ensure that if a stored procedure
that BizTalk is calling is unable to complete its work successfully, you can rollback
the work and be notified of that fact within your orchestration.

  1. In the stored procedure, use RAISERROR with a severity greater than 10 in the event
    of an error.  This should abort the (DTC) transaction that the BizTalk Sql
    Adapter initiated (that wraps the work within the stored procedure.)
  2. Use a scope around the Send/Recieve shapes in your orchestration that deal with this
    stored procedure.  You will want to catch Microsoft.XLANGs.Core.XlangSoapException…but
    you can’t.  The designer won’t let you.  So…be brave,
    open the ODX, and look for the catch block so you can modify it as shown below (see
    “ExceptionType”):
    3. <om:Element Type="Catch" OID="e7590870…" ParentLink="Scope_Catch" …>
    
<om:Property Name="ExceptionName" Value="soapex" /> 

    
 <om:Property Name="ExceptionType" Value="Microsoft.XLANGs.Core.XlangSoapException"
/>

    
<om:Property Name="IsFaultMessage" Value="False" /> 

    
<om:Property Name="ReportToAnalyst" Value="True" />
    
<om:Property Name="Name" Value="CatchException_2" />
    
<om:Property Name="Signal" Value="True" /> 

    
</om:Element>
  3. With this solution, you will wind up with the message you are sending to the stored
    procedure in a suspended state whenever the RAISEERROR occurs.  This isn’t a
    huge deal, but you have to plan how these will get cleaned up.  It could be done
    manually, with a script, or with an orchestration or send port that subscribes
    to these suspended messages (try a filter with ErrorReport.FailureCode ==
    0xc0c0167a to get started, though you probably want to be more specific.)

    4. >

    After you’ve gone to these lengths, it is always worth considering whether you
    want to have your orchestration call a component so you are a little closer to the
    action.  But, if you have need of the adapter, this should work out.

Upgraded dasBlog

by | May 4, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Hi everyone.

I have just upgraded the software on my blog to dasBlog version 1.9.7174.1.

I hope it has been smooth for you all, and if you notie any difficulties, please let
me know.

Later, I will upgarde to dasBlog 2.0, which has been out forquite some time, but one
step at the time, ight? 🙂

—

eliasen