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Showing posts from May, 2009

Harakiri on Twitter

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A few months ago I killed myself (virtually) on Twitter. At least I thought I did (forgot to terminate it for real), but my account was still there and I saw that people are still following me. I now realize that it is something that cannot be ignored and a medium used by so many people outside and inside my network. I therefore start using it again and have risen from the dead (virtually). I know there is a lot of corny and silly stuff being put up there, something I did myself too towards colleagues and people I know. People can make mistakes or look things from a different viewpoint. You can follow me here: http://twitter.com/SteefJan . I will seriously use from now on and explore its potential. Technorati: web 2.0

WF 4

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This week I attended DevDays in The Hague. The most interesting or intriguing for me was Workflow 4. Matt Milner did a preconference Wednesday and some session during the conference. He did his demos in VS2010 Beta 1, which is available right now. I downloaded beta 1 and installed in on (YES!!) Windows 7 RC on VPC (that is possible ). Windows 7 is just marvelous and runs smoothly inside my VPC (It is goodbye Vista). You can download his code and session material from his blog . Ok lets turn to VS2010 Beta 1 and WF 4. I am not a Workflow expert, but i did follow its evolution in 3.0 and 3.5 during conferences in Holland and abroad, like VS2007 in San Francisco (beautiful city, open, warm and liberal). I must say I was impressed at first what it could do and experimented a few things after I attended some of the sessions, but since I am more in BizTalk doing project in that space the interest for workflow went to the background of my mind. Now I got interesting for me again with

Multiple Sandboxes for Development

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Last week I spotted a post stating that BizTalk 2009 SDK contains scripts so administrator’s will be able to sysprep a BizTalk Sandbox machine. In folder <BizTalk installation path>\SDK\Samples\Admin\Sysprep if you have chosen the SDK component during installation you can find the scripts. An image created using sysprep will choose a new computer name in order to join the domain the first time it boots. To get BizTalk Server running properly, we need to update various instances of the machine name that are stored in registry and databases as well. This document from Microsoft assumes that BizTalk Server is configured to run on a single machine (Sandbox) and shows how to update those locations with the new machine name. With sysprep answer file that are included you can create your own. For instance if you are sys preparing a x86 machine like mine sandbox you can use script below: <!-- References: "Unattended Installation Settings Reference" @ http:

BizTalk Server and UDDI 3.0

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One of new SOA capabilities in BizTalk Server 2009 are UDDI services. I found an article at Packt Publishing written by Richard Seroter. UDDI stands for Universal Description and Discovery Information and is a type of registry whose primary purpose is to represent information about web services. As I was reading the article it gave me an itch to try this UDDI stuff out myself. So I opened my BizTalk 2009 Sandbox (VPC environment) and noticed UDDI was not installed. To let you know what to do I decided to create this post to show how UDDI is installed on a BizTalk 2009 Development Environment. I fired up BizTalk Server 2009 CD and installed UDDI Services on my Sandbox. I selected all available components, and clicked install. After only a minute or so UDDI services were installed. After installation UDDI Services Configuration is necessary; I choose basic configuration see what needs to be done. There are three components that need to be configured: * UDDI Service

WCF 4.0

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Spring holiday is over and it is back to work. There is a new challenge awaiting for me involving IBM Maximo , WCF, MSMQ and BizTalk. Speaking of WCF there are changes and I see some postings about WCF 4.0. At PDC last year there were some talks around WCF 4.0. The discussions completely by-passed me, but I have a new chance to get up to speed. End of May DevDays 2009 will take place and I am  able to attend. Some sessions from for instance Aaron Skonnard are about WCF 4.0. Also I will attend preconference session of a complete day called “Introduction to WCF and WF 4.0 and "Dublin"” by Matt Milner . Since WCF as technology plays an essential role inside BizTalk Platform it is mandatory in my view to have experience, knowledge and understanding of it. Technorati: wcf 4.0 microsoft developer days