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Showing posts from March, 2007

VS Live San Francisco 2007 Workshop: Windows Workflow a Gentile Intro Day 5

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Final day at VS Live in San Francisco. I following today the post conference about introduction (gentle) into workflow by Ken Getz and Robert Green. This lasted all day and went through what workflow is, creating one for the first time (this was demoed already a couple of times during conference, so nothing new here), and how to host one (see my previous post with WF Runtime Architecture). Next subject was handling conditions and Exceptions, where they went through a couple of activities like IfElse, While, ConditionedActivityGroup, Replicator Activity and finally Exception handling. After this they discussed and demoed more activities like delay, handling properties, listen, suspend and terminate, parallel, synchronizeScope and handling cancellation. This was not the end of it, because more activities coming up, like ones used when dealing with rules, Policy Activity (see there’s a lot of them, more than in BizTalk Orchestration). Rules in workflow are somewhat the same as in Business

VS Live San Francisco 2007 .NET 3.0 Day 4

Day 4 at VS Live in San Francisco. Today I went to a WPF talk done by Billis Hollis, a great speaker who I have seen a couple of times of the years. He showed some cool demo's and I am amazed what one can do with WPF. Notes about this one I refer again to Jan van de Pol , who is more a UI expert than I am and does a very good job of making notes of this one on the technical side of things. Next one up is more my cup of thea, workflow. It's second part of introduction of workflow and a followup one the one done yesterday. The slides are here . Goal today with his talk today is how to build workflows with WinWF. Three basic patterns, out of the box, others can be customized. (1) Sequential Synchronous ASynchrounous Natural Sequence of operations Workflow is in control (dictates what comes next) (2) State Machine Control outside workflow Workflow restricts choices Simpler than sequential (3) Rule based workflow pattern No natural sequence Rules model relationships independent of t

VS Live San Francisco 2007 .NET 3.0 Day 3

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Oke third day here at VS Live in San Francisco. Today went to a couple of .Net 3.0 talks. To start things of I went to Rob Daigneau's talk about Implementing SOA design Patterns with WCF. Well it was more on SOA and little about WCF. He wanted to show the web service softeware factory in the end, but it didn't work. Talk about SOA was good though. He kicked off with SOA myths, where he claims business agilty is a bogus claim, hence it is not quick or easy; both are true in my view. Than he went on reuse, where message and data types are the ones that can be resued at best (well that's on lowest dominator and resue on micro-level). Finally he got to versioning and demo extension to exsisting interfaces, which in my humble opinion is not versioning but modifying interfaces the way it was done with COM+ without breaking it. Next talk about WPF for Windows Forms Developers, but I am not one of them. Nevertheless its out there in .NET 3.0 and I wanted to see more of it. And it w

VS Live San Francisco 2007 .NET Focus Day 2

Well second day at VS Live in San-Francisco. Today met some interesting guys from my home country Holland working for Bergson . So that's nice and there are excellent people, so I am not lonely. Oke .Net Focus day bringing us a chat from Prashant Sridharan about Vista, 2007 Office system and Asp.net AJAX with a great demo about Fabrikam (haven't we heard or seen that one before) using Exhange 2007, SharePoint 2007 and WPF. Top notch. This talk was followed with a Vista feature talk not very interesting, with a speaker who messed everything up big time. This guy did a similar job later on that day about Vista for managed code. After this session the talks improved a lot, see blog Jan van de Pol . So I don't have to repeat it here.

VS Live San Francisco 2007 Pre-Conference Workshop Day 1

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First day at VS Live San Francisco with a couple of workshops to start things up. I attended the workshop for a whole about building distributed object oriented apps in .net 3.0 from Rockford Lhotka. In this workshop started with designing Windows, Web and Web-Service-based apps that have a reusable business layer composed of objects. Rocky believes it’s all about layering your app in least amount of tiers. Layer structures your application, so maintainability can be achieved. Using least possible tiers results in less complexity, but one needs them in case of scalability, fault tolerance and security. This are enhanced by more tiers, but comes with performance degradation, which means there is a trade off to be made. This also counts for service orientation, where a consumer of a service can be layered as well as the service itself. There is an open source project done by him about CSLA , which is an application development framework that reduces the cost of building and maintaining a

Integration Master Class Experience

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B it late to share my experience during the integration master class given by Microsoft consultants, but here it is. The master class took two days and the information shared was good. Three Microsoft consultants went through integration in general with their pallet of products and technologies like SQL Server Integration Service, BizTalk, WCF, WinWF, SQL Broker, WSE, ASMX, .Net Remoting and Host Integration Server. With this in your let’s say toolbox or kit one can face the integration challenge the Microsoft way. A demo was shown using WCF, MSMQ, SQL Replication, SSIS and BizTalk. From general view they went on down the BizTalk path and talked about: • Design lessons learned BizTalk Scenario’s; • Developing effective BizTalk Server Solutions; • Deployment And Operations of BizTalk Server Solutions; • Future Developments; • Integration Project Recommendations. Information shared was good and brought in a proper context: Integration. Ok well that’s all I like to share for now, next sto

Exclusive Integration Master class

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8 and 9 march I will be attending the exclusive integration master class with some of my colleagues at Microsoft near Schiphol Airport. This master class will be about a number of technologies concerning integration like BizTalk Server, SQL Server Integration Server, Host Integration Server and Microsoft Windows Foundation. Besides technology architectural scenarios will be discussed taking scalability, performance, latency and fault tolerance in to account. Microsoft consultants will be the speakers during this master class. My colleagues and I are very interested what this master class will bring us in Microsoft insights about EAI and their technologies. Hence integration of different information systems is complex and brings a lot of challenges. I have experienced that during a number of EAI projects in the past. Well I am looking forward this week to the master class. I will post my experiences after this event .

Adaption to the world

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This post is about adapters delivered by BizTalk. Through adapters of this toolset of Microsoft heterogeneous connectivity can be achieved. In a previous post I mentioned the adapters delivered by Host Integration Server 2006, the article about it will be published in June edition of the Dutch .NET Magazine. These adapters can be found here . Adapters for Oracle, SAP, Siebel can be found here as a download , so one can install them and can connect to these systems. Using the adapters in a solution one is preparing the first step is usually configuring connection for instance to DB2 (see picture). Followed by this step can be security, ecetera. Important with working with connecting to other systems like DB2 or Oracle, is permissions. One needs to have the proper permission to connect to the system, but also to for instance query views or tables in a DB2 or Oracle database. Having the proper permission can be checked when going though the adapter wizard (see figure below). More about a