Charles Young

Solidsoft Reply is in recruiting mode. We are the UK’s leading integration specialists on the Microsoft Platform with a decade and a half experience of…

This is the third in a series of articles on the emerging world of microservices PaaS and its relevance to Enterprise Application Integration. The other…

This is the second in a series of articles on the emerging world of microservices PaaS and its relevance to Enterprise Application Integration. The other…

The C# compiler is a pretty good thing, but it has limitations. One limitation that has given me a headache this evening is its inability to guard against…

I've just installed the Windows 8 Developer Preview. These are some first impressions: Installation of the preview was quite smooth and didn't take too…

Following the previous post, here is a second bit of wisdom. In the Load method of a custom pipeline component, only assign values retrieved from the…

UPDATE: 22/09/2010. I have posted an update on this issue. My root problem turned out to overheating, although I still advocate a number of optimisations…

Last week, I spent some time looking at a problem with a customer's orchestration. In one place, the developer had made extensive use of the infamous…

This is the first of a three-part series, as follows: - Part 1: Situating the Business Rules Engine - Part 2: Backward Chaining: the 'Simple Name' pattern…

Dr. Gopal Gupta from the University of Texas in Dallas spoke first on “Programming Rules Using a Constraints-Embedded Spreadsheet Interface”. Non-experts…

First up today was Gary Riley talking about how he introduced much greater performance into CLIPS 6.3. The talk was in more detail than last year’s. Gary…

After a very pleasant Texan meal last night with Greg, James, Mark and others, a fascinating discussion about evolutionary approaches to rule processing,…

I’m at day two of the October Rules Conference at the Adolphus Hotel in downtown Dallas having flown over from the UK yesterday. The conference session…

Richard Seroter talks here about feeding BizTalk events into StreamInsight or receiving events out as BizTalk messages. I spent a little time considering…

As promised in my last post (https://geekswithblogs.net/cyoung/archive/2009/02/24/129639.aspx), I had a look at the Express edition of Microsoft Solver…

A few days ago, Daniel Selman of ILOG (now owned by IBM) published a solution to the Einstein puzzle. See. He did this in response to a challenge from…

The last couple of weeks have seen a significant increase in terms of announcements and information from Microsoft ahead of the Professional Developer’s…

The recent release of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Fx 3.5 is causing some confusion. Microsoft released these two technologies together for good reason.…

Earlier this year, Microsoft released a CTP version of a new technology stack called 'BizTalk Services'. In July, they updated this with a new release. It…

Introduction I’ve been asked a few times how the performance of WF (Windows Workflow Foundation) Rules compares with that of the Microsoft Business Rules…

Apologies if anyone has been experiencing IE7 crashes when trying to read articles on this site (though I don't really see why I should apologise for IE7…

For almost two years now, I've been intending to write an article about the mysterious 'side effects' flag used in Microsoft Business Rule Engine…

MS BRE: Fact Identity in the Microsoft Rules Engine, or how the author chased a non-existent bug I recently had reason to revisit the exact mechanisms…

I spent a couple of hours today looking at the problem we encountered yesterday with the xpath() function in BizTalk. We were attempting to use an XPath…

Introduction The compensation model in BizTalk Server 2006 provides a versatile mechanism for addressing an extensive range of business process scenarios.…

A couple of days ago I found myself, yet again, introducing another BizTalk developer to the delights of using XPath with XML facts in Microsoft's rule…

BizTalk 2006: Accessing flat file content in orchestration messages I was recently asked if I would provide some insight into solving the following…

The forthcoming release of Visual Studio Foundation Server will include two methodology templates for the next version of MSF (the Microsoft Solution…

Beta 1 of Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) has been released and can be downloaded from here. I was fortunate to have access to an earlier beta version a…

Unfortunately, the BizTalk help files contain no detailed information on the direct binding models supported for orchestration ports. This has led to some…

Are you new to BizTalk pipeline processing? The 'ten commandments' should prove helpful in avoiding some of the potential pitfalls. Don't take them too…

In the last few weeks, we've encountered a set of problems when using custom pipeline components in Receive pipelines. After some testing, I have managed…

This article has been superseded by a new article. In the last few weeks, we've encountered a set of problems when using custom pipeline components in…

The BizTalk Server 2004 FTP adapter offers a 'guaranteed delivery' feature, the details of which are not documented by Microsoft. The mechanism is very…

A classic mistake in BizTalk is to think that you can control more than you really can through schemas. For example, although you can specify default…

Introduction Perhaps the greatest architectural change between BizTalk Server 2004 and earlier versions is the introduction of the MessageBox and the…

Introduction The other day, a colleague raised a 'problem' that turned out to be no problem at all. They wanted to invoke a web service from within an…

If possible, get the powers that be on your project to provide you with two monitors (preferably flat-screen and of the same size), and use the dual…

BizTalk 2004 supports long-running and atomic transactions within Orchestrations. The model has changed a bit from earlier versions, and atomic…

Most developers understand the classical 'ACID' concept of a transaction as an atomic unit of work that, when performed, moves the system from one…

BizTalk 2004's XLANG/s language is syntactically reminiscent of C#, and it is natural to assume that it exhibits similar features. In fact, XLANG/s is…

Yesterday, Microsoft announced the forthcoming release of BizTalk Server 2010 R2 on the BizTalk Server blog site. This is advanced notice, given that this…