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Sunday, November 08, 2009
Tibi and I are winding down after a hectic few days at the ØreDev conference in Sweden. It was a great conference, with a lot of international speakers and attendees, and a good mix of technologies and tracks. One of the highlights was Ze Frank, who was delivering his stand up comedy routine, which was targeted just right for the attendees. I laid down the gauntlet to Tibi by challenging him to get an interview with Ze, and he accepted and delivered the goods, thanks to Herbjörn Wilhelmsen for chatting with Ze to arrange it. We managed to get a slightly longer “ 5 Minutes With” interview in which Ze turned the tables on Tibi and asked him questions about conquering a fear of flying and his attitude for dealing with the challenges life can throw at us. It’s very refreshing to have an interview without any three-letter-acronyms. CloudCasts has also had a busy week, as I’ve posted interviews with Scott Hanselmam, Scott Allen, Julie Lerman, Herbjörn Wilhelmsen and Magnus Mårtensson. We even added some music to the site with a splendid rendition of “ The Joker” by Carl Franklin, with Shawn Wildermoth providing the guitar solo. If you are ever in Malmö, I recommend the “The Bishops Arms”, though we could not decide if we should have 8 or 10 Bishops Fingers there. I have another few videos in the can, and will be getting them uploaded over the weekend.
Overall ØreDev 2009 was a great success, big credit to Michael Tiberg for his organization skills and his passion for the event; I’m looking forward to ØreDev 2010 already.
You can see all the ØreDev content here.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
I’ve just posted the second in a series of webcasts looking at Workflow Foundation 4.0 in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. This time the flowchart workflow designer takes centre stage, and I use it to build a basic workflow for the flight check-in process at an airport. I also make a few calls to a WCF service from the workflow using the new messaging activities, I’m going to focus on those next and hopefully get another webcast out very soon. Stay tuned...
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
As the public launch of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is probably old news in the BlogSphere by now, I thought I’d try and get an early webcast out. I spent about an hour playing with the new Workflow Foundation (WF) designer, and have to say it’s looking pretty good.
I didn’t think that much of it in the PDC bits or Beta 1, but both the Sequential and Flowchart workflow designers are now very nice to develop with. I’ve not has the chance to look at any complex problems or do any heavy lifting with them, but so far they are impressive.
I have a short webcast looking at the new designer, using sequential and flowchart workflows, and a simple custom activity.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Tiberiu “Tibi” Covaci, the CloudCasts international correspondent was in Bulgaria last week for the DevReach 2009 conference. During a hectic few days he managed to pin down some of the main presenters and technology influencers for his “Five Minutes With…” interview series. The interviews with Chris Sells, Richard Campbell, Christian Weyer and Carl Franklin have been published with four more to be released later this week. Tibi will also be at TechEd Berlin, OreDev in Malmoe and PDC in Los Angeles, so we can expect to see more of the same over the next few weeks.
If you have any interviews of your own that you would like hosted on CloudCasts, or you would like to spend “Five Minutes with Tibi”, please contact me through this blog.
Monday, October 12, 2009
CloudCasts welcomes Tiberiu “Tibi” Covaci and Zaashan Shan as new contributors to the site. I’ve also added an “ Interviews” section with my Brian Loesgen interview from Bloggers Guides and an interview with John Callaway. I also was the first to take part in Tibi’s first of a series of “Five Munites With...” series.
Tibi is in Bulgaria at the DevReach conference, hopefully there should be some more interviews soon.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
I’ve just published a “Behind the Scenes” webcasts on CloudCasts. It’s the first in a series of webcasts that will look at the project and how it is developed, tested, and hosted in Windows Azure. In this webcast I’ll run through the deployment of a new version of the CloudCasts website. I’ll start by showing the project structure and how I have configures the application to use local or cloud based storage in the development phase. I’ll give you a few tips on hosting your Azure applications in IIS to speed up development. I’ll then run through the deployment of the new version of the site to a staging environment, and finally taking it into production.
Friday, September 04, 2009
I’ve just added two more webcasts to the “BizTalk Light and Easy” series, with a webcast on the HL7 Accelerator from Mark Brimble and the WCF-Oracle adapter from Miguel Herrera. It’s great to see good coverage of some of the less mainstream bits of BizTalk Server, very useful to have if you are working with it in a project.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
This webcast shows how the WS-ReliableMessaging standard can be used in WCF to increase the reliability of message transmission across unreliable transports. The Fiddler tool will be used to examine how WCF creates a reliable session, and how messages and message acknowledgements are transmitted across the wire. The effects of blocking messages will be examined with reliable messaging turned off and on, and with the ordered delivery options enabled and disabled.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
I’ve spent a bit of time with CloudCasts (formally Cloud TV). I changed the name for a couple of reasons, primarily because the domain name cloudcasts.net was available. I’m still hosting in Azure, and the original links will work as long as its Azure hosted, but you should update the links to use www.cloudcasts.net so they don’t break if I move it to another platform. I’m still on the lookout for new contributors, so if you want to have a go, grab a copy of Camtasia (there’s a 30 day full featured free trial version which should allow you to get a few webcasts done). Try to keep them to around 20 minutes, (the limit of the average developer attention span :-), you can always do a few short ones instead of one long one. Please contact me if you have anything to add, the update functionality on the site is not too hot.
Monday, July 06, 2009
I’ve just added a few webcasts to Cloud TV:
· WCF - Windows Authentication
· Transactions and Compensation
· Creating a Highly Available BTS 09 Environment
· All you need to know about the SAP Adapter
· All you need to know about the SQL Adapter
Thanks to Mick Badran and the other “Light and Easy” BizTalk guys.
Please let me know via the contact form if you have any webcasts you would like me to add.
Saturday, July 04, 2009
I’ve been looking with Windows Azure for a months now, and thought it would be about time to launch my own Azure hosted site. Cloud TV is a community based website for hosting webcasts relating to Microsoft technologies. The idea for the Cloud TV project is to develop a cool application using Windows Azure that can show off the potential of Azure and the ease of use for existing .net developers and to create a community site for developers to contribute content in the form of webcasts.
It’s along the same lines as the “Bloggers Guides”, a non-profit community based site that will be a great resource for developers. If you have any webcasts that you would like to have hosted there, please let me know.
I have a basic “Upload” page that allows you to submit a webcast. All webcasts will be approved before publication to prevent abuse (I don’t want to get back from vacation and find a ton of illegal content on it). If you have issues with the upload page, please contact me and I can upload and publish your content.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
The second webcasts looks at the Flowchart workflow designer, and how it can be used to implement a simple electronic flight check in scenario.
I found the Flowchart workflow designer very easy and intuitive to work with, the flight check in workflow was the first flowchart workflow I have built, and it only took about 15 minutes to get it running. The flowchart designer has improved considerably since the PDC release, there are still a few things that can be improved upon, but it’s looking like it will be a very nice tool to work with when Visual Studio 2010 is released.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
I’ve just posted the first in a series of webcasts on BloggersGuides.net looking at WCF and WF in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 Beta one. Watch this space for more... This webcast will look at the new Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) designer in Visual Studio 2010. It is the first in a series of webcasts looking at the WCF/WF functionality available in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0.
The webcast will take an introductory tour of the new design experience, focussing on the Sequential workflow designer, and look at workflow variables and flow control activities. It will also introduce the concepts of XAML and take a quick look at the Flowchart workflow model.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
I never really “got” the idea of the need to build a textual DSL when I was first introduced to MGrammar. The light really switched on when I looked into developing a DSL that would make it easier for developers to create BAM activities.
The BAML language only took a couple of hours to develop. I had experimented with simple text based DSLs before, so this was my first “real” language.
I have recorded a 20 minute webcast showing how the language works, and how it can be used. If you want to experiment with it yourself, the language is here.
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module BloggersGuides
{
language BAML
{
syntax Main = Activity;
syntax Activity =
ActivityToken
n:NameToken
'{'
p:List(PKI)
'}'
=> { activity { n,{ p }} };
syntax PKI = Milestone | Integer | Decimal | Text;
syntax Milestone = t:MilestoneToken n:NameToken ';'
=> { t, { n } };
syntax Integer = t:IntegerToken n:NameToken ';'
=> { t, { n } };
syntax Decimal = t:DecimalToken n:NameToken ';'
=> { t, { n } };
syntax Text = t:TextToken n:NameToken ';'
=> { t, { n } };
syntax List (Element) =
e:Element => { e } |
list:List(Element) e:Element => { valuesof(list), e };
token NameToken = ('A'..'Z' | 'a'..'z')+;
@{ Classification ["Keyword"] }
token ActivityToken = "activity";
@{ Classification ["Keyword"] }
token MilestoneToken = "milestone";
@{ Classification ["Keyword"] }
token IntegerToken = "integer";
@{ Classification ["Keyword"] }
token DecimalToken = "dec";
@{ Classification ["Keyword"] }
token TextToken = "text";
interleave Whitespace = ' ' | '\r' | '\n' | '\t';
}
}
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This is the sample input file I used on the webcast.
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activity ConferenceBooking
{
milestone BookingDate;
text ConferenceName;
text AttendeeCity;
text HotelName;
dec Price;
integer Days;
}
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You will need the command line compiler to get the BAM activity created, if you contact me I can email it to you.
Regards,
Alan
Saturday, April 25, 2009
A week ago Brian Loesgen was in town presenting at the Developer Summit here in Stockholm. Brian was kind enough to present at the BizTalk User Group in Sweden, and we pulled our resources to deliver a joint session on BizTalk Server Development best practices and BizTalk Server Administration best practices. The presentation was recorded and should be available on Channel 9 shortly. The next evening we had a second BizTalk User Group meeting with Paolo Salvatory who is a BizTalk Ranger (I know they have changed that title but “BizTalk Ranger” sounds way too cool to deprecate). On the Saturday we took the boat to Waxholm for lunch, together with Julie Lerman and my wife. I hit upon the idea of adding some interviews to BloggersGuides.net, so I popped into the local tech shop and got a video camera for 599 SEK ($75) and recorded a short interview with Brian Loesgen. Among the subjects we discussed are BizTalk ESB Guidance 2.0, Oslo, and also some tips for creating and maintaining a successful user group. The quality is not that great, mostly due to my camera skills, I hope to get better results when Stephen Thomas is in town in June. (I have to admit the interview idea was heavily inspired by Richard Seroter’s excellent Four Questions series on his blog.)
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