Winterdom

Sometimes I need to work on applications that involve dealing with sockets, TCP, serial communications or other somewhat low-level stuff. For sockets, the .NET Framework offers the nice NetworkStream class which makes it much easier to read and write to a socket, particularly if you build StreamReaders and StreamWriters on...

I've just uploaded an updated version of my FixEncoding custom pipeline component for BizTalk 2006 (an update for the BizTalk 2004 version is in the works); you can download it from here. This update is about making the component useful in Send pipelines. The original version only set the Charset...

Continuing with my series on managing BizTalk Server with PowerShell, here's a new script that deals with suspended messaging service instances: #<br /> # declare our parameters: the action to take, and an optional<br /> # path to save messages to<br /> #<br /> param(<br />    [string] $action=$(throw 'need action'), <br />   ...

In a previous post I mentioned that you could work with the WMI interfaces in BizTalk Server easier in PowerShell than you could with C#, and in a more interactive fashion. Here's something else I cooked while playing with the PowerShell RC1: A PowerShell version of my BTSReset tool! Update:...

As many of you know, BizTalk Server has a fairly extensive WMI object model you can use to manage and run your BizTalk servers. As even more of you know, WMI is a pain in the neck to work with from pretty much anywhere, particularly C#. However, PowerShell does make it...

Scott Hanselman shares some rules of thumb to manage Exceptions gracefully in your applications. As usual, great stuff from Scott. Here are some of my own I would add: Don't do: throw new Exception("Something Happened");. Please, I beg of you, don't do it. Don't abuse System.InvalidOperationException, either. Chain exceptions. Seriously, chaining...

Richard Seroter has a few good recommendations here on how to diagnose the confusing "Internal SOAP Processing Failure" message you get when a call to a WebService exposed from BizTalk fails. As he mentions, it can be quite confusing and sometimes quite hard to get to the root of the cause if you're...

Any ideas yet what the WinFX Adapter Framework features in BizTalk 2006 R2 will be renamed to now that WinFX is the .NET FX 3.0? Somehow, ".NET FX 3.0 Adapter Framework" doesn't quite sound so compelling :-)

Just recently realized that the MSDN Architecture center actually had a set of industry-specific centers for architecture topics relating to the Financial Services, Manufacturing and Retail industries. Pretty cool, and lots of good stuff to read. A few articles that caught my eye: Regulatory Compliance Demystified: An Introduction to Compliance...

A while ago I was reading June's edition of ACM Queue (late again!), which is devoted to Software Components and Component Technologies. It's been a fairly interesting reading, though much of it is not new for those familiar with the evolution and concepts behind COM, Java, EJB, .NET and other...