BizTalk

Who Moved my Cloud?

Alan Smith — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:44:54 GMT

Due to technical issues, (well, me not reading my hotmail account or any Azure blogs actually) I had a slight “outage” on CloudCasts. The USA-Northwest Azure data centres closed, taking my site with it. After a frantic couple of hours (midnight to 2 AM Swedish time) I’m back up and running in a shiny new data centre in USA-Southwest.

The site is now running again at www.cloudcasts.net, but due to the change in the Azure app name, links to cloudtv.cloudapp.net are broken. At the moment I am seeing a big drop off in traffic, so I’m guessing there are a lot of links to the old URLs. If you have linked to the site using cloudtv.cloudapp.net, it would be great if you can update it.

As the old saying goes, developers make the worst administrators.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Workflow Designer Webcast

Alan Smith — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:19:44 GMT

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.

The webcast is here.

Two New Contributors to Cloud Casts, Five new Webcasts

Alan Smith — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:54:39 GMT

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.

Two More Contributors on CloudCasts

Alan Smith — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 09:57:33 GMT

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.

www.CloudCasts.net

You can also follow CloucCasts on Twitter: http://twitter.com/CloudCasts

CloudCasts Update

Alan Smith — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 23:19:40 GMT

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’ve added a couple of new webcasts, Visual Studio 2010 WCF Project Templates and Book Review - SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009 (great book by the way). The book review is an experiment, if it’s popular I will maybe do some more. (If you would like me to review any books, please contact me. I make a point of reading most of the book before doing the review, so the throughput will probably be about one per month.)

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.

Five New Webcasts on Cloud TV

Alan Smith — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 17:16:21 GMT

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.

The site is here.

Please let me know via the contact form if you have any webcasts you would like me to add.

Webcast – BAML – A DSL for BAM

Alan Smith — Fri, 01 May 2009 04:49:09 GMT

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.

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')+;