Winterdom

Yesterday was my birthday, again; had a lot of fun having dinner with my girlfriend and all my family last night. Our birthday is always a family event, you see, as it so happens that I share my birthday with my mother, and one of our closest cousins' birthday is...

I'm totally in agreement with Clemens here when he says that the entire Microsoft Stack is now huge and you have to start selecting on which pieces of it on which to specialize. The platform has always been large, but it used to be easier to keep up with it....

I finally uploaded a long overdue update to my Filemap library for .NET (which implements file mapping facilities in managed code). This one mostly contains some minor refactoring and a few bugfixes, and it's one I had done a long time ago but had not put up (sorry for that!)....

Richard Seroter has a good post here on using the improved SMTP adapter in BizTalk Server 2006 and the options it provides. One question he asks is how to use it to send HTML-formatted messages but using dynamic content, instead of just a static one. I've managed to do this...

Has anyone here had success working in offline mode while using Team System's Source Control tool? We're trying to use Team System on a pilot project to see if we could accomodate to it, and since I tend to roam with my laptop between our two offices and need to...

I've been working on a new project this past few days, as part of which we're using the Data Access Application Block from the Enterprise Library, which is OK (for a fairly low-level ADO.NET wrapper). One of the requirements we have is that we need to support dynamic connection strings,...

It just dawned on me (yes, I'm slow, I know) that the RepeatableOperationExceptionMapper class that Clemens presents here is just the precise kind of thing that would work wonders as custom Exception Replacement Handler for a policy in the Exception Handling Application Block of the Enterprise Library. Go figure. It...

Recently, some prominent people have started (or, most likely, are just now talking about it) about BizTalk Server, some in light of the recent SO/Contract and Messaging Vs. RPC discussions. I'm not a BizTalk Expert (heck, I wouldn't call myself an expert in anything in particular), but I've done my...

David Ing posted a great post (or essay, I would say) on being a software architect. I liked it. It is sensible, and, for what it's worth, seems to match my experience learning the ropes of architecture this past couple of years, and certainly makes me more aware of my...

Does anyone know of any good articles and information on leveraging the DSL Toolkit for VS 2005? I've been looking to trying it out to experiment a bit with some ideas I have, but I'm ashamed to say I got up to defining a basic language and had no clue...