Yesterday I had the opportunity to present the new features of BizTalk 2006 at Madrid. The session was included as part of the official presentation of Visual Studio 2005, Sql Server 2005 and BizTalk 2006 in Spain. The session contents were the same as those that will be included in the next Web Cast (see my previous post) and the place were full of people (great!). Well, the next 7th of February the event will be repeated at Barcelona... if anybody is interested, there are vacancies yet!

 

It's been a long time since my last post. I have been very busy with my current project, but I come back with the intention of write every week, at least! This will be my purpose for this year (it could be late to this purpose?!).

Well, my intention now is to be a referent about BizTalk... this product is emerging and every day is most present at the enterprise development. BizTalk is a very, very complex and wide product, and it's really engaged with Visual Studio 2005 development, I hope that my knowledge in this field of development will help the people involved in projects with these technologies.

To start with my new "blog-target", the next 8th of February I will have the pleasure of present all the new features in BizTalk 2006 to the spanish staff. The presentation is through WebCast technology at Microsoft Web ;-): http://www.microsoft.com/spain/technet/jornadas/webcasts/060208_info.mspx

Regards

Today has been less hard day, we hasn't had "guru" speach and all the day (for me) has been focused on BizTalk sessions which has been enougth to verify that there aren't realy big changes between BizTalk 2004 and 2006.

The main improvements in the core engine of BizTalk 2006 are: ordered processing, new capabilities to process messages in same order that they came; subscriptions to failed messages, allowing manage messages failures successfully; pipeline calls within orchestrations; and the new POP3 adapter... at least, the session covering these aspects has been great!

I have attended the BAM session to see a lots new improvements but only a really cool thing I have found, new sources (context properties, ports) for the Tracking Profile Editor, I don't think it isn't very important improvement, but a new BAM Manager tool, not the same command line, would be interesting too...

To end, a very important Scott Woodgate announcement, he has said that BizTalk 2006 will come with testing features to aid the developers... He doesn't explained which features but I will look forward his blog to be up to date about this matter.

Tomorrow the last day!!!

I don't know why but today didn't look as interesting as yesterday... well any way I have discovered few cool things around BizTalk 2006 that will be loved by everyone who develops with.

The day stars with some philosophy, a presentation about workflow concepts, Roger Sessions (note the surname, it could be a joke? :-) explain us the main lines about what workflow is and how we need meet the principal business requirements in an agile way to reach the success developing applications for business. Roger starts showing the mayor requirements for the enterprise to improve the benefits: agility in the processes, alignment between IT staff and business staff and compliance with the actual law (i.e.: to avoid forbidden actions with the accounting). After that, we have reviewed the different workflows that actually occurs in the enterprise processes to finally explore witch are the requirements that any "workflow platform" must carry out to allow the implementation of the business processes matching the business process requirements. These are the basics of any workflow platform:

• Web Services native support: this provides agility to develop applications thats relies in SOA.
• Xml Enabled Database: it make sense that if we use web services intensively, and the WS interchanges XML messages, if we have a store with XML support then we are managing the interchanged messages with agility.
• Workflow framework: to support design and develop any kind of enterprise workflow, allowing process to interact process, people and services between them. Having this as an SO extension (framework) there are less things thats relies on the IT staff to manage. What we request to this framework is agility: quickly development, updatable processes, evolutionary; alignment: the same view for IT staff and for business staff ; compliance: auditable, robust and secure...
• WS Orchestration engine: to provide agility to make the web services collaborate and with features as scalability and support to communicate with legacy systems.
• Tools: to help everybody to use the platform.

  This platform make possible develop solutions which improve the business process successfully and, therefore, make more money to the companies (after all, we are talking about business).

Then, I had the opportunity to see the mayor improvements in BizTalk 2006 orchestration and messaging. Features like support to manage binary messages, multipart messages creation ad-hoc, the new flat file schema wizard (great!), adapters enhancements, runtime pipeline configuration and recoverable interchange messages processing.
One of the coolest things is the "Application Concept" that allow present all related artifacts (ports, orchestrations, pipelines...) as a unit. You can start / stop an application from the management console and all underlying artifacts are checked and requested to starts or stops.

Well, it's enough for me today... tomorrow more!

Business Process Integration And Workflow Conference Day 1...

Today it's been very hard day... my jet lag still making me wake up two hours before the alarm sounds :-).

The general sensation about the sessions is that we are evolving to a more simplistic way to connect systems and people. David Chappell session has been very interesting, he has explained the main concepts about Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) and how either will be the base to develop future business process which will be interconnected. In this session has been clear that BizTalk 2006 has its own place in the business process development and that it cannot be confused with WWF because of WWF will be the base to develop workflows but BizTalk 2006 is the tool to make Business Process Integration (BPI) when EAI is required. In this way, the future versions of BizTalk will use WWF and WCF as core technologies to implement the BPI!

Today I have seen the new version of the administration console of BizTalk 2006 too. It has been improved to be "deeply useful", unifying all administration tools in one as well as improved message look-up and manage is provided.

To finalize, Eric Swift has been speaking about the new application model: Connected Systems. Keep this concept in mind because of it will became as popular as EAI was, and as BPI is now... the core of Connected Systems concept is that relay on SOA, is Process-Centric, Model-Driven, bla, bla, bla... any way, for me it sounds as another "marketing concept"... who knows, maybe it will resolve the application development problems witch we address today.

See you all, tomorrow more!

Hello all!

I'm write only to say my holidays has been finished (two weeks ago :-) and I have the power batteries full. To start this "academic year" I'm know at Seattle, to attend at the BPIWF conference (Business Process Integration and Workflow Conference) where is the "launch" new BPI products such BizTalk 2006, Windows Workflow Foundation (WinOE) and Windows Communication Foundation (Indigo).

I'll be focused on BizTalk 2006 specific sessions because of, with very high probability, will help the launching of that product in Spain... anyway, I will try to have the opportunity to attend at Workflow sessions as well as Communication sessions. I'll keep all of you up to date about this conference!

Otherwise, I've arrived Seattle yesterday, my jet lag is horrible... Because of I arrived lonely, I was walking yesterday night and today in the morning through Seattle streets. There are something that had been surprised me: There is a coffee place every 10 meters at the street... I was alerted about the passion to the coffee in Seattle but... there are more coffee places than bars in Spain. :-)

Regards!

I'm trying to get the latest version of my project through msbuild project. I have defined a SourceSafe.Get task (from Microsoft.Sdc.Tasks project) to do that. When I try to execute the task I get the following error: "Unable to find the Visual SourceSafe  registry key"

I can't find any information about this issue...

This is the task in the .proj file:

 <Target Name="Latest">
  <SourceSafe.Get
   UserName="raul"
   Password=""
   Database="&quot;\\amon\dfs\VSS ilitia&quot;"
   Project="$\Proyectos\PeopleTracker"
   WorkingDirectory=".\" >
  </SourceSafe.Get>
 </Target>

Following, the complete output:
C:\Proyectos\MyProject\build.proj(30,3): error : A task error has occured.
C:\Proyectos\MyProject\build.proj(30,3): error : Message                         = Unable to find the Visual SourceSafe  registry key.
C:\Proyectos\MyProject\build.proj(30,3): error : Project                         = $\Proyectos\MyProject
C:\Proyectos\MyProject\build.proj(30,3): error : Database                        = "vss ilitia"
C:\Proyectos\MyProject\build.proj(30,3): error : Username                        = raul
C:\Proyectos\MyProject\build.proj(30,3): error : Password                        =
C:\Proyectos\MyProject\build.proj(30,3): error : Label                           =
C:\Proyectos\MyProject\build.proj(30,3): error : GetParameter                    =
C:\Proyectos\MyProject\build.proj(30,3): error : WorkingDirectory                = .\
C:\Proyectos\MyProject\build.proj(30,3): error : VersionNumber                   =
C:\Proyectos\MyProject\build.proj(30,3): error : VersionNumberConfigFileLocation =
C:\Proyectos\MyProject\build.proj(30,3): error : VersionNumberConfigVSSLocation  =
C:\Proyectos\MyProject\build.proj(30,3): error : OnlyIncrementRevision           = False
C:\Proyectos\MyProject\build.proj(30,3): error :
C:\Proyectos\MyProject\build.proj(30,3): error :    at Microsoft.Sdc.Tasks.SourceSafe.Get.VSSGet(ShellExecute shellExecute, String project, String label, String getParameter, String workingDirecto
ry)
C:\Proyectos\MyProject\build.proj(30,3): error :    at Microsoft.Sdc.Tasks.SourceSafe.Get.InternalExecute()
C:\Proyectos\MyProject\build.proj(30,3): error :    at Microsoft.Sdc.Tasks.TaskBase.Execute()
    0 Warning(s)
    1 Error(s)

I have posted this issue in the Visual Studio MSBuild Forum, at http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=80162#80162

I'm using Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 developing an application. In the Unit Testing Features, when you use Assert.AreEquals to compare strings, if they aren't equal, the method stop the test (that's correct) but doesn't exists any place where you can see at which character differs the strings... The equivalent method in NUnit shows you where the strings differs, I'm very wrong with this issue, I can't understand how have been able to forget this aid.

I just have read a post from Anil John blog who referees to four articles from Msdn Patterns and Practices about techniques to avoid common attacks to web applications:

How To-Protect from Injection Attacks in ASPNET

How To-Use Regular Expressions to Constrain Input in ASP.NET

How To-Protect from SQL Injection in ASP.NET

How To-Prevent Cross-Site Scripting in ASP.NET

Very interesting information for every body who deals with .NET web application development.

Excelent article from David Hurtado's blog explaining how to use BAM to record execution times within orchestrations. Includes a trick to reach the same goal even if the orchestration has an iteration.