All posts by : Pluralsight Blogs

1 of 134 | Twin Cities .NET User Group - A lap around Microsoft .NET Services - I'm happy to be giving a talk at the upcoming Twin Cities .NET User Group on December 4 at the Microsoft office.  I'll be talking about the Microsoft .NET Services component within the newly announced Azure Services Platform.  I'm going to cover the Service Bus, Workflow Service and Access Control Service.  We'll have several demos and I'll be providing all the code.  Stop by if you want an early look at this emerging technology.  ...

2 of 134 | presenting at Supercomputing --- and the cluster of travelling with a cluster - And not just one cluster mind you, but two!  Anyway, I was fortunate enough to be able to present a half-day tutorial on "Windows HPC Server 2008 --- a developer's perspective".  It went reasonably well I think, a good crowd with great questions.  One mistake I made was not anticipating my audience well enough:  it's obvious to me now, since I used to live in this world as a grad student.  But I've been away from it too long, and while GUIs and Visual Studio are my tools of choice today, I forgot that for a majority of the HPC community, the command line and its plethora of tools are the norm.  Next time (if there is a next time :-) I......

3 of 134 | SharePoint, Silverlight, and Virtual Earth - I've been doing a number of project lately for the SharePoint and SharePoint online teams.  Mostly around services and integrating SharePoint services with Silverlight.  One of these projects was pretty cool so we decided to put it up on CodePlex - http://www.codeplex.com/sharepointsilverligh  (yes I can spell Silverlight - CodePlex seems to not like long project names in its URIs ;-)). The basic idea is a Silverlight control that coordinates data between a SharePoint List (using the SharePoint List Web Service) and the Virtual Earth map control in the browser.  You can point it at any list that has columns containing longitude and latitude data (it should be pretty ......

4 of 134 | WF 3.5 SendActivity with ChannelManagerService followup - Here's a short video on how to use the WF 3.5 SendActivity with the ChannelManagerService to populate named Endpoints.  It also shows how to "subvert" the SharePoint WF Runtime to add custom services, including the ChannelManagerService....

5 of 134 | Understanding ViewState screencast - I've just posted a free short screencast on understanding ViewState in ASP.NET to our new Screencast page. In this screencast I walk through exactly how ViewState is used in an ASP.NET page, how to parse it, and perhaps most importantly, when and how to disable it. If you haven't been to Pluralsight's screencast page before, we're making a collection of short screencasts from our instructors available on this page, ranging in topics from ASP.NET to WCF to XSLT, and the library is growing each week. Be sure to subscribe to our main feed for notices of new screencasts being posted....

6 of 134 | Controlling authentication with the WF 3.5 SendActivity - Someone emailed me a question about whether or not you can specify credentials when using the OOB SendActivity in WF 3.5 because they heard that you had to write a custom activity to accomplish this.  You do not have to write a custom activity.  While it is true that the SendActivity links to a named endpoint, and if you use the configuration file to configure your endpoint you can't specify specific credentials (a username and password for example),  WF 3.5 has a OOB WorkflowRuntime Service named the ChannelManagerService.  The ChannelManagerService (which I described in my article on MSDN - here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc626077.aspx)  allows yo......

7 of 134 | Going to Supercomputing Conference in Austin? - If you're interested in HPC, SC is the place down in Austin, TX, November 16-20.  SC is a great mix of academics, professionals, and vendors.  I'm happy to be presenting a 3.5 hour tutorial on HPC Server on Monday the 17th:  "HPC with Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008 --- A Programmer's Perspective".  We'll look at various ways to develop software for HPC Server, from parametric sweep to WCF to MPI.  I'll post the materials to my download site afterwards....

8 of 134 | Introducing Pluralsight On-Demand - As a follow up to my post last summer about new happenings at Pluralsight, I'm happy to announce that we've come out of beta with our online training, which is now called Pluralsight On-Demand. Aaron has a detailed announcement that he posted last week which should fill you in on all the details. The feedback on our online courses has been great so far, and we're really excited about growing our online repository to contain everything you need to know about the .NET platform. We've all been busy recording our courses over the last 6 months, and have many more courses in the pipeline. I personally have found our online training quite useful already - it's great to be able......

9 of 134 | IntelliPad (IPad): adding commands - Last week at the PDC was Oslo's big coming out party.  If you haven't heard Oslo is a new set of technologies from Microsoft relating to model-driven development.  The three main parts of Oslo are: 1) A language:  The M language is a language for writing stuff down.  You write down the things you need to drive your application.  The things could be application configuration data, or application specific data, or data which is actually your application.  How exactly you use M is largely up to you.  There is also MGrammar which I'll be covering more in future posts. 2) A repository: There needs to be a place to hold all this data, so Oslo has a S......

10 of 134 | Rendering and Layouts - As this is the Pluralsight blog I'm assuming that most people reading this are .Net folk and that you will have at least a passing familiarity with ASP.Net, so occasionally I'll draw comparisons with Microsoft's framework. ASP.Net has had, since 2.0, the concept of Master pages. These are pages that provode the overall structure of parts of a web site. ASP.Net lets a page author design a template that contains content placeholders, this template is called a 'master page', individual pages can then specify that they want to use a specific master page and also specify which content replaces which placeholder within the page. Internally this turns out to be a fairly convolu......

11 of 134 | Looking foward to the PDC - The PDC is coming up fast! I'm so excited about the PDC in general - but I think the most exciting part might be what's coming as part of Oslo. Steve Martin has been talking about it among others. If you haven't heard, Oslo isn't the big wave of products anymore, its been re-defined to mean just three things: Oslo the language ("M") The repository (for holding models) The visual editor ("Quadrant") All three of these are very very cool. Although I have to give the biggest cool factory to "M", and its ability to allow textual DSLs to be built with ease One thing I've been talking about for years is the benefits of model......

12 of 134 | Learning Rails - Part 2 - I wanted to make this a series about Rails and about Ruby. To that end I'm going to write a series of entries on building an MVC application. As I said in the previous post I am a Ruby and Rails neophyte, so I'll be learning as I go along, regard this as a developer's journal. The aim being that you can learn from the mistakes that I make. If this really gets going I also hope to do some screencasts along the way. What am I going to write - a blog of course (is there any other sort of web app out there today :) ). I chose blogging software because Everybody understands what a blog is, so no trying to figure out the behaviour It gives me a chance to play with different form......

13 of 134 | RTM for HPC Server 2008 is now available - In case you missed it, RTM for Windows HPC Server 2008 is now available here.  Don't forget to grab the SDK for HPC Server, which allows you to program MPI, as well as access a cluster programmatically via the HPC Server API. There are also a number of tutorials and how-to articles available on Microsoft's developer resources page, two of which we wrote and blogged about earlier:  "Classic HPC Development using Visual C++", and "From Sequential to Parallel Code".  The former is for more experienced HPC C++ developers, and uses OpenMP, MPI and MPI.NET to develop an image processing application.  The latter is oriented towards newcomers to......

14 of 134 | Screencast: Running workflows in your .NET applications - My latest screencast is up on the Endpoint.tv show on Channel 9.  In this screencast I cover the basic steps to host workflows in your applications.  I cover the basic hosting steps in a console application, then jump in and run a workflow in an ASP.NET application.  Screencasts: Running Workflows in your NET Applications     Previous screencasts: Your first state machine workflow Your first sequential workflow   RSS feed of all screencasts in the series...

15 of 134 | Screencast: Your first state machine workflow - In the latest screencast in the ongoing series, I cover the basics of creating a state machine workflow. I show you the various activities to use, how to transition between states and handle events including time based events.  Screencast: Creating Your First State Machine Workflow     Previous screencasts in the series: Creating your first sequential workflow   RSS feed for all screencast posts...

16 of 134 | The "Endpoint" show on Channel9 - Pluralsight's weekly WF/WCF screencast series is now part of a new Channel9 show dedicated to these technologies -- it's called the "Endpoint" show and you can find it at http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Endpoint/. It's managed by Cliff Simpkins who was instrumental in getting this screencast series going, and one of the main players on the .NET Endpoint blog. The show alternates between WCF and WF topics every four episodes, and is posted weekly on Weds mornings (8am Pacific) - so check it out regularly if you're interested in these technologies. If you're only interested in either WCF or WF, use one of the following URL's that filter by topic: http://chann......

17 of 134 | VSX: Visual Studio Extensibility Architecture Part 1 - Doug Hodges, one of two original architects who built the first, extensible IDE shell from MSFT (Visual Studio 6.0), took up the challenge of two, back-to-back afternoon sessions and launched into "fundamental" (lower-level) architectural concepts. He shared his considerable context, motivating the current design and reflecting a long history of careful attention to detail. Themes: delay load assemblies, mature COM model, thoughtful versioning story, support many styles of Windows programming including managed interop assemblies and helper libraries. VsPackage The initial starting point for a logical set of features in the IDE. Co-created, given a pointer to the IDE......

18 of 134 | VSX: Introduction to the Visual Studio 2008 Shell - James K. Lau walked through a heroic effort to eviscerate Visual Studio 2008 so you can re-use the shell to build your own IDE. Absolutely amazing. Together with the DSL support, this makes fabuluous strategic sense -- after all, here's a way to build your own (graphical) language and your own editor for that language. If there was one place that could use improvement though, it would be *.pkgdef: Wow. Edit a simple text file to set a sea of registry settings to get the experience you want. Compared to the Properties window used for DSL, this is very primitive. Same for *.vsct which is in XML format. http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=vs......

19 of 134 | Technical Currency Metric - I was recently presented a rather interesting question, “Are our products technically current?” The easy answer is to look at something like whether or not our web applications will run on the latest version of IIS and whether or not our applications perform properly under the latest browser versions. That’s the easy way out though. It turns out to be a far more layered question as you begin asking these sorts of follow-on question. How far back must we provide functionality to our clients? Do we still support that version of SQL Server, Oracle, IIS, or Apache? How much time between a new product releases (say, Internet Explorer 8) and our public support for it? 3months, 6 months,......

20 of 134 | Null Strings in ASP.NET Declarative DataSource Updates - I just spent about 15 minutes debugging a problem where a document was getting unexpected nulls where empty strings should have been. Indeed controls like the TextBox have code in them that allows you to set the Text property to null and the TextBox will convert that into an empty string. So it's a bit counterintuitive that the declarative data source works the opposite way by default. When you use a declarative data source to perform a parameterized update that contains string parameters, consider setting ConvertEmptyStringToNull='false' on your <asp:Parameter> elements, because it's true by default! In other words, if a text field contains an empty string, it'll ......

21 of 134 | Programming the MetaWeblog API in .NET/C# - Most modern blogging engines support the MetaWeblog API, which was defined by XML-RPC.com many years ago.  It's become one of the most popular API's for programmatically interacting with blogs because of its simplicity. Even Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces provides support for it. I wanted to use this API recently to interact with our Community Server implementation so I started searching around for client-side implementations that would be easy to program in C#. I was surprised that I couldn't find a mainstream implementation readily available. So I followed the example on MSDN and built my own MetaWeblog library in C# on top of Cook Computing's XML-RPC.NET library......

22 of 134 | Serializable XmlDocument - It's surprising that XmlDocument isn't marked [Serializable], because it's very natural to serialize one into a stream. I wanted to put an object into ASP.NET ViewState the other day, and quickly ran into this roadblock, because part of the object included an XmlDocument, which is not serializable. A quick search revealed that most people deal with this problem by storing a string instead. Indeed, that was where I started, but I quickly realized that there are multiple places in my code where I want to do this sort of thing, and I don't want to have to mess with it in each data structure that contains an XmlDocument. So I put together a simple class that holds an XmlDocumen......

23 of 134 | Visual Studio SP1 and The Metification of REST - Metification – verb The act of adding metadata to a web service in order to facilitate tooling and discovery. The act of adding complexity to a web service in order to achieve tight coupling. Pick one. Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008 has just arrived with new features, including version 1.0 of ADO.NET Data Services (a.k.a Astoria). From the description (highlighting is mine): ADO.NET Data Services … consists of a combination of patterns and libraries that enables any data store to be exposed as a flexible data service, naturally integrating with the Web, that can be consumed by Web clients within a corporate network or across the Internet. ADO.NET Data Services us......

24 of 134 | Introducing Microsoft Code Name Zermatt - For a couple of years now, I've been giving talks about "claims-based identity", and "claims-aware applications". The most concrete example of a claims-based identity architecture that I've been able to show so far is Active Directory Federation Services v1 (ADFS) and Windows CardSpace. And the claims programming model I've been using is the one that shipped with WCF in the System.IdentityModel assembly.But today I'm happy to announce that there's a new path forward in the claims world. Zermatt is the "identity framework" that I've been itching to talk about, but until today, hasn't been announced publicly.Well, Vittorio just made th......

25 of 134 | Keeping LINQ Code Healthy - In the BI space I’ve seen a lot of SQL queries succumb to complexity. A data extraction query adds some joins, then some filters, then some nested SELET statements, and it becomes an unhealthy mess in short order. It’s unfortunate, but standard SQL just isn’t a language geared for refactoring towards simplification (although UDFs and CTEs in T-SQL have helped). I’ve really enjoyed writing LINQ queries this year, and I’ve found them easy to keep pretty. For example, suppose you need to parse some values out of the following XML: <ROOT> <data> <record> <field name="Country">Afghanistan</field> <field name="Year"&g......

26 of 134 | A Note From the New Guy - I took classes with Aaron, Don, Fritz, and Keith as far back as 2001. Back then subjects included XML, COM+ services, messaging we called web services, and something new coming from MSFT called .Net. It was soon clear that the people teaching these classes were a caliber above us “Average Joes”. These folks were genuine ninjas. I have followed their blogs and writings since I first met them and my regard for their work has only increased over the years. This is why I feel so honored to be considered a contributor in PluralSight’s team of instructors. I taught some classes on Team System through Accentient over the course of the last year or so. Thank you, Rich. I really appreciate the opp......

27 of 134 | Upcoming webcasts - There are some WCF-related webcasts coming up during July, with monday's one on transactional WCF support.  You can find links to them on the MSDN Webcasts site.  This month's talks are: Webcast Title Date/ Time Presenter Transactional Windows Communication Foundation Services with Juval Lowy 7/7/2008 10:00 AM PST Juval Lowy Using Windows Workflow Foundation to Build Services with Jon Flanders 7/9/2008 10:00 AM PST Jon Flanders WCF Extensibility Deep Dive with Jesus Rodriguez 7/11/2008 10:00 AM PST Jesus Rodriguez Bringing Enterprise Data to Life with SharePoint Serve......

28 of 134 | I guess I should be flattered - That some spammer thought my wiki pages where hit enough to warrant modifying them on a daily basis with links to various "odd" sites ;-) Thanks to Craig I've upgraded to FlexWiki 2.0 and now those pages are locked down - I apologize if you've visited them and they haven't been right,  should be ok from now on. My Workflow Sample Page My BizTalk Sample Page   ...

29 of 134 | E4X and/or VB9 XML Users - How's it going? - I've been spending a lot of time with XML again lately. Since my last stint with XML, I know we shipped native XML suppport in VB9. I also know that there are E4X implementations out in the wild. What I'd love to know is how either of these are working out for people? What do you love? What blows? What do you wish you had? I'm also interested in hearing from XQuery users, but I'm keenly interested on how the “you got peanut butter in my chocolate” solutions are working out. Feel free to comment here or via a private mail (dbox at the usual place).  ...

30 of 134 | Intellisense for XML config files broken in VS 2008? - I remember having trouble in VS 2005 with Intellisense not working - the trick back in those days was to remove the namespace declaration that was added by various tools. As long as the content was in no namespace, Intellisense seemed to work. In VS 2008, Intellisense for config files was working great for me until recently, and now, regardless of whether I have the namespace or not, it appears hopelessly broken. I checked under XML|Schemas to see if the schema was in place, and indeed I have DotNetConfig.xsd listed in there for an empty namespace, and it's got the little green checkmark by it, which makes me think VS recognizes that this is the schema it's supposed to use, but still no joy......

31 of 134 | Windows Mobile Webcast Series – Getting Ready for Tech Ed (and other life changing events) - If you've been thinking about getting started with Windows Mobile programming, then you'll want to check out this webcast series co-presented by Maarten Struys, Constanze Roman, and me. We originally put this series together so that people who are new to Windows Mobile could get a foundation in Windows Mobile before attending TechEd Windows Mobile-related sessions. Honestly though, this series is useful for anyone who is looking to start developing Windows Mobile applications whether or not you're attending TechEd. Part 1: Developing Applications for Windows Mobile Devices (now available on-demand) Part 2: Developing Your First Real Windows Mobile 6 Application (Wednesday 21-May) Part ......

32 of 134 | XML Schema Explorer in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 - In case you didn't notice, the XML Schema Designer that was made available as a downloadable CTP back in August 2007 made it into Visual Studio 2008 SP1. It's now called the XML Schema Explorer. You can read more about it here....

33 of 134 | Optimizing declarative datasource binding within UpdatePanels - If you've been working with UpdatePanels in ASP.NET Ajax, I'm sure you appreciate how simple they make it to add Ajax behavior to almost any ASP.NET page. You can easily isolate portions of your page to update independently using asynchronous callbacks instead of refreshing the entire page with a standard post-back. In order to keep the programming model identical to that of a synchronous post-back page, however, the UpdatePanel-initiated request will run through your server-side page logic in its entirety, which is often doing more than needed to fulfill the request to update only the contents of the UpdatePanel that actually initiated the request (this is assuming you have set UpdateMode=......

34 of 134 | WCF Strategies for Windows Mobile Webcast - Due to a last minute scheduling problem, my planned appearance on geekSpeak last week to talk about Windows Communications Foundation (WCF) Strategies for Windows Mobile had to be rescheduled. I realize it's a bit of short notice but I wanted to let everyone know that it is now scheduled for Monday 12-May at 12-noon PDT (3PM EDT, 19:00 UTC). The URL to register for the webcast is still the same. I really encourage you to come by and checkout this webcast. Although, our initial point of reference is WCF on Windows Mobile, most of what we talk about applies equally to all mobile-oriented applications whether running on a Windows Mobile device, or laptop/notebook computer. One of the key ......

35 of 134 | MSDN Updates - Yesterday was a big day for me with respect to MSDN. There were a pair of "the new replaces the old" moments.   The first event was the one Larry Jordan amusingly subtitles "There will be only one!" What happened was, the old MSDN finally got turned off - the MTPS-based version of MSDN is now the only version running. http://msdn2.microsoft.com now redirects to http://msdn.microsoft.com. That means no more fun URLs like https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/shellcc/platform/shell/programmersguide/shell_basics/shell_basics_extending/fileassociations/fileassoc.asp. Now it's http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb776847.aspx. Ahh - that's better.   Since I hel......

36 of 134 | A Whirlwind of Webcasts - It looks like Webcast season is upon us J … Between now and Tech Ed, Maarten Struys and I will be presenting a combined total of 7 webcasts. This Wednesday, 30-April and next Wednesday, 7-May I'll be the guest on MSDN's geekSpeak. Then starting next week (week of 5-May), Maarten Strays and I will be co-presenting a multi-part webcast series on a variety of Windows Mobile topics as a lead-in to Tech Ed Developer 2008. geekSpeak This Wednesday (30-April) I'll be talking about SQL Server Compact Tips and Tricks (both devices and desktop). I'm really looking forward to this talk. Those of you who have followed my blog or who have seen my whitepapers or webcasts know that I'm a big fa......

37 of 134 | BizTalk Server 2006 R3 just announced - Steve Martin, director of product management for Microsoft's Connected Systems Division (CSD), just announced their plans for the next version of BizTalk Server on his blog. It will be called BizTalk Server 2006 R3. This new version will be updated to work with Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008. It will also be updated with the following SOA-related features: New web service registry capabilities with support for UDDI v3.0 Enhanced service enablement of applications through new and enhanced adapters Enhanced service enablement of “edge” devices through BizTalk RFID Mobile Enhanced interoperability and connectivity support for B2B......

38 of 134 | Randomizing rows in a DataTable - I've been working on a project recently where I had the need to randomly shuffle all of the rows in a DataTable. I wanted to do it with the DataTable itself instead of in the act of populating the DataTable for a couple of reasons: 1) I wanted to keep the DataTable in memory and shuffle it in place multiple times without going back to the source, and 2) I had multiple sources where data was coming from (SQL and XML) so I preferred to keep the randomization logic in one place. I also didn't want to copy all of the data (even though it was not a large amount) each time I shuffled, so I decided to use a DataView to display the data shuffled each time I needed it. Here's the utility function I......

39 of 134 | Applied BTS R2 in the Windy City - I've been teaching mostly WF and WCF lately, so I'm excited that in a couple of weeks (April 22) I'll be getting a chance to teach our core BizTalk course again in the lovely city of Chicago.  I'm excited because there is a lot of cool stuff for this particular open enrollment.  1) R2 - need I say more? I will.  We will be using the latest bits to teach the core course from now on so you'll be learning BizTalk Server fundamentals using the latest and greatest version.  This is still a class for developers new to BizTalk, so if you have taken this class, you might be interested in the R2 features class that Jon is teaching in May and August.  2) Dual Monitors!&nb......

40 of 134 | Problem creating data-bound DataGrid in Device Project - The other day while working in Visual Studio 2008, I encountered an unexpected error while attempting to create a DataGrid by dragging a table from the Data Sources pane onto a form (something we've all done many times). At first Visual Studio appeared to be creating the DataGrid and associated components (BindingSource, TableAdapter, etc.) correctly but then Visual Studio threw an error: An error occurred while performing the drop: Length cannot be less than zero. Parameter name: length The error message might have been useful if I had access to the Visual Studio source code – but I was just using Visual Studio, not building it. Needless to say, the error mes......

41 of 134 | WCF Security Guidance from P&P - This is new; J.D. and crew are hosting it on CodePlex to get feedback. From J.D.'s blog: Our patterns & practices WCF Security Guidance Project is in progress on CodePlex.  This is our first release of prescriptive guidance modules for WCF Security.  How TosOur How Tos give you step by step instructions for performing key tasks: How To - Create and Install Temporary Certificates in WCF for Message Security During Development How To - Create and Install Temporary Certificates in WCF for Transport Security During Development How To - Impersonate the Original Caller in WCF calling from Web Application How To - Impersonate the Original Caller in WCF calling from Windows Forms Ho......

42 of 134 | Automating the process of associating the Device Emulator with the Cellular Emulator - If you do much work with Windows Mobile applications, there's a good chance that you frequently use the Cellular Emulator to test out things like call handling, SMS message handling, as well as cellular network behavior. I'm a pretty big fan of the Cellular Emulator … I remember what it was not that long ago when we didn't have it … that said … There is one thing that I do sometimes find bothersome (yes I know this is a very small thing) – it's the process of associating the Cellular Emulator with a Device Emulator. You have to: Open the Device Emulator Configuration dialog Select the Peripherals tab Enter the Cellular Emulator COMx port number into the Serial Port 0 field Dismiss the ......

43 of 134 | Elegant Code Podcast - Last week I had the pleasure of teaching a class for Healthwise in Boise, and while there met David Starr.  David has a website called Elegant Code and we got a chance to sit down for a podcast during the week.  We chatted about WF, WCF, BizTalk, "Oslo" and being a Pluralsight instructor.  Have a listen if you are interested, and check out the rest of the site while you are there.  David also organized the Boise Code Camp, which I, sadly, missed by just a day.  From the sound of it, this was a huge success and a pretty large event, even by west coast standards.  I'm sorry I missed it....

44 of 134 | DevWeek 2008 wrap-up - I just wrapped up DevWeek 2008, a wonderful developer conference held each year in London. This show brings in some of the best attendees around...I always really enjoy my time here. I'm sitting in my hotel here decompressing before my long journey home. Here are the demos from my sessions:  Programming WCF (workshop) The ABC's of Programming WCF Message-Oriented WCF SOAP, REST, POX, & RSS Getting Started with BizTalk Server 2006 R2 (workshop) Thanks again to the attendees for making this a great event once again, for all the thought provoking questions and discussions along the way. Hope to see you again next year! I'm going to especially miss the Indian food and running along......

45 of 134 | Request for Input from WF - Request for input from the Windows Workflow Foundation Team: “The Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) team is looking for YOUR input to help us prioritize our efforts around designer re-hosting scenarios. If you're interested in helping us shape the future of this feature, tell us what you think by filling in this survey. https://live.datstat.com/MSCSD-Collector/Survey.ashx?Name=WF_Rules_Designer_Rehosting_Blogs The survey will close on Wednesday, March 19th 2008.”...

46 of 134 | March CTP of HPC Server 2008 just released - Microsoft has just released a CTP of its upcoming HPC Server 2008 product (the next version of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003).  The MPI library has undergone a series of performance enhancements (e.g. Network Direct for more efficient message communication), and the scheduler now provides an easier and more interactive way to execute kernels of work (based on the scheduler's new SOA capabilities for job submission and execution).  I'm just starting to kick the tires, existing MPI and OpenMP apps runs just fine on the new version.  Next up is to start playing with the new scheduler... The CTP also includes numerous other improvements, including better setup an......

47 of 134 | Windows Workflow/Rules Designer Re-hosting - The design surface of the shipping Windows Workflow Designer can be re-hosted in applications other than Visual Studio. The team that owns building the vNext designer is looking for input around re-hosting scenarios. If you have an interest in this feature, you can help shape its future by filling out this survey, on or before March 19....

48 of 134 | Building the transaction protocol documents - You've undoubtedly read about the announcement last week to publish our protocol documents on msdn.  If you've gone and looked, there's an extensive set of documents posted. You may also remember that I mentioned that I'd been involved in some projects that had taken up quite a bit of my time over the past 18 months.  One of those projects involved some of those documents -- the MSDTC protocols [MS-CMPO], [MS-CMP], [MS-DTCO], and others.  If you take a look at these documents, you'll find that they describe a fairly complex set of messages, state machines, and inter-component interactions.  Constructing this documentation was a pretty interesting challenge, and one that......

49 of 134 | Disappearing BizTalk Add Generated Items wizard with SQL adapter - I've run into this in two different places now so I figured it was time to blog about it and hopefully help someone else out since I didn't see much about this on the web when searching.  What I experienced was that when I would try to add a schema for a table in SQL Server, the wizard would get part way through allowing me to configure it, and then it would just disappear (usually when I hit the next button after specifying the select state or when I was about to choose the tables for an updategram) with no errors in the UI or in the event log.  I have seen this in two different cases.  In the first case, and easiest to fix, I was trying to access tables to create an update......

50 of 134 | MTPS REST API Updates - Well, I warned you that we'd be updating the MTPS REST API (located at http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/restapistubs/). And we did. A bunch of things have changed. Mostly, I've added new functionality. I did, however, change the way one thing works in a fairly significant way, but it just makes for a good opportunity to talk a bit about how the service works.   If you visit the content section of the service, you'll be given a list of all the content item IDs in the system. (A content item is an atom of information - for example the documentation for one of the overloads of System.Xml.XmlReader.Read.) Right now that list is very short, because we're still not hooked up to the live database, s......