All posts by : BizTalk Blogs

1 of 469 | Xbox 360 NXE - Forget Games, The Xbox is a Media Center - What's all this talk about gaming on the Xbox 360? I can't remember the last time I actually played a game on the thing, but I can say that both The Wife and I use it daily. I'd even say she uses the Xbox 360 more than I do. She plays music from the Zune and iPod, she runs photo slideshows for the boys and when we have company. Recently we had a party for my Dad and the Xbox was showing slideshows of him over the years with his favorite music running in the background. My wife and I didn't think anything of it (it seems pretty obvious to us) but oddly enough it was the hit of the party. A half-dozen people were literally freaking out. The Xbox can do that? Why You Should Buy an Xbox 36......

2 of 469 | I'm on MSDN's Endpoint.TV - During a recent trip to Redmond, I was interviewed by Ron Jacobs for his Endpoint.TV series. I had just been shown a bunch of new things, was full of excitement, and we had a great chat about models, clouds, workflow... all my current hot-buttons :) http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Endpoint/endpointtv-WCF-and-WF-40-First-Look-with-Brian-Loesgen/   Enjoy!   Technorati Tags: Oslo,Cloud Computing,WF,Workflow ...

3 of 469 | Speaking at SOAWorld 2008 - In a few hours I will be speaking at SOAWorld about REST and WS-* in the enterprise. The session provide a pragmatic view of the best practices customers are following in order to adopt the REST model in the enterprise and its coexistence with WS-* services...(read more)...

4 of 469 | 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. Check out my new book on REST. ...

5 of 469 | What books should I buy for CSLA .NET? - As the Expert C# 2008 Business Objects book becomes available (now in alpha ebook form, and in paper by the end of this year), I'm getting more questions about what book to buy for different versions of CSLA .NET, and for different .NET technologies. (Expert VB 2008 Business Objects should be out in February 2009. The one unknown with this effort is how quickly the team of volunteers can get the VB port of CSLA .NET 3.6 complete, as I don't think we can release the book until the code is also available for download.) I do have a summary of book editions that is often helpful in understanding what book(s) cover which version of CSLA .NET. But I thought I'd slice and dice ......

6 of 469 | 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)  all......

7 of 469 | Windows 7 Developer Guide released - Also on Code Gallery, in addition to the Vista Bridge, you can find an interesting bit of guidance for those developing Windows 7 applications. This is 43 pages of "what is special about Windows 7" written for developers. Curious about touch and multi touch? Ink? The new taskbar, ribbon, jump lists? Libraries? How to handle previews and thumbnails for your file type? Wondering what Windows Web Services are and how they differ from WCF? (quick answer - WCF is managed, Windows Web Services is native C++ - expect more on that from me when life calms down a little.) It's all in here, with plenty of screenshots. From here you will know where you want to drill......

8 of 469 | BizTalk vs Dublin - Do Not Get Confused - I was reading an interesting blog post today called Will Dublin Replace BizTalk? It got me thinking more about this and I wrote up the response below.  I would love to hear other peoples comments and thoughts on this.  I see a clear separation on when you would use BizTalk vs when you would use Dublin.  I see a great story going forward with both technologies working together.   I welcome comments and feedback on this.  Comment on "Will Dublin Replace BizTalk?" blog post: "I like your article on Dublin and BizTalk but wanted to comment on a few parts. As someone who makes a living working with BizTalk Server my ears perk up when I hear “it is g......

9 of 469 | Implementing EPC Information Services with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 - Recently Krish, lead program manager for BizTalk RFID wrote a post(here) on EPCIS capabilities in our upcoming release BizTalk Server 2009. Same time we have been working on providing guidance to our customers and partners on how they can extend BizTalk Server 2006 R2 to deploy EPCIS applications. The white paper on this topic has been posted on MSDN. Following is brief intro to the topic and link to detailed White Paper.  This goal of this document is to provide architectural guidance on how an enterprise can implement EPC Information Services using the suite of relevant products and technologies from Microsoft. As such, its audience consists of architects, analysts, developers, ......

10 of 469 | Live Search API "Silk Road" - Yesterday, Microsoft announced the release of Live Search services "Silk Road". Silk Road is Live Search's new set of search APIs (version 2.0 beta) and services for developers. With Silk Road, you can build applications without restrictions around presentation. Getting started is simple: decide what search content you want, choose from JSON, SOAP, or XML output, and then customize them according to your needs to build your own search application. All you need to get going is an AppID. The API is very thorough and will enable some very interesting scenarios as well as an opportunity to monetize your search results (as well as enhancing your site's 404 experience). Earlier this week I wr......

11 of 469 | The Future of WCF, Part 1 - It's been two years since we shipped the first release of WCF (codenamed Indigo). It was actually even a little before that that I started thinking about what features we should include in the upcoming .NET 4.0 release. The first time that I wrote down a list of features that I was targeting for improvement was the summer before, approximately two and a half years ago. There is always a period of time towards the end of a release where every addition is scrutinized too closely to add a new piece of work but the old pieces of work no longer require the continuous attention of everyone on the team. This is typically one of those creative periods where people are doing things such as t......

12 of 469 | 1 Question Survey on Configuration - Since I did the survey question on extensibility, I thought I'd do this followup on configuration. The two are often talked about together but have very different needs. Question: What's the one thing you would change about how configuration is done for WCF applications?Pick anything you want about the configuration format, tooling, integration with service code, or other topics as you'd like, but try to keep in mind that this is for an application that uses WCF. It's ok if the details of the change have to do with IIS or other products though. ...

13 of 469 | Biztalk Server: What's wrong with the UDDI Features of the The ESB Guidance Toolkit v1? - I spent some time today looking at Microsoft's Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Guidance Toolkit, and this reminded me of an issue which we noticed a year ago, and did attempt to raise with Microsoft at the time, but which I never blogged about.   It's always a little uncomfortable taking the good people at Redmond to task, but, while this is hardly the most urgent problem facing today's world, it is, nevertheless, a bit of a problem and something which should be addressed. In the article, I discuss the problem, where the Toolkit goes wrong, how UDDI should be used, and a possible remedy.    The article is at http://geekswithblogs.net/cyoung/archive/2008/11/12/126975.aspx. ...

14 of 469 | Fluent Interfaces and Flowcharts - In a previous post, I talked about modeling flowcharts with C# code. The flowcharts are designed, documented, and standardized  by a non-profit  organization charged with measuring the quality of patient care inside of hospitals. They do so by looking at common cases that every hospital will see, like heart failure and pneumonia patients. The logic inside each flowchart can determine if the hospital followed the “best practices” for treating each type of case. Some of the logic becomes quite elaborate, particularly when evaluating the types of antibiotics a patient received, and the antibiotic timings, relative orderings, and routes of administration. Sitting down with 100 of pag......

15 of 469 | TechEd Developer 2008 - I had the pleasure of being in Barcelona this week for the TechEd Developer conference.  Highlights – getting to talk to several hundred developers about WF / WCF / Dublin /Oslo.  Lowlights – it’s Barcelona, what could be a lowlight? TechEd capped off the most interesting 8 weeks I’ve ever had in software.  In under two months we’ve had major iterations on virtually all the technologies that we drive in CSD.  It started out with a roadmap update on BizTalk Server where we provided some more detail  on BTS2009 and also talked about the next two major releases.    Next, we announced major updates to WF and WCF and introduced “Dublin”.  After tha......

16 of 469 | Screencast: Content Based Correlation in Workflow 4.0 - What is Correlation?  Correlation is when a process sends a message out and that same process is expecting a response to be returned to the same instance of that process. The complexity rises when the messaging patterns become asynchronous or the process becomes long running.  Asynchronous and long running processes are a common scenario inside business processes today. BizTalk Server is great at correlation inside Orchestrations given the publish and subscribe architecture of BizTalk Server. BizTalk supports both system based correlation (based on a Send Port or File Name) and content based correlation using specific values inside the message.  Content based correlation fit......

17 of 469 | 1 Question Extensibility Survey - WCF has a whole lot of extensibility points. Many of those extensibility points use similar systems for describing and installing extensions, but overall you still end up with multiple ways of doing extensibility depending on what you're extending. The Managed Extensibility Framework is a standardized plugin model for dynamically composing applications. If you haven't heard of MEF before, there's an introduction on the site, a short demo together with Visual Studio, and a longer explanation. These types of plugin frameworks seem to be increasingly popular as a way of extending the application development experience. Question: How would you expect a more uniform model fo......

18 of 469 | Modeling Flowcharts - A few months ago I worked on a system that was based on a set specifications that included some gnarly flowcharts (see pages 7 – 17 for an example). The good news was that the specs were concrete and readily available. The bad news was that the specs change every 6 months. I explored a number of options for modeling the logic in the flowcharts, including WF, WF rules, and code generation from XML, but ultimately decided on staying as close as possible to the flowcharts with C# code. Maintainability and testability were the keys to survival. The end result of building a flowchart in code looks like the following:var flowChart = new Flowchart<PnemoniaCaseData, MeasureResult>() ......

19 of 469 | Teched EMEA 2008 - I'm at Teched EMEA 2008 this week in Barcelona until Friday. I'm presenting several sessions on a variety of topics that I'm excited about including the Windows Azure Service Bus (part of the .NET Services layer), a first look at WF 4.0, moving towards Web 2.0 with WCF (primarily REST), and the WCF LOB Adapter SDK. If you're here this week, hope to see you in one of my sessions. I have some Pluralsight t-shirts I'll be giving away. Also, if you're interested in our Pluralsight On-Demand offering, find one of the Pluralsight guys this week (Jon, Brian, Ian or me) and we'll give you a registration card for a special Teched discount....

20 of 469 | New and Notable 278 - Oslo/M/CSD/WCF/WF/Dublin/.NET Services Doug Purdy makes the case for Oslo Dave Chappell takes a First Look at WF 4.0, Dublin, and Oslo Aaron on Introducing Oslo Aaron on Oslo and the Future of BizTalk .NET Services: MSDN Developer Center The Service Bus Bindings and WAS/IIS David Chappell introduces Geneva The Web Services Track Adding documentation to WCF Restful services with the REST Starter Kit Conditional Puts in REST Technorati Tags: Oslo,WF,Dublin,BizTalk,CSD,.NET Services,Geneva,REST ...

21 of 469 | Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference 2009 Call for Content - As you know, our next Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference will be taking place January 26-30, 2009 in Redmond, WA.  At this time, we’re still accepting session submissions and would love to hear your stories on how you are using a SOA & BPM solutions today to lower costs and achieve your business objectives.   Case studies describing best practices and lessons learned provide unrivaled insight and perspective from the in-the-trenches work that you are engaging in everyday.  We realize that our customers would rather hear from peers, which is why we have dedicated a majority of our sessions for customer stories.  Session submissions: Sessions are 1 h......

22 of 469 | Using ASP.NET Dynamic Data with the Windows Workflow Foundation Rules Engine - In this post, I will show how to use the Windows Workflow Foundation rules engine to provide business logic for a Dynamic Data Entites Web Application.  We will show how to change business rules without modifying code, drive the application based on a logical entity model, and map the entity model to a data store. I have to admit that I am in awe of how easy this was to do.  Create the Dynamic Data Entities Web Application To start, open Visual Studio 2008 with SP1 installed and create a new Dynamic Data Entities Web Application.  This will generate what seems at first to be a lot of code, but once you peek under the hood you will see that it's really just templating code......

23 of 469 | Tech Ed EMEA BPM Briefing Scheduled for 11 November 2008 -   Tuesday 11 November 13:30 -18:15 AC Barcelona Hotel, 3rd Floor (Attached to the CCIB) The Microsoft Business Process Alliance will be sponsoring a briefing on Microsoft’s Business Process Management (BPM) strategy, discussing how we partner with ISVs to build high value solutions, what developers need to know to leverage these solutions and reviewing a number of significant product announcements from the last 60 days.   13:30-14:45 David Chappell MICROSOFT AND BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT (BPM): A TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW What is BPM, and why should developers care? How does BPM relate to SOA? And what can you really do today with BPM technologies? This session takes a look......

24 of 469 | Screencast: Using the WCF Receive Activity in a workflow - My latest screencast in the Windows WF developer screencast series has been loaded up as of this morning.  In this session, I discuss the basics of using WF to implement an operation in a WCF service, or using WF as the implementation of a WCF service by using the Receive activity.  I show you how to use this activity to implement an operation processing the input parameters and returning the result.  In addition, I do a quick walk through of using the WorkflowServiceHost class to host the workflow service and expose an endpoint for client applications to call.    Endpoint Screencasts - Using the WCF Receive Activity in Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)   &nb......

25 of 469 | WCF REST Starter Kit - Now that I'm mostly caught up with reporting on sessions from PDC, I'll start talking a bit about the future of WCF that we announced during the conference. The REST Starter Kit is actually something that is available now rather than coming in the next release of the framework. We had been thinking for a while about the state of REST support for the platform and decided to bring together guidance and samples for how to use this architectural style with WCF. The starter kit includes some experimental framework classes, Visual Studio templates, code samples, and documentation to better enable you to create applications in the REST style using WCF. Some of these resources are focused o......

26 of 469 | "Oslo" and the future of BizTalk Server - “Oslo” is a new modeling platform being developed by Microsoft that promises to simplify the way we design, build, and manage systems on Windows. Check out my last post on Introducing "Oslo" for more details. Because CSD also includes the teams responsible for Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), and BizTalk Server, it stands to reason that “Oslo” is related to these technologies to some degree. It’s also reasonable to question what future impact, if any, “Oslo” might have on your applications that were built using these CSD technologies. There are many similarities between the current version of BizTalk Server and some of concepts that “Oslo”......

27 of 469 | First Look Screen Shots of Windows Application Server - Dublin - Make sure you check out the video content on Dublin available on BizTalkGurus.com: First Look at Windows Application Server (Dublin) Dublin is the code name for the new Windows Application Server components.  At the core, Dublin is designed to be a hosting environment for Windows Workflow and Windows Communication Foundation based applications.  It integrates into IIS and provides eight new features out of the box.  If you have worked with BizTalk Server 2006 in the past, as we walk through the next few screen shots keep saying to yourself.... "this is not BizTalk this is a new Application".  The likeness to BizTalk 2006 will make adoption by fellow BizTalkers......

28 of 469 | Interviewed on Channel 9 - I was in Redmond a few weeks ago looking at the new stuff that Microsoft's Connected System Division (CSD) were working on (WF 4.0, REST Toolkit, Oslo, Dublin). At the end of the week I did an interview for Ron Jacobs for Endpoint.tv on Channel 9. We discussed WF 4.0, Dublin, Oslo and M - as well as 150 person Guerrilla courses. You can watch it here ...

29 of 469 | Introducing "Oslo" - At this year’s PDC, Microsoft announced a new technology called “Oslo”. This article aims to help you understand the vision of “Oslo”, how it fits into the bigger picture as a Microsoft developer, and some of the key features it will ultimately provide in the years ahead. What is “Oslo”? “Oslo” is a new modeling platform being developed by the Connected Systems Division (CSD) at Microsoft. CSD includes the teams responsible for Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), BizTalk Server, and other related technologies. The “Oslo” modeling platform promises to simplify the way we design, build, and manage systems using these CSD technologies, as well as potential......

30 of 469 | PDC Download - Part 2: .NET Services - .NET Services is a block of functionality layered on top of the Azure platform. This project has had a couple of names in the past – BizTalk Services when it was an incubation project and then Zurich as it was productionized.   .NET Services consists of three services: 1)      Identity 2)      The Service Bus 3)      Workflow   Lets talk about identity first. Officially named the .NET Access Control Service, this provides you a Security Token Service (STS) that you can use to configure how different forms of authentication map into claims (it leverages the......

31 of 469 | A First Look at WF 4.0, Dublin, and Oslo - Lots of interesting new technology is on the horizon from Microsoft. Among it is a set of interlated things from the company's Connected Systems Division. This group includes:WF 4.0, which is the next release of Windows Workflow FoundationDublin, a new server for WF applications and others Oslo, a modeling platform that can be applied in lots of different ways.I've written a Microsoft-sponsored white paper introducing these three, attempting (as usual) to paint the big picture. If this picture sounds interesting to you, the paper is available here....

32 of 469 | SOA, EDA, and CEP a winning combo - There’s been some discussion on the SOA yahoo group around the connection between SOA, EDA, and CEP (complex event processing) since Jack’s original post on the topic. I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity to jump in and it seems to have come. Dennis asked this: There are different design choices in a SOA, even when [...]...

33 of 469 | New and Notable 276 - CSD/Geneva/Oslo/BizTalk Services/.NET Services I'm leading off with agreement with my friend Aaron Skonnard's asessment of all things CSD in his post, "If you're a Microsoft Connected Systems developer, and you're at the PDC this week, you're swimming in a sea of new technologies that will surely impact your life in the years ahead." Just when I was feeling a little weary of all  things CSD, they have blown me away again and got me back in the fold Speaking of Aaron, I was a Beta Tester for his company's new online service called Pluralsight On-Demand. Think of it as training in the Cloud. Fantastic training on all subjects .NET from the best t......

34 of 469 | Adapter Pack v2 - CTP4 !! - Adapter Pack CTP 4  is here and we have added a lot more features based on some feedback we have been getting from various channels. So here is the list of major enhancements SQL adapter Support for “for xml” style procedures used commonly with v1 SQL adapter Oracle EBS Adapter - support for    Request Sets Selecting Application Context using BizTalk Message Context Properties Oracle EBS installations with Multi language systems  Windows integrated authentication of the DB user Setting Print/Repeat/General options and submitting the request in a single operation for Request Sets and Concurrent Programs   As always, if you want to try this CTP&n......

35 of 469 | First Look Screen Shots of Workflow 4.0 - Make sure you check out the video content on Workflow 4.0 available at BizTalkGurus.com: Consuming WCF Services in Workflow 4.0 Flowcharts and Rules in Workflow 4.0 Windows Workflow 4.0 is a major upgrade to the existing Microsoft workflow technology.  As part of this upgrade, the designer has been enhanced to account for new features and increase the developer experience.  Below is a screen shot of a basic sequential workflow. A cool feature, that is not shown here, is the dynamically changing gray arrows.  If a new shape is dragged over between the Persist and Delay shape above, the gray arrow would expand.  On the bottom left of the surface is the new Variable......

36 of 469 | Keep an Eye on PDC 08 here - Hi guys - there's a bunch of stuff going on right now at PDC 08 in LA. What's hot: (If you're on a PDA/Mobile - grab a the PDC from here - http://www.microsoftpdc.com/mobile/) Here's a select set of recorded sessions up on Channel 9- http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/PDC08/  OSLO Oslo” is the code name for our platform for model-driven applications. The goal of “Oslo” is to provide a 10x productivity gain by making model-driven applications mainstream with domain-specific models, languages and tools. Public Oslo(BizTalk vNext next) Site - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/oslo/default.aspx Oslo Downloads here - http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/oslo ......

37 of 469 | New and Notable 275 - After a flurry of PDC specific posts, back to a mixture. Architecture I wanted to give a big mention to the release of patterns & practices: App Architecture Guide 2.0 Beta 1 release. I did a little bit of review work on this and I do believe this is a very useful guide for practicing architects packed with guidelines and information. Oslo/M/REST Starter Kit More Oslo/"M" First Look Screen Shots of Microsoft's Modeling Platform - Oslo Adding caching to WCF RESTful services using the REST Starter Kit More ....in progress... ...

38 of 469 | About "Dublin" - Microsoft have announced "Dublin" in September, but up until now (PDC) there' has been very little information about how that is going to look now. Over at PDC are finally able to see some sessions as well as visit the various .net booths and get first hand look at the "bits" and ask questions about the new technologies. However, at this time of writing this, I have not yet attended any Dublin sessions, which really means anything I write here currently is stipulating on some stuff I've seen and heard "in the corridors of PDC". I have, however, spent enough time at WCF/WF booth to probably make them call me various names behind my back (I'm sure) :-) and I ......

39 of 469 | Adding caching to WCF RESTful services using the REST Starter Kit - As promised, this is the first of a series of posts that intend to cover the new capabilities implemented in the WCF REST Starter Kit to enhance the development of RESTful services using WCF. Specifically, this post is focus on how to enable caching on...(read more)...

40 of 469 | Announcing Pluralsight On-Demand - Today at PDC we officially announced our new online training product called Pluralsight On-Demand. Pluralsight On-Demand is a web-based subscription service providing developers access to hours of searchable and browse-able .NET developer training. This content is the same as what you'd receive in one of our instructor-led courses, only you can hit pause and replay whenever you want. This compelling model puts you in control of your training. With Pluralsight On-Demand, you can get the in-depth training you need on a variety of different topics whenever you need it, from any computer with a Web browser. You decide what topics are worthy of your valuable time. The initial Pluralsight ......

41 of 469 | Microsoft Connected Systems: PDC 2008 - If you're a Microsoft Connected Systems developer, and you're at the PDC this week, you're swimming in a sea of new technologies that will surely impact your life in the years ahead. There are too many specific things to enumerate in one post but there are several major themes: Windows Azure - the new Microsoft cloud services platform, essentially "Windows in the Cloud" (MSDN) WCF REST Starter Kit - providing enhanced WCF REST extensions, APIs and project templates (MSDN) .NET Framework 4.0 - major improvements to WCF and WF (see WCF and WF dev centers) Codename "Dublin" - the Windows Application Server for WCF and WF applications Codename "Oslo&quo......

42 of 469 | Microsoft takes REST to the next level: the WCF REST Starter Kit - The first version of WCF didn't have any built-in REST support. WCF 3.5 introduced a "Web" programming model that enabled REST service development scenarios (through classes like WebServiceHost, WebServiceHostFactory, WebHttpBehavior, WebHttpBinding, WebGetAttribute, WebInvokeAttribute, UriTemplate, etc). However, building RESTful services today with WCF 3.5 still leaves a lot to be desired. At PDC this week, Microsoft announced the WCF REST Starter Kit, which makes building RESTful services with WCF much easier. You can download the WCF REST Starter Kit from CodePlex. It comes with a new library of APIs, both new classes and extension methods, that address some of the common ......

43 of 469 | Pluralsight On-Demand is now live! - I've been rather dark over the last couple of months as I helped to finish up Pluralsight's online training offering, Pluralsight On-Demand. I'm psyched that we finally shipped! Be sure to check it out soon (you can preview bits of each course right now for free), as we're offering a limited-time early adopter discount that's good for the life of your subscription. Our online courses are told by the authors themselves, with names that you'll recognize, as many are MSDN Magazine contributing editors and book authors on their topics. Courses we now offer online include: WCF Fundamentals by Aaron Skonnard Windows Workflow Fundamentals, by Matt Milner WPF Fundamentals, ......

44 of 469 | Some Thoughts on Oslo - I’ve started playing with the Oslo bits a little, and I thought I’d share a couple of thoughts on the platform and its tools: M – The Language M is an interesting beast, but to me the most interesting part of the platform to start with. In particular, I’m looking forward to playing with the MGrammar stuff. I’m not thrilled about the close relationship between M (and its tooling) to SQL, though. In particular, I really think that Don Box and friends really need to find a better example to introduce Models and M; it was painfully obvious (at least to me) during the M language talk that many people just weren’t getting it. ......

45 of 469 | Videos on Modeling (Oslo), Windows Application Server (Dublin), and .Net 4.0 Workflow - Today is a great day to be a BizTalk Developer! Why? Microsoft has introduced .Net 4.0, Windows Application Server (Dublin), and Microsoft’s Modeling Platform (Oslo).  These new technologies compliment the existing Connection System technologies. As you look though the various technologies one thing is consistent: Take the best things of BizTalk and allow others outside of BizTalk to leverage it! I’ve put together over an hour of first look videos to help show the new features of Microsoft’s latest offerings. The following videos are now available on BizTalkGurus.com: First Look at Windows Application Server (Dublin) – If you do not watch anything else, watch this video! This video t......

46 of 469 | Fowler's Must Read Post on Oslo, M Language and Quadrant - Martin has a must-read post on Oslo, the M Language, and Quadrant, all in the language of his DSL book.Some highlights: Oslo has three main components: a modeling language (currently code-named M) for textual DSLs a design surface (named Quadrant) for graphical DSLs a repository (without a name) that stores semantic models in a relational database. The textual language environment is bootstrapped and provides three base languages: MGrammar: defines grammars for Syntax Directed Translation. MSchema: defines schemas for a Semantic Model MGraph: is a textual language for representing the population of a Semantic Model. So while MSchema represents types, MGraph represents instan......

47 of 469 | What is Oslo and Oslo Announcements at the PDC - Along with my posts on Oslo's Coming Out Party at the PDC and the Oslo Developer Center and CTP Download, I thought I would have this direct, simple post on what exactly Oslo is at this point, and exactly what parts of Oslo have been announced at the PDC. This is an info-only topic. I will have analysis and commentary later. What is Oslo? Oslo" is the code name for Microsoft's platform for model-driven applications.  The goal of “Oslo” is to provide 10x productivity by making model-driven applications mainstream.  The Oslo Modeling Platform provides a fundamental change both in how people create and maintain a solution and in how software runs and controls a system.......

48 of 469 | PDC Day 1 - Windows Azure - Day 1 at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008, Ray Ozzie, announced Windows Azure, the cloud-based service foundation underlying its Azure Services Platform, and highlighted this platform’s role in delivering a software plus services approach to computing. The Azure Services Platform is an industry-leading move by Microsoft to help developers build the next generation of applications that will span from the cloud to the enterprise datacenter and deliver compelling new experiences across the PC, Web and phone.Ozzie described how this platform combines cloud-based developer capabilities with storage, computational and networking infrastructure services, all hosted on servers ......

49 of 469 | PDC Day 1 – Azure Services Platform, CTP availability and much more! - Well, we’re finally here, on the ground in LA at PDC. After months of speculation, chatter and building curiosity about Microsoft’s next move in the cloud space, we’ve officially gone on record with the details.  It’s always interesting to take a quick look back at what’s been said up to this point; I have to say, some folks got it right and some were way off. My hope is that the details Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia provided in today’s keynote kick off a fact-based ‘round two’ of these industry discussions.   And while we’re all ready to celebrate, I want to take a moment to re-emphasize what a critical day this is.   It’s not just critical for Microsoft, but for partner......

50 of 469 | PDC Keynote- Day 1 - Ray Ozzie set the stage by talking about how cloud computing is all about moving to the next level of web applications and services that need to reach your customers.  The traditional data center model takes a lot of resources to manage all of the data centers, servers, etc. involving dealing with resources like electricity, networking, local laws, etc.  Microsoft, and other cloud vendors can help meet these challenges by using their skills and experience in managing data centers, as well as their deep pockets, to build out the infrastructure, tools, and services to help meet this demand.  Windows Azure is the new name for Windows in the cloud.  It provides a core set o......