Winterdom

A few weeks ago, just before the MVP summit, I got a new Dell Latitude D820 laptop, which is now my main development machine. It runs far, far better than my previous laptop and overall I'm very happy with it. After waiting for a while and making sure I had...

Today hasn't been a very good day. First, I wasted several hours on the phone trying to get an account set up and then trying to be able to access an application created by Colombia's Department of Commerce (thank goodness I'm a developer and know my way around things, otherwise...

Last month I mentioned briefly that the Connected Systems Division was working on some interesting "cloud" services, starting with Relay and STS services. The picture is now starting to unveil, and now they have been publicly announced as "BizTalk Services", with a new home at http://labs.biztalk.net/! The Relay Service is...

A couple of weeks ago we learned that Colombia's department of commerce was changing the rules on how to register declarations of exported services with them (which is something needed in Colombia to be avoid having to charge VAT as well as being able to receive payment in foreign currency without getting into trouble)....

I noticed last week that PrimoPDF v3.1 was released, which now (finally) works on vista. I tried v3.0 (which I had used in XP before) on Vista after RTM, and it just didn't work because it kept trying to create temporary files in the installation folder. I installed v3.1 and...

Here's one tip I discovered while building a Windows Communication Foundation output channel: The client channel can rewrite the URI sent in the wsa:To WS-Addressing header on the request message to the server. Normally, the URI sent in wsa:To matches the destination URI passed in by the user when the client...

There's a new BizTalk newsletter/website on the web: BizTalkHotRod (found through Richard Seroter), created by some Microsoft Technology Specialist and other members of the community. The first issue can be found here. I find the layout and overall design of the website and newsletter to be pretty awful (my opinion), but suffering...

I just received my copy of Bruce Payette's Windows PowerShell In Action book from Manning today! I did some late reviews of the book and really, really liked it. This will be a wonderful reference to keep around when doing any PowerShell!   Technorati tags: PowerShell

Nicholas Allen posted a while back a short entry on the assymetries between channel factories (send side) and channel listeners (receive side) in Windows Communication Foundation. I've been revisiting some of his posts while working on my custom channel, and this one seemed pretty fundamental. The lifetime tie between channel...

Almost two months ago, I wrote a couple of entries on writing custom transport channels for Windows Communication Foundation. Those entries and a few that followed on defining URI schemes for transport channels were based on some stuff I was working on at the time. Unfortunately, I got sidetrack with some stuff...