Winterdom

Several cool BizTalk-related news reported today: The new BizTalk 2006 developer's Troubleshooting Guide released, as reported here, here, here and here. Fantastic work on the part of BizTalk's Documentation Team putting this together. I've turned my copy into a slightly smaller PDF file I can keep around for constant reference! Managing a...

After reading about the Windows Live Alerts service over at Mads Kristensen site, I thought it sounded interesting enough to warrant a look and thought about experimenting with it out on my own weblog. Turns out the signup process isn't quite the experience I expected: The signup page asks a lot of...

Eric Lee has a pretty interesting idea here of integrating Visual Studio Team Foundation Server with BizTalk Server to create a Virtual Kanban System. Pretty funky stuff and pretty cool. It sounds, though, as something where possible Windows Workflow Foundation would be an even better choice than BizTalk: It's more lightweight (certainly less expensive...

From Rory Blyth, on his new www.TheSmartestMan.com site: Rory's resume. Hillarious! (See Rory's own comment on the site here).

Pretty much every application uses some sort of identifiers to keep track of things around; Services are no different, really, most of the time. Sometimes, those IDs will need to be externalized across service boundaries. One key point to keep in mind, though, is that if you do decide to...

I've uploaded the updated version of my FixEncoding Pipeline Component for BizTalk 2004, matching it to the new features in the BizTalk 2006 version I released last week. You can download the updated code from here.

Last week I needed a way to unit-test some code I was about to write that sent notification emails, and ran into SmtpMock. Nifty little bugger. Here's some sample code using it: <P class=MsoNormal style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: normal; tab-stops: 45.8pt 91.6pt 137.4pt 183.2pt 229.0pt 274.8pt 320.6pt 366.4pt 412.2pt...

After seeing the various entries around from people commenting on a Visual Studio configuration using a dark background for code instead of a white background, I got interested in trying it. However, the totally black background just isn't for me; it starts almost hurting after a short while. However, a...

Scott Bellware posts his thoughts on the role of the agile architect, saying that the title of architect might indeed not be the best description, and instead suggesting the name "Pathfinder" as an alternative. I personally like it. A lot of the principles that Scott mentions just resonate with me;...

What are people using this day to post code (and I mean good looking code) to their blogs these days? I've tried a lot of options without finding a good way of doing it, though I see a lot of people getting it done without issues, so I must be doing...