Winterdom

I just uploaded an updated version of my MSMQ Activities for Windows Workflow Foundation. You can download the updated code from here. Here are some of the changes: Updated to work with the July CTP of .NET FX 3.0 Added a new MsmqDirectReceiveActivity class. This one also allows you to...

Brian Noyes postes here about the complexities in developing for Windows Workflow Foundation. In general, I have to agree with his sentiment. Workflow in general is not trivial and requires approaching it with a somewhat different mindset, and it's no different with Workflow Foundation. Some of what Bryan talks about...

James Higgs posted an interesting rant here on the Postback and Viewstate mechanism in ASP.NET, saying they can turn an application into a nightmare to maintain. While I'm not sure I'd agree that I would never use them (I certainly have and probably end up doing it again because I'm...

Max Akbar posted a pretty cool article explaining the ins and outs of Commerce Server Pipelines. Excellent introduction to the topic, as it covers what they are, how they are executed, and how to configure one.

A question on the public BizTalk newsgroups brought the question of how to add arbitrary binary message parts to a multi-part message in an orchestration and have them be correctly processed by the MIME encoding component (or the SMTP adapter) in BizTalk 2006. By this I mean arbitrary parts (such...

On the new Software as a Service (SaaS) resource center over at the MSDN Solution Architecture center has a pretty interesting article on Multi-Tenant Data Architecture by Frederick Chong, Gianpaolo Carraro, and Roger Wolter. The article covers all the basic requirements for SaaS applications that need to support multi-tenant data (for...

A couple of weeks ago I received my reviewers copy of Sam Guckenheimer's Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. Since I had only reviewed a part of the book, I've been reading the rest of it to see the full picture, and I thought I'd share my opinion...

Book two in the Architecture Journal series is now out: Readings in Service Orientation, which you can download from here. Plenty of good stuff to read, though I was surprised to see that several of the included articles are about Software Factories and not quite about Service Orientation per se....

This is something I ran into tonight while testing a few things which I thought other people might be aware of. If you're creating arbitrary message parts in a multi-part message in a BizTalk orchestration, and you're loading your part's data from a Stream directly, be aware that you can only...

I've just uploaded and configured my new theme 'Commonality2' for my weblog. I had been wanting to change my weblog's look and feel for a while now, but only recently did I get any ideas as to the new look I wanted. It's a fairly simple, sober style, which is...