Winterdom

BizTalk Tip of the Day: If you're writing a custom BizTalk Pipeline Component (particularly a receive one), and you're creating a new message from scratch to return from your component, don't forget to copy the original message context into your new one. And the right way to do this is...

Here's something that tripped me the other day in a Windows PowerShell script. Let's say that you have to variables $user and $machine, and want to print a string with the value of both of them separated by a colon (':'). You can obviously do it using string concatenation: $user...

Here's one interesting issue I ran into while trying a few things out: Conversions. Given the dynamic nature of the DLR and the languages implemented on top of it, and the statically typed nature of the CLR and most .NET languages, you need to be able to ensure that the...

Size of %WINDIR%\winsxs: Clean Windows Server 2008 Enterprise installation: 2.6GB Used Windows Vista SP1 installation: 6.52GB I know that Side by Side installation is important for compatibility and serviceability, but this might just be going a bit overboard.... Technorati tags: Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008

Service Pack 1 for Vista is now available for download from MSDN (I guess the Windows Update rollout will still wait to march or something). For some reason, though, it is a 434MB, 5-language pack. I downloaded it last night and installed it this morning without too much fuss, except...

Every once in a while someone voices their surprise when they try out one of my Visual Studio Color Schemes and find that all those very large fonts I leave by default on most of them [1]. I've been using Damien Guard's excellent Envy Code R font, usually at 15pt...

I thought I'd use a few posts to talk a bit about some interesting ways that IronRuby does things. To do this effectively, we need to have a way to look at the code that IronRuby generates, as just browsing the code isn't going to do much good if you...

I've spent part of the weekend playing with some code for a BizTalk 2006 Send adapter, and while looking at the failure handling code, remember something that always struck me a bit odd about the model. BizTalk supports a several different ways of implementing a send adapter, depending on the...

I had seen the RTM announcement but no mention on when it might be in MSDN. Took a look yesterday, and it was already available, cool :-). At least the Datacenter/Enterprise/Standard DVD for x86 and x64, Itanium (those are still around?) and Web Server seem to be available. I'll need...

Scott Hanselman just mentioned using the PowerShellPlus editor as an IDE for PowerShell. You can always trust good old Scott to point out cool new tools! Anyway, I was already aware of PowerShell+ (and its closely related product, PowerShell Analyzer), and I find the idea appealing in general and a...