Although the WCF adapter for BizTalk Server 2006 R2 has been released a while ago, I found that a coworker of mine had created a simple and short video explaining all the basics of using the WCF adapter. If you haven’t used the adapter before or just want to see how easy it is to use the adapter, go see the video here.
Although I rarely develop front-end applications, let alone web applications, during my day-to-day job, I’m still practicing the skill in my personal time. Before my interests in application integration started to arise I was very much intrigued by all what is currently known as web 2.0 and Ajax. In the time we would simply call it DHTML, but that term was superseded by the more catchy ones.
So if I see someting passing by that really looks cool and is built using simply Javascript and HTML I always take a quick look at it. This time I was following an e-mail thread on Ajax libraries until Ext JS was suggested. As I’d never heard of it, I went out and looked at the samples. And I must say I’m really impressed with the style, smoothness and functionality of the library. Now I only have to check out how to incorporate this with .Net.
Please do check out the samples at http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/samples.html.
Quote: “Once SQL Server 2008 (…) becomes generally available, we will follow with an updated version of BizTalk Server designed for the latest versions of Windows Server, the .NET Framework, Visual Studio, and SQL Server. This will mean that BizTalk Server customers will continue to take full advantage of the platform’s latest improvements including: scalability for mission-critical workloads, improved support for next-generation web and service oriented applications, improved virtualization support and better business insight through Office.”
http://blogs.msdn.com/stevemar/archive/2008/04/23/biztalk-server-platform-updates.aspx
A lot of people are waiting for a new release of MCE Guide Editor which hopefully fixes the bug that the channel order gets mixed up again after a reboot. Somewhere in the comments of the old post I mentioned I thought I’d found the bug and it was just a matter of days until the fix could be released. I was testing the tool agains a simulated set-up with preconfigured UPC guide listings. Unfortunately things work completely different when using Digital Terrestrial (for instance with FloppyDTV) and my fix didn’t work at all on my real media center setup. This brought me back to square one. I now need to figure out the complete guide listings database structure to be able to figure out how to rearrage the channels. The problem is that the structure is pretty complex and not straightforward. This means I’m still struggling for a fix.
If there are people that know the structure of the media center database or are willing to help me figure it out, please reach out to me by leaving a comment or by dropping me a mail. I hope we can together figure this thing out and release a fix.
IT-talent is an internship project which offers IT-talents an exclusive assignment with a prominent IT company. The goal is to create an unique experience and a solid basis for a successful career in IT. Check out www.it-talenten.nl (Dutch) for more information on this project.
One of the eight participating students is Jonas Butt, who’s doing his internship at Avanade Netherlands. During his internship he’ll try to answer the following research question:
How can Avanade promote the reuse of products (like code, patterns and domain knowledge) from similar projects within the same domain to reduce costs and shorten the run time?
If Jonas manages to make his blog the most interesting and entertaining of all eight he’ll be awarded the IT-talent of the year award. For more information please continue to read his blog.
For about 5 months now I’m running with a couple of friends. We started out with a small route in the woods, but that got a little too dark in the winter. One time I was running right behind one of my fellow runners and I couln’t see anything but his white shoes. Suddenly I noticed the path was way to our right and we were standing somewhere in the middle of some schrubs. We then decided it was time for a new route. We found that route near the woods we used to run. Since then we expanded it to be around 7 kilometers in length. Our last record is about 41 minutes and today we’ll try to beat that. Below an image of the route.
DevDays 2007…I was there, but were you? For those of you living in the Netherlands, Microsoft held the 2007 edition of DevDays and off course Avanade was well represented. On the main plaza you could find our stand where we were running an XNA demo on two giant plasma screens. One was running on a laptop and the other live on a Xbox360. Okay, Avanade doesn’t actually do projects using XNA, but we didn’t mind. In a part of our spare time Eric van Feggelen (http://www.fegelein.com) and I developed sort of a tech demo to show off the power of XNA. Both with little experience in 3D game development (Eric some more than I) we put together a scene rendering with water, clouds, an island and off course our logo.
I’ve put the demo online for you to download. You need at least a videocard that support shader language 2.0 and DirectX9 to run this.
Most of the time I spend on our stand showing off our XNA demo, but I also was able to attend some sessions. Most of the DevDays were about Silverlight and Visual Studio Orca’s, and oh boy, some great stuff is ahead of us. I’m definitely going to play a little with Silverlight and LINQ to SQL, but also with XNA.
Here you can see me in action on the stand 
Today I released the first edition of MCE Guide Editor. I created this tool because of the very long list of channels I got since I use satellite tv. Reordering the channels is a real pain in the ass if you use the Media Center user interface. Here’s where MCE Guide Editor comes in…
MCE Guide Editor allows you to change the order of channels of your Media Center setup in an easy way, using drag and drop. This tool also allow you to exclude channels from appearing in Media Center, thus making the list of channels smaller.
Note: use this tool at your own risk. MCE Guide Editor has been tested on the Dutch version of Vista Media Center.
Any feedback is really appreciated.
So, what are you waiting for? Download it now!
Today I found out that my article on BAM for the Dutch .Net Magazine of december 2006 is published online. It’s an introduction to BAM and I wrote it because I think BAM is far underused at the moment.
If you understand Dutch you might want to check it out here.
Ex-collegue Dick Dijkstra also wrote an article for the same edition of the .Net Magazine. His article is about the new and improved error handling methods in BizTalk Server 2006. You can find his article here (also Dutch).
Today I passed the 70-235 exam, required for earning the MCTS BizTalk Server 2006 certification. About 20% of the questions was related to the Business Rule Engine (BRE) and another 15% to Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). The other questions were all general BizTalk questions, including some questions on Role Links. I found the exam a little difficult, mainly because I haven’t worked with the BRE that much and also haven’t used Role Links. Luckily I took the BizTalk 2006 Deep Dive course by QuickLearn, which gave me the basic knowledge on these subjects.
