Winterdom

Bit the bullet and installed Vista Ultimate RTM as the main OS on my laptop this morning, replacing my aging WinXP installation. Setup went without issues fortunately, and all significant hardware is working right now. Lots of stuff to install yet, but as of now at least I have the...

A recent question in Stephen W. Thomas' excellent BizTalkGurus forums asked about how to control the value the HTTP send-side adapter in BizTalk Server 2006 sends on HTTP requests. After a little investigation through the adapter code (which lives in the Microsoft.Biztalk.HttpTransport.dll assembly), here's my guess of what goes on:...

More product releases: Following Vista and Office 2007 RTM last week, we now have the 1.0 release of Windows Powershell. Pretty cool. Look forward to installing that to use as my main console. On a related note, just finished downloading the Office 2007 products from MSDN last night (Office Professional...

I mentioned a few days ago I had succeeded finally in hooking an arbitrary endpoint into a WCF service host in order to publish custom metadata information associated with a service. Since then, I've been working on cleaning up the code and ensuring the code actually works correctly. A few extra...

I've said in the past I enjoy looking for cool and beautiful fonts, particularly of the monospaced variety. I tried using Monaco (a font recomended by some), and while the font is nice, I found it too tiresome for everyday use, and reverted back to trusty 15pt Consolas. I recently found...

I'm in Lima, Peru all this week, so probably won't be able to blog much. Meanwhile, several important releases are coming out: .NET FX 3.0 RTM: WCF, WPF, WF and Cardspace all in RTM. I'll be installing it as soon as I get back home and have a decent internet...

I do all my development inside Virtual PC virtual machines, and except for some performance issues I've talked about in the past, it does work rather well. However, one thing that kept bugging me was the networking was flaky, particularly when I was connected through the wireless network (i.e. 90%...

Sometimes you may need to get at a service's ServiceDescription (WSDL) from a place where it is not normally accessible. One way to do so that I found is if you've enabled metadata publishing for your service, you can do something like this: <P class=MsoNormal style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0in 0in...

A few months ago I wrote about an issue with writing fully streaming custom decoding components for BizTalk pipelines, which originated in limitations imposed by the disassembler components (the XmlDisassembler component in particular) on the streams it received from the decoding stage. While doing some further work on custom decoding component...

Harry Pierson posted a response to a comment I said in a previous entry about SQL Server Service Broker. Lots of interesting stuff to consider, but let me address some of the points Harry made right away. First of all, it seems Harry made quite a bit of assumptions about...