João Pedro "jota" Martins

I’ve been trying out Pivot in the last few days, downloaded from here. Pretty amazing thing, crossing the power of DeepZoom with structured information. I can’t help but imagine the application of these technologies to information stored in business databases, intranets, or even as a navigation metaphor in your computer/file system or code. There will be a Silverlight version this year, and there’s an Excel Add-In to generate the custom Xml that feeds the system.

As reported by IASA, the Certified IT Architect at the Professional Level (CITA-P) has now replaced Microsoft’s Certified Architect (MCA) program. The information about the new certification can be found here.

Details for Version 2.0 of the BizTalk ESB Toolkit (Brian Loesgen)

Complex-Event Processing (CEP) Explained for BizTalk Users (Charles Young)

Interview Series: Four Questions With … Ewan Fairweather (Richard Seroter)

BizTalk Server Best Practices Analyser v1.2 (Released 5/6/2009)

BizTalk Hotrod (Issue 6, April 2009)

Index:

• Writing Great BizTalk Applications
• BizTalk Rule Engine, a practical application
• Development Challenges with XML over AS2
• Batching Outbound Messages
• Hierarchical naming convention
• To Be, Or Logical Not To Be
• Enhancing the BizTalk Mapper
• Muenchian Grouping and Sorting in XSLT
• Eliminate BizTalk Admin Problems with Terminator
• Static Code Analysis for BizTalk Using BizTalkCop

Good information via Pat Helland’s weblog, on UC Berkeley’s Paper “Above the Clouds: a Berkeley View of Cloud Computing”.

This news is a few days late, but couldn’t let it pass: the 2009 version of BizTalk is out on MSDN for download. This is another evolutionary release, containing a large set of improvements ont he previous 2006 R2 version, including .Net 3.5 SP1/VS2008 SP2 support and much more. You can check everything that’s new on the deck of the presentation I delivered at DevDays 2009 (in Portuguese).

Tiago Pascoal and myself are doing a webcast with a repeat of our session at DevDays 09, as part of Microsoft Portugal’s “Best of DevDays” webcast series. :) The webcast will happen on April 21st, in portuguese. If you are interested, the you can register here.

Ok, so I finally made up my mind, after getting feedback that apps like the Zune Software, Live Mesh, and VMWare Workstation seem to work under the Windows 7 beta, and went for an upgrade from my main Vista laptop.

Here are some notes on the process:

• The upgrade itself took some time (4-6 hours), and apart from one of the pre-conditions being the uninstalallation of Windows Powershell, it went smoothly;
• Windows Live Writer lost the preview themes, which I had to re-download/update;
• The apps I had pinned to the start menu are gone, as well as the Quick Launch toolbar;
• Apps that seem to be working fine: FeedDemon 2.7, Simp Pro, Colligo Contributor 3.2 Pro, Twhirl, Firefox 3, Word/Excel/PowerPoint, SnagIt, Zune Software, Mesh;
• The Zune Software starts when I plug in the Zune in the USB, but it doesn’t sync. The Zune forums helped: just run the Zune app “as an Administrator”;
• The upgrade process did a strange change to my files: it moved them from C:\Users\jota.CREATE to C:\Users\jota. As you can guess, this caused several problems, with Outlook 2007, Zune, Mesh, and others. Mesh especially was especially troublesome, because it started sync'ing files back to the original location, thus doubling the files. I had to manually move the folders, one by one, and this was not a good experience.
• VMWare Workstation 6.5 worked fine, if ran as an administrator.

Overal, I must say this has been a great experience until now. Things work correctly, no major issues (I do have occasional intermittent wireless network losses, but I can’t pin it down yet to Win7), it doesn’t look like a beta. The only thing I don’t really like is the default display in Windows Explorer. I much prefered it to open in the My Documents folder, not the library list. I’m pleased, anyway.

This year the usual TechDays event focused exclusivelly on Dev contents, and reduced to two days. I was help at IST’s campus on Tagus, a smaller but also cosier space. I did three sessions, all of them on the ARChitecture track:

ARC206 Patterns & Anti-Patterns. I did this session together with Tiago Pascoal, and we mostly talked about Architectural Anti-Patterns (and not Patterns/Design Patterns), in a Developer-oriented session. The original TechEd EMEA 2008 session we based it off was one of the best I’ve seen yet, at and I think we managed to surpass the original delivery and contents with examples and real-life experiences.  We had very good feedback on this session.

ARC208 O que há de novo no BizTalk 2009. I do one of these every two years :-). It’s a difficult session to do, because the next release of BizTalk Server has mostly small incremental features, and because there are lots of them. I did two demos, of the developer experience and the new Sql Adapter, to break the sequence of slides, and also mentioned the ESB Guidance 2.0, the relationship with Dublin, and the ISV Royalties program.

ARC209 Windows Azure – Introdução aos .Net Services. This session was similar to my presentation last year on this same topic (when it was still called “BizTalk Services”), but with more deep technical content and demos. The main host of the session was Pedro Félix, I mostly did the connection to real-life use cases, some clarifications, and the final segment on hosted Workflow, the third component (with the Access Control and Service Bus) of .Net Services. This session had a very high rating.

All the presentations are available here for download in PDF format at my Skydrive.

My first session this year at DevDays09 will be ARC206, with Tiago Pascoal. We’ll be discussing mostly architecture anti-patterns, with loads of real life examples. It’s today at 14:30 on room A03, at Instituto Superior Técnico, this year’s venue. Overview to follow later.

Microsoft just published a very interesting an in-depth 86-page document about BAM, one of the most under-used features of BizTalk Server, “Business Activity Monitoring in Depth for Developers”. You can download if here, and find more overview info about it here. Highly recommended.

Additionally, if you have been following the new features of BizTalk Server 2009, you can find the beta documentation available for download, which is well worth a look. Better yet would be trying out the public beta, which was made available in December, and is available at Microsoft Connect.

Finally, on a last note, I’ll be doing an overview session on BizTalk Server 2009 at Microsoft DevDays 09, which this year will happen at Instituto Superior Técnico on the 18th and 19th of February. Be there if you are interested in the product.

There’s an announcement around for the ESB Guidance 2.0 CTP (October 2008). It’s good to know that this is already getting worked on to have new features and work with the upcoming BizTalk Server 2009. The strange thing is that I can’t actually find the download anywhere: it’s not at Codeplex, and I can’t find it at Connect.

According to the post, the new features are:

• Alignment with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 ( Beta )
• ESB Configuration tool
• Centralized itinerary store
• Itinerary resolver components
• Itinerary forwarder pipeline component
• Itinerary selector pipeline component
• Itinerary designer
• Centralized configuration uses Enterprise Library 4.0 Configuration Block
• Centralized caching uses Enterprise Library 4.0 Caching Block
• Multiple service invocation using both messaging and orchestrations
• Itinerary BAM tracking
• Improved ESB Core engine and itinerary execution

Back from PDC08, back from TechEd EMEA 2008, session done yesterday at the Architect Forum 2008. The trip to PDC08 was very interesting, on the same level as the 2005 edition, now focused – obviously – on cloud computing. TechEd was interesting for me especially because of the Architecture track, which was the best I’ve ever attended, but the best was being at the Ask The Experts BizTalk booth: we had several people going by with interesting questions and challenges, and I got to do several contacts. Yesterday in Lisbon I did the afternoon session at the Microsoft Architect Forum 2009, representing GASP and together with José António Silva and Nuno Godinho as the developer. The topic, obviously, was around the cloud.

I have several posts to do, I’ll try to add them in the next few days.

Follow me here: http://www.twitter.com/LokiJota

Next week I’ll be off at PDC08, which is shaping up to be as good as PDC05 was, with a lot of sessions on Today’s hot topic: Cloud Computing. One week later, I’ll be at the Ask-The-Experts booths at TechEd EMEA 2008 Developers in Barcelona (my colleague and SharePoint God Raúl is also attending the conference), focused on making contacts and maybe attending some of the sessions missed from PDC that will be repeated there. Pedro Rosa from Microsoft Portugal is the owner of the dev track, and has some pretty good sessions lined up.

If you happen to be at any of the events and want to meet, contact me using the form on the blog.

You just gotta love technology… :-) See you there.

Check out Charles Young’s post “Dublin and BizTalk Server - What's the difference?”. It’s well worth the read, for all BizTalk developers, and a very interesting analysis.  I’ve been to some of the events Charles mentions, where there was some discussion about this new application server and its relationship to BizTalk Server, and this a curious solution Microsoft has found. I do have a complaint, however: I do feel BizTalk Server could be improved in several areas, and the last two versions (R2 and the planned 2009) have been somewhat lacking in this aspect. Things like the Orchestration Designer, BAM, BRE and even the mapped could clearly be improved (and don’t get me started in Usability), and low-latency support added, but Microsoft has not focused the evolution of the product in these aspects, which I regret.

Anyway, a highly recommended read.