October 2004 - Posts

Support for DSL's in Visual Studio.NET
Thu, Oct 28 2004 9:13 AM
Another one of the Microsoft announcements around Visual Studio 2005 that I like. Microsoft announced how they will support DSL's in Visual Studio. DSL stands for Domain Specific Language and describes problems in specific space.
 
Visual Studio 2005 will allow you to create designers for your own DSL. Imagine you created a very flexible, highly configurable platform product, that uses one huge unmanagable unreadable XML-file to drive it's configuration (my collegues know which XML-file I refer to ;-). To ease configuration, you can write a designer on top of the XML file, that allows you to visually create all the settings you need. I think that can be a big help in these kind of problems. Just imagine your XML file describes the service interaction in your Service Oriented environment, then all of sudden your DSL designer will allow you to see and compose your service interaction visually. Now, I think that is cool. 
 
[UPDATE: S Dot One correctly pointed out I screwed up in definitions. Fixed!]
How to do workflow in BizTalk and what happens to HWS
Wed, Oct 13 2004 8:24 AM
Scott posted a very interesting document about choosing a workflow approach with BizTalk.
 
I was particularly surprised with the statement that HWS (Human Workflow Services) will not be extended or enhanced and ultimately removed from BizTalk (not in the next version, though). HWS will be replaced by the workflow tools that will be natively build into Longhorn. That's a major consideration when you think about HWS as a option in your architecture.
The Bloggers guide to BizTalk
Mon, Oct 4 2004 6:36 PM
Want to see the best of the blogging community? Alan Smith selected and grouped the most interesting ones and compiled them into a windows helpfile. The article is here
by Carlo Poli | with no comments
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Wouldn't it be great to have BizTalk implementation samples of the Integration Patterns?
Fri, Oct 1 2004 2:05 PM

A while ago I though it would be great. In fact, there is already a document that touches part of it on the EAI Patterns site, but that one touches the ones that are quite easy.

I was thinking about doing some more complex samples, both as a learning experience and a nice contribution to the community. But I just don't get around to actually doing it. Lucky me, because Alan Smith has started a blog on exactly that. He already has done an Aggregator sample (which is the only one I also spend some time on in the past). Seems like he is busy on both the Resequencer and the Message Splitter. Great stuff. Subscribed!