In Part 1 I showed how to create and publish a simple Orchestration demo. Now we’ll finish configuring it in the admin console and test it. Open the BizTalk Server 2009 Administration Console, and expand BizTalk Server 2009 Administration, then Applications. You should have an entry for OrchestrationPortDemo – expand it as well. First, we’ll add the Receive Port – the place that we’ll drop the test file. Right-click on Receive Ports and select New One-way Receive Port. On the General tab, name it...
(This is a reference for a lunch & learn I'm giving at my company) This demo will create a BizTalk process that monitors a directory for an XML file, loads it into an orchestration, and drops it into a different directory. There’s no real processing going on (other than moving the file from one location to another), but this will introduce you to Messages, Orchestrations and Ports. To begin, create a new BizTalk Project names OrchestrationPortDemo: When the solution has been created, right-click...
If you haven’t spent the last week in the middle of the Sahara desert or traveling on a sled in the north pole area you should have heard something about the launch of Windows Phone 7 Series (or Windows Phone Series 7, or Windows Series Phone 7 or something like that). Even if you are in the middle of the desert or somewhere around the north pole you may have been reached by the news, since it seems that WP7S (using the full name will kill my available bandwidth!) is generating a lot of buzz in the...
A new updated release of everybody favourite XAML to CPP conversion tool (at least because it’s the only one available!). New features: - support for resource dictionaries (app.xaml if you use Blend to generate your XAML) Bugfixes: - the parameters for the mouseleftbuttondown and up events were incorrect As usual you can download the new release here: http://cid-9b7b0aefe3514dc5.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/XAML2CPP.zip Technorati Tags: XAML,Silverlight for Windows Embedded...
In MDI application we can have multiple forms and can work with multiple forms i.e. MDI childs at a time but while developing applications we don't pay attention to the minute details of memory management. Take this as an example, when we develop application say preferably an MDI application, we have multiple child forms inside one parent form. On MDI parent form we would like to have menu strip and tab strip which in turn calls other forms which build the other parts of the application. This also...
With SharePoint's next release on the horizon (May 12th) many of my clients and colleagues are starting to ramp up for the upcoming tidal wave of functionality. Microsoft has been doing a terrific job of getting as much information out in the public lime light as possible over the last few months and I think that will definitely pay off with regards to acceptance of the new version of SharePoint. However, there are still some aspects of the new platform that are a little murky. Aspects such as: "Should...
I have uploaded the presentation and source code samples of the session we had for the Malaga .net user group to my sky drive, you can find it here. About the session it self: is an express introduction to Silverlight and line of business application development, heavily based on samples / demo’s to cover the basics (Binding, INotifiable, ObservableCollections, Converters, …)...
/// <summary> /// Redirects parent of IFrame to specified URL /// If current page doesn't have parent, redirect itself /// </summary> /// <param name="page"></param> /// <param name="url"></param> public static void NavigateParentToUrl(Page page, string url) { String script = @" try { var sUrl='" + url + @"'; if (self.parent.frames.length != 0) self.parent.location=sUrl; else self.location = sUrl; } catch (Exception) {} "; page.ClientScript.RegisterStartupScript(TypeForClientScript(),...
Pekka from Frends gave me the opportunity to have a look at the beta-version of their Helium 2.0. For all of you, who don't know the tool: Helium is a web-application that collects management-data from BizTalk which you usually have to tediously collect yourself, like performance-data (throttling, throughput (like completed Orchestrations/hour), other perfomance-counters) and data about the state of BTS-Applications and presents the data in clearly structured diagrams and overviews which (often)...
Windows Virtual PC (aka XP Mode) When XP Mode was released, it insisted on hardware virtualisation being present on your CPU and enabled in the BIOS. Given that Windows Virtual PC was based on an improved Virtual PC 2007, which provided hardware virtualisation as a user selectable option, I did wonder why on earth Microsoft thought this was a good idea. Not only do many people not have a CPU with hardware virtualisation support, some manufacturers don't provide a BIOS option to enable this setting,...
Thanks to Steve and Andy at NxtGenUG Manchester for making me very welcome and for the guys who didn't head down the pub for a Guinness for St Patrick's Day and came to NxtGen instead. I hope you all got something from the presentation, if not technical insights, at least a can of Guinness of Tunnocks caramel wafer as swag. As promised here is the presentation in both PowerPoint and Adobe PDF format (with speaker notes), http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/nxtgenugmanc/hyperv4devs-ppt.zip http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/nxtgenugmanc/hyperv4devs-pdf.zip...
The new release of Employee Info Starter Kit contains lots of exciting features available in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. To get started with the new version, you will need less than 5 minutes. Minimum System Requirements Before getting started, please make sure you have installed Visual Studio 2010 RC (or higher) and Sql Server 2005 Express edition (or higher installed on your machine. Running the Starter Kit for First Time 1. Download the starter kit 4.0.0 version form here and extract it....
After banging my head for days on a “A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detected" issue when post (ajax-ing) a form in ASP.NET MVC 2 on .NET 4.0 framework using jQuery and CKEditor, I found that when you use the following: Code Snippet $.ajax({ url: '/TheArea/Root/Add', type: 'POST', data: $("#form0Add").serialize(), dataType: 'json', //contentType: 'application/json; charset=utf-8', beforeSend: function () { pageNotify("NotifyMsgContentDiv", "MsgDefaultDiv", '<img src="/Content/images/content/icons/busy.gif"...
My EntSSO (Enterprise Single Sign-On Server, part of BizTalk) did not start today, with the message: The SSO service failed to start. Error Code: 0x80131700 Could not create SSOSQL. To fix the problem, reinstall SSO or try 'regasm SSOSQL.dll' from a Visual Studio command prompt. Error Code: 0x80131700 The only reason for this that I can think of is that I have just installed the .net framework 4.0 RC but I have not verified this. The solution suggest in the error message works like a charm! Open...
My laptop housing my life in entirety decided to go south this last weekend, cant blame it because I wanted it to do things that not even normal people :) but it corrupted and could not get it going no matter what I tried. Imagining what I would loose (my POC's, Couple of VM's and lots and lots of documentation) pushed me to try anything short of reinstall. After toiling for about an hour looking for solution, I ended up at http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Recovering+the+Vista+Bootloader+from+the+DVD...
Employee Info Starter Kit is a ASP.NET based web application, which includes very simple user requirements, where we can create, read, update and delete (crud) the employee info of a company. Based on just a database table, it explores and solves most of the major problems in web development architectural space. This open source starter kit extensively uses major features available in latest Visual Studio, ASP.NET and Sql Server to make robust, scalable, secured and maintainable web applications...
My organization has an ongoing project to take documents produced for internal regulations and such, change some of the formatting and then export it as PDF. Our requirements were that only one person would be doing this, but it has been painfully tedious and sometimes error-prone to do by hand. Enter the fearless developer to automate the situation! Since I am one of those guys that just plain does not like VB, I wanted to do the automation in the ever-so-much-more-familiar C#. While Microsoft had...
Introduction We are adopting Click Once as a deployment standard for Thick .Net application clients. The latest version of this tool has matured it to a point where it can be used in an enterprise environment. This guide will identify how to use Click Once deployment and promote code trough the dev, test and production environments. Why Use Click Once over SCCM If we already use SCCM why add Click Once to the deployment options. The advantages of Click Once are their ability to update the code in...
This weekend, we were planning on going to Mt. Rushmore, but with the weather the way it is, we decided to head south instead. So what are we going to do? A tour of different restaurants on the show Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives. Not very original I know since there are web sites and iPhone apps dedicated to locating the establishments, but it definitely sounds like it could be some fun. We are going to leave KC tonight and go through St. Louis, Memphis, Little Rock, Dallas, Oklahoma City, and back...
The Chicago Architects Group will be holding its next meeting on April 20th. Please come and join us and get involved in our architect community. Register Presenter: Matt Hidinger Topic: Onion Architecture Location: Illinois Technology Association 200 S. Wacker Dr., Suite 1500 Room A/B Chicago, IL 60606 Time: 5:30 - Doors open at 5:00 del.icio.us Tags: Chicago Architects Group,Data Integration Architecture,Mike Vogt...
We have been getting hit very hard with comment spam as of late. As mentioned in the last post, this is something we typically deal with on a regular basis for the past 6 years, but some weeks are like this week where it is just crazy. Because of the way things are right now, I have disabled the ability to toggle on or off the CAPTCHA controls for comments. I know some bloggers are going to get mad, but we need to see if the lack of CAPTCHA on some blogs is the key cause of SPAM or if they are manually...
When I started this blog in September 2009 I was working as a BizTalk developer for a financial institution based in the South West of England. At the time I was developing using BizTalk Server 2004 and intended to use my blog to collate and share any useful information and experiences that I had using this version of BizTalk (and occasionally other technologies) in an effort to bring together as many useful details as I could in one place. Since then my circumstances have changed and I am no longer...
You should always have three builds on your team project. These should be setup and tested using an empty solution before you write any code at all. Figure: Three builds named in the format [TeamProject].[AreaPath]_[Branch].[Gate|CI|Nightly] for every branch. These builds should use the same XAML build workflow; however you may set them up to run a different set of tests depending on the time it takes to run a full build. Gate – Only needs to run the smallest set of tests, but should run most if...
Thanks to my work mate Dave Robinson we have a new mock-up of Windows Mobile...
In this Issue: Tim Heuer(-2-), René Schulte(-2-), Bart Czernicki, Mark Monster, Pencho Popadiyn, Alex Golesh, Phil Middlemiss, and Yochay Kiriaty. Shoutouts: Check out the new themes, and Tim Heuer's poetry skills: SNEAK PEEK: New Silverlight application themes I learned to program Windows 3.1 from reading Charles Petzold's book, and here we are again: Free ebook: Programming Windows Phone 7 Series (DRAFT Preview) Here's a blog you're going to want to watch, and first up on the blog tonight is links...
The SPSiteDataQuery class in SharePoint 2007 is very powerful, but it has a few limitations. One of these limitations that I ran into this morning (and caused hours of frustration) is that you can only return results from one list type at a time. For example, if you are trying to query items from an out of the box custom list (list type = 100) and document library (list type = 101) you will only get items from the custom list (SPSiteDataQuery defaults to list type = 100.) In my situation I was attempting...
The Microsoft Azure Cloud is looking pretty solid compared to just a few months ago. The storage mechanisms in the cloud now are blobs, drives, tables, and queues. Also, not to forget, is SQL Azure. I won’t dive too much into that, as most will know what SQL Server is, and SQL Azure is pretty much just a hosted SQL Server instance. The blobs are generally geared toward holding binary type data, images and those types of things. The tables are huge key value type stores. The drives are VHD, which...
So I’ve been to events with Cathy, Lori, and Laura. They are good people. Honestly, the best event I ever attended was SharePoint Saturday Ozarks. I had a crappy week and I got there the actual day of the event. Hanging out with the three of them plus Joy made everything so much better. Then there was devLink and SharePoint Saturday DC and a few other events sprinkled into the mix. I was going to attend Birmingham but the timing was bad and other things occurred. Now I have the opportunity to attend...
Here is the scenario: You have a Windows Form Application that calls a method via Invoke or BeginInvoke which throws exceptions. Now you want to find out where the error did occur and how the method has been called. Here is the output we do get when we call Begin/EndInvoke or simply Invoke The actual code that was executed was like this: private void cInvoke_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { InvokingFunction(CallMode.Invoke); } [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.NoInlining)] void InvokingFunction(CallMode...
Ok, the title is misleading – I’ll admit it, but there is a way to store your data in Windows Phone 7 Series. Windows Phone 7 Silverlight solutions have what is called Isolated Storage. [XNA has content storage as well] At this time there is no port of SQL Compact engine for Silverlight Isolated Storage. There is no wind of such intention. [That was a question way before WP7 was even rumored to have Silverlight.] There a few options: 1. Microsoft recommends you “simply” use client-server or cloud...
For those that don’t know, you can download the W7 Phone developer tools now. It is available here. I have installed it and wanted to share my experience so far. You can read the pre-release documentation here. First, here is what it comes with the install: The Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP includes the following: Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP Windows Phone Emulator CTP Silverlight for Windows Phone CTP XNA 4.0 Game Studio CTP First impressions: No ISO image install (Bad for...
“Full House” at the ArcSig Ft. Lauderdale March meeting at the Microsoft Office! After all participants had the opportunity to get free pizza and soft drinks, Quent Herschelman, Developer Solution Specialist at Microsoft, gave an excellent presentation about Architecture Tools in Visual Studio 2010. He started with a brief introduction to the new MSDN subscriptions, the different versions of Visual Studio, and the full circle of application and solution integration for the new Team Foundation Server....
Hello! I have decided to start a blog of my adventures learning how to solve problems coding things with the intent that what I put out there might be of some use to some down-trodden developer out there that is trying to solve a problem that I have already figured out...
I would like to thank everyone who came out to last night’s event and especially thank Mike Vogt for the presentation. I think at first everyone glassed over since very few of us spend a lot of time with Integration Architecture and most of us live more in the application architecture space. Learning about subject like BPEL and BPMN was refreshing. The discussion after Mike’s talk was lively and I think that everyone came away with a good idea of areas they might want to know more about. People stuck...
The P&P team have started to share guidance on the Windows Azure Platform. They plan to group their efforts around: 1. Moving to the Cloud 2. Integrating with the Cloud 3. Leveraging the Cloud First up is a document which explains the capabilities and limitations of Enterprise Library 5.0 Beta 2 in terms of use within .NET applications designed to run with the Windows Azure platform. You can download it here. Related Links: UK Azure Online Community – join today. UK Windows Azure Site Start working...
I was happy with Windows 7 at the beginning, until I started to add in the peripherals. Windows 7 was never able to recognize any of my PCI video card (I know, I know, we should be in the DVI age). Anyway, I went through another 4 days of trouble setting my computer up with dual monitor in XP (also did a bunch of other things like getting rid of my sound card and taking the computer off RAID. Kind of feel stupid to put the computer on RAID in the first place because now I can have 2 drives: double...
On Tuesday (16th March 2010) I presented on Azure to a none technical audience at the Cloud Computing Congress. Great audience, lots of folks, lots of questions during and after – although it did feel odd to do a session with no code :-) Lots of people asked me for my slide deck – which is a 30minute none technical overview. I will get it on my slideshare.net (which is being temperamental) but in the meantime I have hosted it on skydrive. or download link. Related Links: Steve Ballmer on Cloud Computing...
When you are building complicated software and working with customers it is always nice for them to have some idea on who to speak to about a particular story during a sprint. In order to achieve this one of the Team takes responsibility for “looking after” a story” a story and manages it to completion. They will collect all of the “Done” emails and make sure that everyone follows the Done criteria identified by the team as well as answering any Product Owner queries. Figure: Bad example, the product...
MIX is happening and there is a lot of excitement around the various releases such as the Windows Phone 7 Developer Preview, IE9 Platform Preview and few other announcements that have been made. Clearly, the Windows Phone 7 Developer Preview has generated the maximum interest and opened a plethora of opportunities for .NET Developers. It also takes the mobile development to a new generation and doesn’t force developers to learn different programming language. Along with this, few other releases have...
Douglas Purdy explains. I think the best part will be the governmental aspect. All public record should be available in a way that’s easy to query IMHO. From the article: Many of us at Microsoft believe the OData protocol can help usher in a more open and programmable Web by creating a common funnel to expose rich data, thereby creating a world of customized consumer mash-ups; a world where government data is transparent and accessible to any citizen; a world where you can ask a question and know,...
Unless you've been living in the caves of Lascaux for the past couple of days, you probably know what's happening in the world of Windows Phone. Microsoft unveiled the developer tools required to develop applications and games for Windows Phone 7 at MIX10 a couple of days back. Silverlight and XNA being the major frameworks, no big surprise there. And the best news of all is that all the development tools are free! So if you are planning to develop apps for Windows Phone 7, read on. The first place,...
So I spent a couple of hours yesterday building my first Windows 7 Phone Series. application. I still can’t get used to saying Windows 7 Phone Series. So I think I’ll just go with WP7. I must say I’m really impressed. Calling web-services a breeze laying out User Interface a very straight forward. I had made called into Dynamics NAV using web-services in under 10 minutes. Working in XAML takes a bit of getting used to, I’m not trying to-do anything too clever yet. One thing I will point out to transition...
Finally Silverlight 4 RC is released and also that Windows 7 Phone Series will rely heavily on Silverlight platform for apps platform. its a really good news for Silverlight developers and designers. More information on this here. You can use SL 4 RC with VS 2010. SL 4 RC does not come with VS 2010, you need to download it separately and install it. So for the next part, be ready with VS 2010 and SL4 RC, we will start using them and not betas. With this momentum, let us go to the next part of our...
MIX day 1’s keynote was all about Windows Phone 7 (WP7). MIX day 2’s was a reminder that Microsoft has much more going on than a new mobile platform. Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie, Doug Purdy and others showed us lots of other good things coming from Microsoft, mostly in the developer stack, that we certainly shouldn’t overlook. These included the forthcoming IE9, its new JavaScript compiling engine and support for HTML 5 that takes full advantage of the local PC resources, including the Graphics...
Well, day 2 of the MIX10 conference did not disappoint. The keynote speakers introduced the preview release of IE9, which looks really cool and quick, and Visual Studio 2010 RC that is scheduled to RTM on April 12th. It seemed to have a lot of improvements aimed at making developers more productive. Here are the current links to these two offerings: Internet Explorer 9 – Platform Preview Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 – Release Candidate While both of these were interesting, the demos that really...
This is a great utility which i have used countless times to generate CAML Queries. Enjoy.... http://www.u2u.net/res/Tools/CamlQueryBuilder.aspx...
Topic: nServiceBus is mature and powerful open source framework that enables to design robust, scalable, message-based, service-oriented architectures. Latest improvements in the configuration API enables developers to quickly get started and build a working simple system that uses messaging infrastructure. The goal of this session is to give a jump start with the framework, introduce basic concepts such as message handlers, Sagas, Pub/Sub, Generic Host and also create a working demo application...
I have made a change to my code-based BDD style. I start with a scenario such as: Pre-Editing * Given I am a book editor * And some chapters are locked and some are not * When I view the list of chapters for editing * Then I should see some chapters are editable and are not locked * And I should see some chapters are not editable and are locked and I implement it using a modified SpecUnit base class as: [Concern("Chapter Editing")] public class when_pre_editing_a_chapter : BaseSpec { private User...
We are running a survey to collect feedback around scenarios where people were experimenting with velocity on windows 2003 in the CTP but are now in a position where the beta requires windows 2008. We would like to understand how important this scenario is precieved to be. If you are in the Connected Systems Community and would like to provide feedback please complete the following survey http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/N3VKZWN...
Wow, creating IE Accelerators is superbly easy. If you want to learn how to create one, go here (some MSDN blog) and the MSDN documentation (clearly written). I was fed up of dictionary.com bringing all those popups and the stupid definitions of Google's dictionary. So I decided to scratch my own itch. I randomly stumbled on the site called Wordnik and it provides with all examples plus definitions plus lots more for words and its popup-free (as far as I know). So I decided to write and accelerator....
Geekswithblogs Gets a Facelift
Celebrating the five year anniversary of the first post on Geekswithblogs, the GWB team has launched a new look and functionality for the community designed to help the community continue to grow and increase interaction amongst bloggers.
The new design offers bloggers and readers the ability to quickly check recent posts, popular posts, Twitter users from the community, community news, and featured bloggers.
The redesign also makes it easier for bloggers to find tutorials on how to get the most from their blogs, support information, and a community-wide tag cloud.
We hope that you will enjoy the new features and look. Here’s to another five years and to everyone that makes up Geekswithblogs!
GWB Goes to PDC ’08 – Let Us “Tag Your Top”
Geekswithblogs is proud to be a Silver Media Sponsor for the upcoming PDC ’08! This will be a great opportunity for face-to-face interaction with the developer community.
If you happen to be going to Los Angeles for the PDC, and we highly suggest you do, make sure to swing by the Geekswithblogs booth (#100) in the Expo Hall to say hi! We will have some amazing looking Geekswithblogs stickers hot off the press ready to “tag your top” – so bring your laptop by to take it from drab to fab!
GWB Podcasting from PDC ‘08
Make sure to look for fellow Geekswithbloggers Chris Williams and D’Arcy Lussier roaming around the floor. They will be playing the part of on-site GWB ambassadors and roving reporters; stop and chat with them!
We’d like to know what you think about the upcoming podcast. We are thinking of firing PodcastStudio.net (the official podcast of GWB) back up after the event and would like to hear your thoughts and suggestions.
GWB and PDC ’08 – We’ll Make You Famous!
A major part of our display at our PDC booth is going to include a video featuring none other than the Geekswithblogs community members! We’re proud to have you as contributors to a large, healthy blogging community and want to give you some additional exposure.
Here’s what to do; record yourself saying “I’m a geek with a blog, and I…”. Simply fill in the rest with something interesting about yourself. It could be anything from what technology you love, what you like to do in your spare time, where you live, etc.
Examples include:
- I’m a geek with a blog, and I rock at ASP.NET.
- I'm a geek with a blog, and I support my development community by presenting at user groups.
- I'm a geek with a blog, and I love playing guitar.
- I’m a geek with a blog, and I volunteer to help the homeless.
- I’m a geek with a blog, and I chug energy drinks.
First 30 bloggers that send in a video with at least 5 statements get a ultra-stylish Geekswithblogs t-shirt with their blog URL on the back!
Stay tuned for FTP information for uploading your files!