I don't know the defining characteristic of an excited BizTalk developer - jumping up and down maybe? Whatever it is, we're doing it thanks to Scott Colestock's NAnt Build Script for BTS2004. Coming under the heading of "I was going to do that when I had time...", it promises to make life much, much easier in the develop-test-deploy cycle.
Thanks Scott - I owe you a beer!
Well, after yesterday's entry about the ASP.NET Enterprise Manager, I had a comment and a trackback pointing me at Microsoft's own SQL Server Web Data Administrator.
Thanks for the heads-up :-)
Today I spent some time experimenting with the xsi:type to allow subclassing in my XML Schemas, as described in "W3C XML Schema Design Patterns: Dealing With Change" by Dare Obasanjo. Many of the xsi:type examples on the web give the xsi namespace declaration as xmlns:xsi=http://www.w3c.or... .NET users look out! If you use this declaration in your XML instance document then it won't validate in VS.NET... you must reference w3.org, not w3c.org. The correct declaration for the ......
The ASP.NET Enterprise Manager is a pretty funky web-based, Open Source version of Enterprise Manager. Think of it as a very good cover version of the original ;-) Two immediate benefits are obvious: MSDE users have a proper management tool at last No need to install SQL tools locally or use a Remote Desktop Connection just to administrate SQL Server There's still a reasonable TO-DO list for the tool, but it's pretty usable as-is ......
Scott Woodgate has just announced a cool set of reporting tools for BizTalk Server 2004. A quick cut & paste from his entry: Any of this sound familiar to you? I wish I could report on the relationship between my BizTalk Server components easily. I have an orchestration connecting to three receive ports but it isn’t simple to see how it all hangs together. I wish I could understand the impact of making a change to one of the BizTalk Server components such as this schema I want to update. I ......
"SpideyWitness" has ported my back button fix to version 2 of the User Interface Process Block. Top man!
I haven't had a chance to check it out yet, but he has kindly emailed me the source so I'll have a look soon.
The release can be found here.
This probably belongs in the "really, really obvious" category - but since it is also really really useful, I'll blog it :-) Installing BizTalk 2004 isn't just a "Double click setup.exe" job, so it's nice to create a Virtual Machine containing your one-stop dev environment, containing SQL, VS.NET, BTS, NUnit, and so on. It's also nice to be able to connect up to network resources such as Sourcesafe, the Internet, and so on. Now, networks don't like multiple machines with the same name, so if two ......
I've noticed a number of referrals from Google from people looking for help with the UI Process block. Having spent some time with the UI Process Block I'd like to share my experiences, but to do that I would like to know what information people are after. Please leave me a comment below, or contact me directly using the "Contact" link above and I'll try to come up with some suitable articles. Finally the obligatory plug: If you are looking for help with UI Process Block implementation, especially ......