CaPo's Integration adventures

An accident waiting to happen

Carlo Poli — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 04:10:00 GMT

When I saw a post some weeks ago about 5 things I didn't know about Robert Scoble I could only hope it didn't reach me. Since then I saw dozens more until the last couple of days it hit our bloggingabout.net community. Just over the last two days many of us wrote about our private 'secrets'. And thanks to Edward it's my turn now. A good reason to reincarnate my blog.

So here we go:

I've been a major (let's say MAJOR) Guns n' Roses fan since the day I switched on MTV and saw Paradise City. Which BTW is still my favorite GnR-song by far. Not so interesting in itself, but people that know me, can hardly think of me as a:
1. Long-haired
2. Head-banging
3. Black t-shirt wearing
4. Hard-rock fan
I could say this would be 5 things by itself but the stories continues.
I learned programming on the Commodore 64. I was the book-buying kind that used to type evening after evening on a program that in the end didn't do what I expected it to do and was disappointed. The funniest thing I remember is Hobbyscoop, a radioshow about programming broadcasted on Sunday evening. The show always ended with the broadcast of the bytes of a compiled program that you could record on tape and then try to play (which I have never seen anyone get to work, BTW). The fun part was that I was always in the car with my parent travelling home from my grandmothers house, because it was right after football ended on the TV. So we were sitting in the car listening to peep-peeeep-peep-peeeep-grgrrgr-peep-grrrgrr (imagine the sound a modem makes when connecting) and back then there wasn´t much else so we just had to listen ;-).
My wife always was unhappy with my little belly, which I found strange, because it wasn't so bad. Until the little belly went into a somewhat more descend belly and once I found myself laying my hands upon it to rest. That was the day I decided to loose weight (I guess that day is almost 4 years ago). I did that by starting running and in combination with a normalized eating pattern (which is, no candy but three descend meals a day). I lost 10 kilos in 8 weeks. I still run 3 times a week and I again eat everything I want and haven't gained a kilo since then. I once tried to run a marathon but that failed for several reasons, including major illness a couple a weeks before the event. I now focus on shorter distances, but I will once finish a marathon. Oh BTW, my wife is still unhappy because I now run a race every 3 or 4 weeks and am gone for most of that Sunday. Well, it's hard to please them ;-).
I don't think there is one line of code gone into production in 2006 that was written by me. I merely just talked, written documents, supported testing, building environments and lots more, all well received (at least that's what my customer still tells me), but hardly any programming. And I haven't really missed it too.
I can't end this list, without introducing my lovely children. Stefan (6) and Julia (3) really changed my life. A couple of years ago, work was everything to me, everything was build around it. Now, my family is in the center and I build everything around that. I enjoy coming home to eat and play with them more than anything else I do. If I come home from work, it´s my task to shower them, read them a last story and then bring them to bed and I love doing that every day of the week.

Mmm, now the hard part, I'm supposed to tag someone. They won't like it but I'll tag Robert, Wellink, Edward and Fijsjan. I guess there will be some swearing going around in a crowded room in Rotterdam ;-).

Office 2007 RTM

Carlo Poli — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 07:12:00 GMT

Here it is: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/nov06/11-062007OfficeRTMPR.mspx

Now, give me the bits ;-).

Deploying a BizTalk web service using setup project

Carlo Poli — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 03:14:55 GMT

Here’s another thing we bumped into recently that took a lot of time to find and fix.

In a project in which I’m sideways involved a BizTalk generated WebService was deployed using a setup project. These projects by default include all dependencies, which are all BizTalk assemblies. Deployed this way, our webservice did not work, without any error logged in either the HAT or the event log. We did see that BizTalk was involved by incomplete messages in the HAT. Turned out that when we removed all dependency assemblies from the bin folder of the webservice it worked great. We choose to remove dependencies from the setup project and that fixed it.

Don’t close the original DataStream in a Custom Adapter

Carlo Poli — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 03:07:58 GMT

I have written a custom adapter over two years ago that worked a charm back then. Recently I had to use it again in a little project. It worked, but not when an error occurred on transmission. In that case it failed with the following errors in the eventlog:

“The Messaging Engine encountered an error while suspending one or more messages”

and

“The Messaging Engine encountered an error while deleting one or more messages”

After attaching the Visual Studio debugger to the BizTalk Host process and setting breakpoints on all Exceptions, I saw it failed on a closed stream. As clean as I am, my adapter closed and disposed everything inclused the stream I got from GetOriginalDataStream. And that is not allowed. After I fixed that, everything worked great!

Back on blogging?

Carlo Poli — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 01:59:24 GMT

I haven’t written anything here for a long time, but since I installed Vista and Office 2007, I should also try the blogging service. I know, I know, half the world tried. In fact, I did too, but didn’t get it to work because of a bug that is supposed to be fixed. In the meantime I was involved in two nasty BizTalk issues, which I will blog about later on.

Windows SDK February 2006 CTP installation trouble

Carlo Poli — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 23:21:00 GMT

I've been trying to install the Windows SDK CTP versions numerous times now, failing every time. None of the workarounds/resolvements I found on the net did work for me. I found another way of resolving the issue though, so just for some search engine juice, here's my solution.

The error I received uptill now was:

Installation of the "Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit" product has reported the following error: Fatal error during installation.

My enviroment is as follows:

I run Windows Server 2003 R2 in a Virtual PC session. I have bound the Windows SDK image to a drive with Virtual Daemon Manager on the host and bound that drive to the guest session.

I ran a verbose install:

d:\setup\msiexec /package WinSDK-x86.msi /quiet /lv c:\out.log

When checking out the log I found the following error at just around 80% of the 30 MB log file:

"invalid digital signature" "WinSDK-SDK_WinFX_DOC-common.8.cab"

I resolved the issue by copying the entire setup disk content to a local folder in the guest OS and run the setup from there.

BizTalk 2006 RTM

Carlo Poli — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 22:06:00 GMT

This post from Don Box really amazed me. Didn't think it was quite that far. Anyone to confirm?

In any way, you might want to check the webcast calender for which an update on RTM is also announced.

What kind of architect am I?

Carlo Poli — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 10:34:00 GMT

When I was young I wanted to become an architect ;-). But whenever this goal came closer, the target became more obscure. What is an architect? What I thought an architect did, seemed more a software designers function, while architects did infrastructural stuff and application selection and more. Since a while I know that Enterprise Architects, Infrastructure Architects and Application Architects each do high-profile work but require very different skills. Yet, in my projects I'm oftenly faced with challenges that requires bits of all skills. Which left me wondering for a while which of the three I actually am or will become.

But now Simon Guest proposed a good way to lighten up the discussion. It's not black and white, I'm floating somewhere in the middle. But now the question still remains where I should place the dot. Which is something I will think about...

Building my personal radio station

Carlo Poli — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 21:51:00 GMT

Brilliant,

build your personal radio station in seconds. You can even build multiple within minutes.

[via Dennis Pilarinos]

WinFX November CTP

Carlo Poli — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 21:48:00 GMT

The November CTP of WinFX is available. Guess that this is the first version to run on .NET 2.0 RTM. Jevdemon has all the links.

Code snippet library

Carlo Poli — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 10:37:00 GMT

Just came across this source of VS2005 code snippets. Still a little empty but looks promising. Anyone knows better sources for code snippets? I saw Don Box using snippets for Indigo bindings but I can't find them. Anyone?

BPM, reinventing the UI every time?

Carlo Poli — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 22:19:00 GMT

I'm currently involved in introducing a workflow package within my customer's organization. The last couple of weeks I had numerous discussions with various persons inside this company about the way end users would interact within these processes.

The point that arose everytime around is they certainly don't want to rebuild interfaces they already have. SAP screens, Oracle Forms, etc. On the other hand they want to give users an integrated experience. A user executes a task within a workflow and he shouldn't take aditional steps to inform the workflow itself on what they did. Ideally he is presented the right screen when he selects the task at hand and information about the task done flows automatically between the workflow and the user screen.

Everytime these requirements come up, my brain start to run overtime ;-). It doesn't fit my view on architecture. I don't know of any technology that would allow me do this and when I look around in the service oriented world I don't see any discussions about reusing existing UI. You see a lot of samples with InfoPath and portals, but then I do start running down the path of rebuilding the UI for the processes.

What do you think, should I start discussing the fact with the customer that in a message oriented, workflow enabled world I should accept the fact that I can't reuse existing UI's? Or do you see alternatives I missed? Or should the customer and I drastically change views on the subject? Do you know of workflow tools that can reuse UI's more or less seamlessly?

On the last question, I do think the problem lies in the fact that we now view the workflow as the dominator, the initiator, in the process. The problem would shift if it would be viewed as more of a coordinator (which doesn't fits the products view, but that might be a different question). However, in that case the question would arise how the coordinator knows what is happening without requiring the user to enter 'workflow ids' all over the place. Interesting food for thought I think. Anxiously awaiting your reactions.

IBF, .NET 2.0 and VSTO 2005

Carlo Poli — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 01:40:00 GMT

A few weeks ago I had an interesting demo script in mind where the Outlook extensions in VSTO2005 and IBF together would create an very compelling experience for a certain customer.

When we started trying to implement that, we immediately ran into the issue that IBF requires .Net 1.1 while VSTO2005 requires .NET 2.0 and Outlook can only host one framework version. Which basically meant, end of the idea, wait for next version of IBF. I thought.

When browsing the newsgroups today I came along this post that describes how to host IBF in .NET 2.0. You still need VS2003 for the Metadata Designer but at least you use both VSTO 2005 and IBF in one solution for rich experiences. Which is great news. Now if I only could find the time to build the demo I had in mind ;-).

Answers on the WWF vs BizTalk question

Carlo Poli — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 21:48:00 GMT

I questioned whether you would want to invest in BizTalk orchestrations if WWF is already around. Darren Jefford perfectly describes the fundamental differences between WWF and BizTalk. I think the two biggest arguments are that BizTalk acts as a reliable, scalable host to orchestrations and automatically persists the state while in WWF you need do both things yourself.

This proves that BizTalk has added value, even in the orchestration space. I still see situations in which the choice is tougher, but the majority of the orchestrations I build today, would probably be done in BTS anyway, even with WWF around. Which doesn't make WWF useless in any way. I can imagine applications that become very flexible because their abilities are exposed as WWF activities and tied together through WWF Workflows. That is very powerful stuff.

The BizTalk Solution Designer

Carlo Poli — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 10:26:00 GMT

I just saw a video on Channel 9 about the BizTalk Solution Designer. That stuff is really brilliant. The solution designer gives you a visual workspace that you can use to create ports, assign pipelines and maps to them and visually define the routing rules between them. Very intuitive and very well done.

Unfortunately, if I understood the video correctly, it will be in the version of BizTalk that ships after BTS2006. Which is a bummer because the stuff that was shown is really a missing link in creating complex message routing environments. Cool stuff, though.