Winterdom

People usually treat MSMQ as if it provided, on it's own, magical reliable messaging features, when the reality is that all MSMQ does is provide a best effort mechanism when sending a message to a [remote] queue (albeit a really good one, in general). So, people don't usually bother implementing...

Today was the last day of the MVP summit. I had a great time with all the technical sessions, parties and getting face to face with a lot of people again. I got to meet again with old friends from the .NET world like Sam Gentile and Mattias Sjögren, as...

My good friend Sam Gentile wrote a good piece on Occassionally Connected [Smart] Clients and how they fit into a Service Oriented style of Architecture. I agree with him that, for many real business scenarios, this is substantially significant; not just benefit but a business necessity. Web- and always- connected...

Después de una buena espera, finalmente tenemos nuestro propio grupo de noticias de BizTalk Server en español: microsoft.public.es.biztalk! After a long wait, we finally get our own BizTalk Server Spanish newsgroup: microsoft.public.es.biztalk! </p>

I'm leaving tomorrow early for the MVP Summit. Hopefully, I'll be arriving in seattle tomorrow around 11 pm, which should give me at least a nice one and a half days to unwind and have fun around seattle before the summit officially begins. I'll be at the Crowne Plaza in...

Am I right in assuming that the September CTP of WinFX and related tools, despite having the same denomination as the recently released VS2005 and SQL 2005 builds, actually requires VS2005 Beta 2? It is not obviously apparent from looking at the download pages (heck, the WWF page actually says...

One of the features I'm really excited about in Visual Studio Team System is the Unit testing features, and how they are deeply integrated with the code coverage tools and the overall set of metrics that Team Foundation Server enables. This is very, very cool. However, after working with them...

On one of the projects we are working on, there was a need to integrate with Vantive (aka Peoplesoft), which was to be done by using a connector to access the CRM's Oracle database. All fine and good. However, we did ran into a nasty issue: Attachments. As it turns...

In BizTalk Server 2004, when you add the Flat File Disassembler component to a receive pipeline, there is no apparent way to tell the disassembler what the encoding of the incoming files will be. This is not very obvious but, as it turns out, there is a way to do...

Richard Turner posts a response letter to the whole Distributed System White paper thingie. I thought it might be interesting (to me, at least) to respond briefly with my thoughts on it. I think both John and Richard (and several others) have made good points over this discussion. Personally, I...