Biztalk Patterns

My SharePoint Development Environment

2010-11-28T15:06:00.002-05:00

I have seen many blog posts on using a variety of configurations to run SharePoint 2010, MOSS, WSS, etc. Most of the solutions that I have seen, they revolved around having a hosted machine to run the development environment.

Face it, developing SharePoint solutions is not an easy task. There are so many different factors that can affect your results. The best way IMHO, to create SharePoint solutions is to have a SERVER OS Environment. Since Microsoft VM does not support creating 64bit images, you are left with either Sun’s VirtualBox or VMWare. Regardless of which of these 2 you choose, you still have to deal with the fact that you will run a hosted environment inside your machine.

One of the cool tip I got from AC (#BuckeyeSPUG meeting), was to use Windows Virtual Host. Since I am running Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, I decide to give it a try. This is my laptop configuration:

Hardware: Dell Vostro 1520, 6GB RAM, 320GB HD. OS: Win7 x64 Ultimate edition.

Step 1: Make sure your laptop supports Hardware Virtualization. You will need to enable this setting on your BIOS. If you have the Dell Vostro 1510 you are out of luck (asked me how I know… ;). A: It supports virtualization, but it is disable on the bios.. WTF..!

Step 2: You need to get a bootable image. For more information, check this article on Technet about VHD Support in Win7.

You will need to use the Windows Image to Virtual converter tool Wim2VHD. Get it from http://Code.msdn.microsoft.com/wim2vhd

Get your Win2008_R2 iso and mount it. Run the following command to extract a bootable image. In my case, the iso image is mounted on the F: drive. Also, I put all of the output inside a root folder named vhd.

cscript wim2vhd.wsf
- /WIM:f:\sources\install.wim
- /SKU:SERVERSTANDARD
- /SIZE:51200
- /VHD:c:\vhd\SP2010\win2k8_r2SP2010.vhd

Step 3: Now you need to get familiar with BCDEdit (Boot Configuration Data Store Editor). .

Once you have your bootable image, then you can create multiple boot configurations:

bcdedit /copy {current} /d "Win2008R2 SP2010 Base Dev"

This will return a GUID. Copy that GUID, you will need it for another step.

bcdedit /set {returnedGUID-in-here} device vhd="[c:]\vhd\Base2010\win2k8_r2SP2010.vhd"
bcdedit /set {returnedGUID-in-here} osdevice vhd="[c:]\vhd\Base2010\win2k8_r2SP2010.vhd"

Now when you reboot, you will see another entry in your boot menu:

Pros: I can run my virtualized environment with full access to 6GB of RAM and no overhead of running a host system.

Pros: Another benefit is that I dont have to go buy a Solid State drive to see the improved performance.

Pros: You can attach/managed any VHD using your Win7 Disk Management Console

Pros: The best part of this configuration = MULTIPLE MONITORS.... :)

MOSS 2007 – Configure Incoming email

2010-10-02T10:01:00.000-04:00

Reading through these 2 technet articles, you get the main idea on how to set this up

Plan incoming e-mail (Windows SharePoint Services)

and in here

Configure incoming e-mail settings (Windows SharePoint Services)

In Windows Server 2008 R2, there are some steps that are different from the technet articles. My environment is as follow:

First is to add the SMTP server feature. Open Server Manager, add features, and select the SMTP Server

once you click on this, it will bring another dialog box, prompting you to add more role services

It seems that it requires the SMTP Server Tools from the Remote Server Administration Role, and also the ODBC Logging.

click Add required button and continue. Now click on the Next button on the features wizard.

On the confirmation screen you can verify these 2 new roles

Click install.

After the installation, Open IIS 7, and under the Features View, double-click SMTP Email.

Click on Apply.

Now go back to MOSS Central Administration and click on the Incoming e-mail settings task for the Administrator

On the item, task, select the Action: Configure Incoming E-Mail Settings.

After you have configure the incoming email you can now receive emails on our SharePoint document libraries. Now you can follow the instructions on this article to get those emails inside your document library enable/configured email article.

How to Pre-Populate MySites with Pictures in SharePoint

2010-09-22T22:00:00.000-04:00

Allowing MySites in a SharePoint environment is good. But you have to put some governance into it.

Maybe one of the requirements from the HR department is to have only official taken pictures of all employees. Make this easy to update, but do not allow the employee to change that information.

Maybe, we need to avoid employees from uploading pictures on reflectives surfaces (bing keywords: ebay pictures kettle).

Anyways, the solution is to give control where control is needed. In our case, we want the HR department to control what pictures are displayed and we want this process to be painless for them.

I have seen another solution in which they store the picture inside the AD. But that solution is very cumbersome and not very user friendly. Not to mention, that it will make the size of your AD database grow exponentially.

Here is an easier way. Store the pictures in a picture library and then just store the url inside a custom field in your AD. There are 5 easy steps.

Step 1: create a picture library to hold pictures (duh.)

Step 2: Modify your AD to put the url of the picture into the ExtensionAttribute1 field

Step 3: Map your AD field to the SharePoint field, and don't forget to set this field to Read-Only mode

mapped the field.

Step 4: import your user profiles from AD

Step 5: crawl through the user profiles to populate the information.

To test this, perform a search

there, Picture is display correctly.!

Doing the right thing

2010-09-15T23:00:00.000-04:00

It’s been almost 2 months since I have left the independent life to become a full time employee. I have found a small consulting company that shares most of the personal goals that I have in mind. This company name is Halcyon. The main message is “to seek happiness for our customers and employees”.

Before entering into negotiations with them, I thought they were just another consulting company. However, after meeting with the owner of the company and see his passion for charity work I’ve change my mind.

It is very refreshing to find a company with such high ideals. While most companies I have come in contact with, have a few individuals that are very dedicated to help others, this company is different. We are ~~obligated~~ encouraged to do community service. As a good citizen, you are to do the right thing for others. You know that, and I know that. But, when that command comes from the owner of the company, it trickles down to the all of the employees, and you can feel the effect.

Of course there are other perks like YOGA classes every other week. (which I have yet to attend one… ;) So, in short, Halcyon is trying to bring a balance between your work and your personal life. The fulfillment that comes from helping others is very different than the one you get when you get your paycheck.

Mohan latest project is to help integrate war veterans back into IT. Not just office work training, but actual programming training.! I am just happy to be a part of this initiate of giving back to those that put their lives in danger for us. If all of us took the time to do a good deed every day, the world would be a different place…

Another aspect that I enjoy is the dogfood. We are not only preaching SharePoint, but our CEO firmly believe in this technology. We have BPOS as the technology for our intranet connecting both of our offices (US, India). Also our website is built on SharePoint (soon to be SharePoint 2010). Find out if your company uses SharePoint or just claiming to use SharePoint how to tell if a site is running SharePoint?

In all I am excited to start a new phase in my life and in my professional career.

Using Excel as a Source for your Data Generation Plan in Visual Studio 2010

2010-07-25T23:31:00.000-04:00

I like to use DataDude for almost anything related to SQL Server. I use the data generation feature quite a lot. Most of the times, I am happy with the string randomly(RegEx) created by it. However, I encounter a situation in which I needed the random source to be in a group while still preserving the randomness of the wizard.

Of course, I could have created a SQL server temp table and use that as my sequential data bound field. However, I wanted to try to see if I could use a different source.

I’ve created a simple CSV with 3 columns, that I’ll use to populate my SQL server project.

Notice the name of the columns, and also the name of the worksheet. You will need those for later.

Assuming your SQL Server Database has a table named CommtDefn.

Import the schema into a SQL server project in Visual Studio 2010. After you have imported your schema in your solution, you would be ready to populate this table with data.

First step, is to add a new data generation plan, then select the table CommtDefn and, select the first column.

Your Data Generation plan would initially look like this

Select the first column and choose the Sequential data bound generator option.

Under the properties window, select <Add new connection..>

then on the Data source screen, select <other>. For the data provider, use the ODBC provider, and not the OLE DB Provider as instructed in MSDN. Now click Continue

On the connection properties, select the Use Connection string. NOTE: the trick in here is to specify the type of connection we are going to use

So in this box type the following:

Dsn=Excel Files

Now, click the build button. A dialog box will pop up asking you to select the Data Source, click OK to dismiss this dialog box. This action will bring another dialog box where you can specify the actual excel file you want to use.!!

Select your Excel worksheet, and then click OK. The Use Connection string field is populate with the proper connection string:

Dsn=Excel Files;dbq=C:\vsProjects\2010\PowerShell.SQL\PowerShell.SQL\Excel CSV\Committees.xlsx;defaultdir=C:\vsProjects\2010\PowerShell.SQL\PowerShell.SQL\Excel CSV;driverid=1046;maxbuffersize=2048;pagetimeout=5

Click on the Test Connection button, make sure it is successful. Click OK twice to close all dialog boxes.

Go back to your Properties window and write the following query

SELECT * FROM [CommitteesDefinitions$]

In here, don’t forget to enclose the name of the worksheet in parenthesis and also you need to add the “$” at the end of it.

Your screen should now look like this

Now if you go back to the data generation screen, you will see that the Generator Output column has been populated with the columns extracted from the Excel worksheet.!!

* BTW, there is a MSDN article on how to generate data from an excel spreadsheet, but after following those instructions I could not get that to work with VS2010 data generated plans.

How to remove SQL Mirroring from MOSS 2007

2010-06-29T01:27:00.000-04:00

So mirroring technology with SharePoint 2007 does not seem to be working as expected. As a consequence, the decision to remove it from our production servers was made.

I have been trying to remove the mirroring from the SQL Serve 2008 R2, and it still shows the Mirror Databases on the secondary server. Worse, the status does not change, it is still showing as (Restoring).

from the MSDN, this is supposed to be an easy step: ms189112 but it is not.!

As you can see, my SQL1 server has the actual databases, while SQL2 is supposed to have the mirrors of SQL1.

A quick search on the internet turned nothing to the (Restoring…) status message. Connecting to the second SQL Server and trying to delete the database were encountered with failure.

TITLE: Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio
------------------------------

Alter failed for Database 'SPSProd_Main_Search'. (Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo)

For help, click: Some useless article on MSDN

------------------------------
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

An exception occurred while executing a Transact-SQL statement or batch. (Microsoft.SqlServer.ConnectionInfo)

------------------------------

ALTER DATABASE is not permitted while a database is in the Restoring state.
ALTER DATABASE statement failed. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 5052)

Then I went into the query editor and ran the

DROP DATABASE <databasename> from the master databases. It worked.!

Command(s) completed successfully.!  :)

How to Synchronize LiveWriter’s blog drafts using LiveMesh

2010-04-26T23:22:00.000-04:00

Technorati Tags: Live Mesh,Live Writer,HowTo

I have a myriad of environments that I am working with.

Windows XP Pro, Vista x64, Win 7 Ultimate x64, Win 7 Home Premium x86, Win Server 2008 R2.

Throughout the day I am in any one of these environments. I would get an idea for a blog post, then I start to write a draft. Next thing you know, I am out to do something else so I save the blog post as a draft and exit live writer. However, there are times when I could dedicate a couple of minutes to continue that draft (Dr's appt which are the norm and not the exception lately.. :(. Come to find out that I've written the latest updates on a different computer. I began to research on the practicality of using an online storage.

Experimented with Dropbox for a little bit. It works ok for single files, but it is not very flexible for blogging.

So, I have started to use Live Mesh to keep all of my drafts, that under different locations, into a single repository. The only problem with Live Writer is that it does not allow you to specify the location in which to save the drafts/posts (Build 14.0.8089.726)

The trick to get Live Mesh to synch all of the content, is to find the path where the drafts are stored. I have compiled a handy table of paths for the OS'es I've used:

Environment	Path
XP Pro	C:\Documents and Settings\arnulfo\My Documents\My Weblog Posts

Vista	C:\Users\Arnulfo\Documents\My Weblog Posts

Win 7	C:\Users\arnulfo\Documents\My Weblog Posts

Then all you have to do is setup your Live Mesh folder to point to these locations.

Go to your Mesh folders, Manage Folders

Then when you set the folder in Live Mesh, specify the correct path location depending on the OS you are running. For i.e. this the default location for Win 7

I change it to

That’s it.! Now if you go to the Live Mesh Folders and check the synch settings

you will see all of the devices where my blog draft/post will be synchronized.

happy blogging… :)

Installing SQL Server 2008 x64

2009-09-10T18:06:00.000-04:00

If you want to have the DAT and LOG files on a separate drive, perform the standard setup and choose the default values.

On the feature selection window, make your selection and DO NOT CHANGE the location where your shared features will be.

If you do so, you will get this error message, and WILL have to restart the installation all over.

The INSTANCESHAREDWOWDIR command line value was not specified. This value must be specified when the INSTANCESHAREDDIR value is specified.

Read about it from the msdn knowledge base 955458.

Funny, it complaints about INSTANCESHAREDDIR when it is really looking for the WOW64 shared components directory INSTALLSHAREDWOWDIR.

Check the Configuration file path at the Ready To Install screen:

If you open this ConfigurationFile.ini you will see the entries what the boot strapper is looking for.

Continuing with the default installation, you will get to the Database Engine Configuration screen, that’s is where you can specify the location for the DAT and LOG files.

Non-intuitive, IMHO.

My Developer Environment

2009-05-27T09:51:00.000-04:00

I’ve read Steve Smith post regarding Developer’s Machine. Great post. Got me thinking about my development environment…

Background: to fully understand the whole lifecycle of a solution, you need to know not just Unit test or integration tests. But also about the backend/infrastructure where this application would eventually live.

For instance, I have been involved in several integration projects at different clients. The solution calls for situations that involved multiple users, multiple roles, multiple permission profiles. Yet, they only provided me with a SINGLE account to their environment to fully test my application.!

Being an integration geek, you need to have a bigger bag of utilities to help you being certain that your app works as intended. IMHO, you not only need to know about IIS settings/security, but also about AD, Clustering, SQL roles, etc. And it is not enough to just READ it from a blog. You need to experienced it and work with it. You need to be a JOAT.

Ideally, like Steve’s view, the Developer workstation will be both mobile and desktop. It is nice to be able to take that mobile environment with you. However, most of the times while working at home, I would trade my portability for some speed and flexibility. I like desktops with Dual screens (wish I had more than 2 monitors… :) and full size keyboards. I like to feel a mouse and not those annoying keypads/touchpads. Yes, I do HATE touchpads…!

I had built my own controlled environment (SandBox). This is so that I can experience what the network operator/admin that is going to inherit my application would experience. Under this controlled environment, I can test the full cycle of my software (deployment, running, integration) . Nothing worse that going into a client’s environment and say: “… but, it works on my machine…”

I know that now a days, with VM’s (VPC/VMWare), building a Sandbox environment is easier and cheaper. However, there are pros/cons for virtualization vs real machines. I feel that my investment was well spent. My future upgrade will be to beef up my SQL server (still keeping it as a real machine). Then put a couple of VM’s on the app and the web servers to test NLB and some Farm features of BizTalk and SharePoint.

	old CRT 14" monitor. No LCD here… :(
	I selected 4u cases for my servers, since they can fit standard hardware (MB, Power Supl., video, nic’s) = cheaper… 4U – App Server 4U – SQL Server 2U – Web server Guess which case I bought first…. ;)
	16-Ports Switch used to be plenty of ports over 5 years ago… :(
	LAN lines. Rest of my hardware ( 3 laptops, NetBook, Wii, NDS’s) are all on the Wi-Fi.
	Power master switch for all servers.
	KVM switch.
	My mini-keyboard. Love it…

BTW, I think building your own computer is still the way to go.

PANAMA 2009 Elections: RERE, TE, PLAGEL, CPP

2009-05-01T09:22:00.000-04:00

Having dual citizenship give me the opportunity to choose and to compare 2 different ways of voting. I casted my vote for the most powerful man of the free world back on Nov. 2008, and now I have the privilege to influence who will lead my Querida Panama for the next government.

Since most people I know in the US have no idea about presidential elections outside of the US, I want to share a little bit of knowledge.

There are 8 political parties (as of today ;) in Panama. The main one is the PRD (Partido Revolucionario Democratico). It stands for Revolution and Democracy. BTW, it is the same government that we had with Noriega. All of the other parties are opposition to this one. Each of them claims to be different because of X-Some facts/view.

People line up with the political party that they feel, closely matches their views, concerns. However, if you work for any government institution it is expected that you lined up with the PRD, if you don’t your job ~~might/~~will be at risk. All of the parties put their candidates up and start the political satire that occurs everywhere, in which they try to convince the audience that they party is better than the other ones.

This all seems very similar to the US elections. Start with the flow of information on the Radio, TV, Newspapers (negativity and lies). However, in Panama, they also do Posters, Billboards, Musical Tours. There are about 3.5 million people in Panama according to the CIA world factbook. Since the population is so disperse, one of the ways to get your message across is to *tour* the small towns. What is different about this, is that they bring what is called MURGAS to each city. It is basically a band playing folklore music. There is plenty of free drinks and dancing. Most of the times they close the roads and make the whole road a big staging area.

Another of the ways they publicize their slogans.

People rent their cars/time to drive around small towns and playing loud messages over their megaphones. ANY time of the day.!!

One thing you need to know about the Panamanian culture, and all Latin cultures for that matter. We are very centric on socializing and having a good time. So the Murgas, attract the majority of the local audience, and if you have a good time with this candidate’s murgas, then voting for this candidate will bring more of the good time, right?… ;)

This is what an official ballot looks like. You need to select ONE entry only. As you notice there are only 3 candidates to president. Just like in the US (Rep., Dem., Waste-your-vote). Now, we started with 8 political parties, and as the election date gets near, each party aligned with the candidate that they think will win.

In Panama, there is still a lot of bribery. (just like in the US, but not as organized ;). So if you are in one of the political parties that have won, you can expect to have favoritism over jobs and influences once the new party takes over. One step further, you can even put your own people on jobs that are already filled by people from the losing party..! And this is regardless of qualifications/tenure. It is all about who you know.

Molirena	Union Patriotica
Vanguardia Moral de la Patria	Partido Popular
PRD	Partido Panameñista
Cambio Democratico	Partido Liberal

So you see, there is LOTS of thing riding on your vote. Not just the future of your country, but also your vote affects DIRECTLY your future. The percentage of people willing to vote in Panama is a LOT higher than in the US for that matter. In the US, we get to elect the most powerful man in the world, and yet I see many people that are not even excited about having this privilege.!

Hope this little bit of info have brought you a new insight into exercising your right to vote.

BTW, there are LOTS of acronyms used in Panama. TE: Tribunal Electoral. CPP: Centro de Procesamiento Postal. PLAGEL: Plan General de Elecciones. RERE: Registro de Electores Residentes en el Extranjero.

Exam 70-541 – Developing for WSS 3.0 Study Guide

2009-03-19T15:39:00.000-04:00

One of my goals for 2009 is to get certified in SharePoint development. I have found that you can get some good/cheap/professional online training from Microsoft Learning. If you go to this link Microsoft eLearning Collection and follow the instructions, you can obtain the e-learning promotion code. Then you get to use this code to choose ANY training material for only $35.00. I have chosen the Collection 5385, which coverts all of the topics needed for the 70-541 test.

Course 5386: Working with Server and Site Objects WSS 3.0
Course 5387: Programmatically Securing WSS 3.0 Sites
Course 5388: Programming Lists and List Events in WSS 3.0
Course 5389: Managing Documents and Libraries in WSS 3.0
Course 5390: Working with List Metadata and Content Types in WSS 3.0
Course 5391: Customizing Navigation and Layout in WSS 3.0

Their course is very interactive. It contains videos, labs, code snippets, games, etc

Once you finish with the course, then you can start doing the interactive labs. Microsoft gives you one full hour to use on the virtual labs. I’ve found that this is plenty of time to complete the labs, if you don’t do the extra assignments.

The only issue I have with the labs, is that I wish I could get a hold of the solution code that is being used in those labs.

Overall, I did like the simplicity of these labs. I would highly recommend them for anyone looking to pass the exam 70-541.

I took the 70-541 test today. It is a 3:00 hour test. According to my calculations, I needed to get 41/59 correctly answered questions in order to pass. I did get more than 41 questions correctly answered. ;) At the end of the test, I have but 22 minutes left, time flies when you are having fun.!

Hints for the test? Setup your own VPC and a Domain Controller, so that you can go explore web parts and Document Workflows a little deeper than what they offer on the eCourse. It certainly helped me a lot… ;)

How to Synch Google Calendar with a SmartPhone Running Windows Mobile without a Computer.!

2009-02-12T09:01:00.001-05:00

Finally.!

I just discover that Google has a setup that supports the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol to provide synch between their products and your Windows powered device. Follow the instructions in Set Up Your Windows Mobile Phone.

I did this configuration without having to craddle my SmartPhone to the computer. I have the Motorola Q9c running Windows Mobile 6.1. On your phone, open up ActiveSync.

select Menu

select Add Server Resource. After this step. I followed the instructions on their site. [I repeated them here for posterity]

add your username and password, leaving the domain field blank

Now on the next screen, I selected the Calendar option ONLY.

It was giving me some errors when I selected tasks, email, and contacts. I think it does not handle tasks created in Outlook.

Click on Finish and Voila.! It synchs wirelessly.!

Once it had synch all of my calendar entries, I went back and added the option to synch my Contacts. The one drawback to synching your contacts for the first time, is that you have to go to Gmail and categorized them all. And this is not fun when you have too many contacts…

This is very cool. I have a share calendar with my wife and now we both can add/delete/modify entries into it, and it is REAL TIME synch.

Enterprise-in-a-Box Series – Creating users in an AD

2009-02-10T16:15:00.001-05:00

When dealing with Enterprise applications, you often need to use VM’s to try to replicate the environment where your solution is going to ultimately live on.

For SharePoint and BizTalk development, the best way to ensure that your solution will deploy and run on the target environment is to create a Virtual Environment that closely resembles what your customer has. Besides the obvious benefits to the IT department (less heat, more CPU utilization, etc, etc.), there is the hidden benefit of efficiency and less integration bugs on a Virtualized environment. How many times you have developed the “perfect software”, and when try to deploy to the QA or Production environment, you’ve spent lots of hours troubleshooting security permissions, user profiles, IIS settings, SQL permissions, Service account not having proper rights, etc, etc. I know I have had my share.!

To setup a Virtual Enterprise from scratch, the easiest way is to follow the steps by steps directions from Microsoft: Using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 to Create and Configure a Two-Node Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Cluster

I recommend that you use a 64bit Operating System as a host to run the Virtual Server. I have used a Dell D820 running Vista x64 with 4GB of RAM. I have found this configuration to be very responsive and not very expensive.

Let’s assume that the solution for my customer will have 3 users, and each of them have different roles and responsabilities.

Role	User	First	Last	email
user	asmith	Aaron	Smith	asmith@contoso-local
supervisor	jsmith	John	Smith	jsmith@contoso-local
CEO	msmith	Michael	Smith	msmith@contoso-local

Once you have your virtual environment setup, it is time to add users and roles to get your environment setup. I have used Neil Thompson’s script to create AD accounts programatically.

Here is a slightly modified version of his script:

As you can tell, now I am able to programmatically add users so that I can test. One more benefit of this Enterprise in a box, is that once you are done with it, you can bundle all of the configuration and setup to your integration team. No more manual configurations.!

Noticed that regardless of what my solution does, or what the problem is. I would be able to test and troubleshoot my solution under 3 separate roles. There is no need to deploy to production for *real* users to test if my application does what it is expected to do.!

CodeMash 2009

2009-01-14T12:50:00.001-05:00

Once again this event was like a good wine.! The older it gets, the better and more concise it becomes.!

Just when you think, how can they improve on something that is already great? The organizers of this event did an absolute outstanding job (Jim, Dianne, Jason, Brian, Jeff, etc).

Pre-Compiler: oh yeah, I got the most of this session. In the spirit of CodeMash, I have decided to try something out of my comfort zone. Last year, I tried Ruby. This year, I have decided to give Groovy and Grails a try. I immerse myself for a FULL day of these 2 technologies. While I can't say I am a Groovy developer at the end of that day, I have a much better understanding of the technology.

KidzMash: One word to describe this: INSANE. This is my 2nd year volunteering for this event. [CodeMash 2008]. Learned a few new things from the experience last year. This year, I've decided to make it a little bit more interactive, so I've packed 4 laptops with Scratch. Out of those, one have BabyMash installed, just in case there were some young developers in the making there (<6yrs old). I was completely blown up by the number of kids we have: 35 kids.!! Thankfully, Sarah Ford and Michelle and another mom in there step up to help by providing extra laptops and balloons animals.! Hopefully, I was able to influence those young minds to become a future RIA developer.

Open Spaces: I've got a lot of value attending these.! I was just being a fly-on-the-wall. Intimidated by the sheer brain power of those people talking.! Looking forward more Open Spaces.!

Sessions:

Scala with Venkat. Got a candy with the infamous: "do I need to ask a question to get a candy?…" ;)
Scaling of ASP.NET apps with Richard Campbell. The man is a legend.!
WCF with Keith Elder. Good refresher course.
User Experience with Josh Walsh. Solid session. Very good presenter. Even though I have not worked on end user apps for a while, this session was a very good background information.

KeyNote: This might be the only portion of CodeMash that I have to skip. Last year's keynote with Scott Hanselman was awesome. Venkat was a terrific follow up this year.! His analogy of how writing unit test compares to doing physical exercise was right on target. All of the other keynote presenters were good, but they just could not capture my attention.

Negatives: yes, there were negatives.

Too many repeated sessions or content was very similar to another talk. Open spaces filled that void. :D
Keynotes were not hitting the CodeMash audience (except Venkat… ;)
Evaluation forms. Why aren't the evaluation forms online instead of paper? It would be awesome to fill them up online. Instant feedback.!

Moments: CodeMash is also about networking with others, and I use Breakfast, lunch, dinner, party, water park, etc to meet someone new. I love the small conference atmosphere where you don't feel like another number in a group.

Met developer that work for Overdrive. They developed the application that I just installed last year to get audio books from my public library into my Zune. And you know, they are based on Akron, OH.!
My Twitter count went up by 10.
Carl Franklin rocked the house on Thursday night.!
Sponsors ads during meal time. FTW..!!!

Looking forward CodeMash v.2010 next year

How to get Hyper-V to read corrupted VHD files

2008-12-03T23:40:00.000-05:00

We have a lots of projects that are virtualized. When we finish with a project it is common practice to de-hydrate the servers and put them away. For one of our customer's project, we followed this process over a year ago. Lots of things have changed in the past year. First, we moved from one building to a different building. On the process, we added new servers, clean up some old AD's, change OS's (Windows 2008 DataCenter... oh yeah.!), etc...

Now trying to hydrate back online this one project's environment with all of the infrastructure changed was a challenge. For this enterprise application we have Oracle, App Servers, Web Servers, Test Servers, etc.

Out of all of the VHD's that we needed to bring back, only 2 were recognized by Hyper-V.! Doing a check on the rest of those VHD's gave me the file or directory is corrupted and readable message... :(

This is how to check for integrity using the Hyper-V. Add the vhd file to the IDE controller and then hit the Inspect button.

[Main Instruction]
An error occurred when attempting to retrieve the virtual hard disk "F:\hydrate\Project1-Agent.vhd" on server XXX.
[Content]
The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.

At this point, if we try to recreate all of the settings/configurations stored on those servers will take days.! Some entries in the TechNet forums mentioned that they got it working by re-opening the files on VirtualPC. This is the way I got my corrupted vhd's to work:

First, I create a new Virtual Machine with a new HD. Then went to Settings|Hard Disk 1 and loaded this corrupted vhd file.

There you will find the Virtual Disk Wizard. Click on it, go through the prompts and select the option to Edit an existing virtual disk.

Then choose to Compact it. The reason for this, is that if you select the Convert it to a fixed-size virtual hard disk, the wizard will make the new hard disk EXACTLY the same size of what content is written at the moment in it. Which means, if you have allocated 20GB to this disk initially, and have used 12GB of it. Now instead of having a 20GB with 8GB free, you ended with a fixed 12GB hard drive with NO SPACE LEFT on it.

On the next screen, I save the file under a different name for precaution. Now click next and wait. It will take about 1hr for a 28GB file. Once this process completed, I copied the new file back to our Windows 2008 server, load it on Hyper-V and it was recognized.!

Success.

Windows 2008 DataCenter Mouse Blues

2008-11-12T14:13:00.001-05:00

Working with the Windows 2008 Datacenter version, I had to create a couple of Virtual machines. Once I remote into that server, and created the virtual machines, I've found out that connecting to those VM while using Remote Desktop causes the VM machine to not recognize the mouse.!

I keep getting this annoying dialog box: Mouse not captured in Remote Desktop session.

Of course the content help wasn't helpul at all:

The mouse is available in a Remote Desktop session when integration services are installed in the guest operating system. For more information, search on 'integration services' in Help.

if you look at the bottom of the Virtual Machine Connection screen you see this

I have tried removing the virtual machine additions, adding the Hyper-V Integration Services, etc, etc. It is still did not work. I found a blog post from Maarten van Stam that talks about making the VM look at the HAL by adding an extra CPU to the VM. At this point, I'm very aggravated that I don't have a mouse and keep having to use TABS and SHIFT-F10 keys all over, so I give it a try.

After adding an extra CPU, rebooted the VM, and now my mouse works.! WTF? I remove the extra CPU from the VM, and confirmed that in fact the mouse still works.

One more thing, you can get your mouse working if you install the Hyper-V Management Tools on your Windows Vista, here is the MSDN article that talks about it http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952627.

How to configure a MOSS VPC Development image

2008-10-30T23:37:00.000-04:00

On the Microsoft TechNet site, there is a couple of articles on how to set up a MOSS environment. Following those steps will give you a good environment. However, I have found that there is not that much control over the naming of the databases. This is fine, but then you have to come back and do some extra steps to rename them correctly. These are the steps that I follow to avoid having to come back and do all of that work.

I have already configure a VPC image with Windows Server 2003, SQL Server, Visual Studio 2008, etc. I have also set it up as a Domain Controller (DC) and create a couple of accounts (SharepointService, SQLService, etc).

There are instructions on TechNet on how to setup the SQL Server before setting the MOSS environment: Prepare the Database servers. Follow those steps.

Now start the MOSS setup, select the Advance installation

I choose to install the Web Front End, since it gives me the most flexibility

Once this step has finished running, this is a good point to rename the Content DB's.

Do not run the configuration wizard yet.

Uncheck and close this window. Now use the psConfig utility, which it is available on this location:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN

parameter	value
Server	MossOnlyAW
Domain	MOSSBSG
User	SharepointService
Password	*********
Config DB name	STS_Config
Admin Content DB name	STS_AdminContent

this is the parameters to configure the initial Databases

psconfig.exe
-cmd configdb
-create -server MossOnlyAW
-database STS_Config
-user MOSSBSG\SharepointService
-password <myPassword>
-admincontentdatabase STS_AdminContent

Run this from the command prompt window and you will get the following results:

SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard version 12.0.4518.101
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 2005. All rights reserved.

Performing configuration task 1 of 3
Initializing SharePoint Products and Technologies configuration...

Successfully initialized the SharePoint Products and Technologies configuration

Performing configuration task 2 of 3
Creating the configuration database...

Successfully created the configuration database.

Performing configuration task 3 of 3
Finalizing the SharePoint Products and Technologies configuration...

Successfully completed the SharePoint Products and Technologies configuration.

Total number of configuration settings run: 3
Total number of successful configuration settings: 3
Total number of unsuccessful configuration settings: 0
Successfully stopped the configuration of SharePoint Products and Technologies.
Configuration of the SharePoint Products and Technologies has succeeded.

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN>

now if you check your SQL server, you will see the 2 databases that were created, it also went and added that SharepointService account to the valid logins in your SQL Server.

Now go ahead and run the SharePoint Configuration Wizard. It will pick the databases that you have created, do not disconnect from this server farm:

I like to specify a port number that is easy to remember

Gotchas: You might run into an error if the service account does not have enough rights:

Server Error in '/' Application.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The current identity (MOSSBSG\SharepointService) does not have write access to 'c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files'.

so open up this folder and add the SharepointService account to the list of authorized users. Give this account access to modify.

Close the browser and re-open the Central Administration page. You can now start to configure your MOSS sites.

Certification vs Google Developer

2008-10-17T07:45:00.000-04:00

I have seen this thread so many times. Those who don't have certifications always batching those that have them. Yes there are lots of paper certs developers out there. Braindump sites has brought the core values of the certification down. But consider the facts:

Certification Preparation Facts:

to become certified you need to at least study the preparation guide for the exam
you will need to read at least one book on the subject
you would probably take some simulation test before taking the exam

A certification WILL not get you a job.! There are lots of factors that influence the decision to hire someone. However, having achieve a certification in a new technology goes a long way to show that you have the Passion and Commitment to stay on top of the technology.

Yes, writing a blog entry does show that you are into technology. But having to study to pass a test is a different beast. A blog is written on your spare time, and there is no commitment to when you need to blog.

I hate when someone will tell me that they don't know something, but they are fast learners and they can find it really quick on google. That's great, but when you are in presenting in front of a client, they expect you to know EVERYTHING right there. When hiring a developer, there should be a base level knowledge that they should have. Knowing the basics first and then knowing how to find information in the internet for other stuff is fine with me.

Basic knowledge like how to use the xmlWritter, or what the background worker is? or creating a delegate. Using globalization and resources? About ClickOnce deployment? All of these concepts and more are required on the certification exam for .NET.

When you start getting into the Enterprise playing field, certifications are more valuables in terms of knowledge, rather than chrome on your resume. i.e. knowing what can be done and how it can be done in BizTalk is more important to a client, than the actual detailed implementation of it. This is because every client out there has a different problem that they want you to solve, and they are looking at you for answers.

Once again, certification alone does not qualify ANY developer to get a job, but at least it shows that this person has the determination to study and learn the basic to do his job. Which one will I hire? The one that has a black belt in google searching or the one that took the extra time, to learn something.

Do you have the time to study? Do you have the determination and commitment? Do you have the experience? and most important of all Are you Passionate about Technology?

Certification Pros:

your team will only move as fast as the slowest developer. Requiring a certification, will set the base by which you can start moving forward. You don't have to start guessing what level is each of your team members.
Invest some training $$ on your team, they will feel appreciate [read more...]
Think like an owner..!! Everyone wants to work for a Gold Certified Partner. Well, getting those Microsoft competencies takes some requirements:
1. Customer references
2. CERTIFICATIONS Requirements...!!

If you think that certifications are used only for evaluating a prospective candidate, think again. How does your company benefits from having certified developers? Can you company truly stand out among other companies out there without certified people? If you want to be a Business Partner with some of the big companies out there like Microsoft, IBM, Sun, guess what? You need certifications...!

The guy that study and did that extra effort is the one I want on my team, and in my Company [Quick Solutions, Inc.]

Visual Studio 2008 free eBooks

2008-10-09T08:26:00.001-04:00

Offer from Microsoft to download some cool content, check it out

http://csna01.libredigital.com/?urvs5cn3s8%20


Programming Microsoft LINQ	Introducing Microsoft® Silverlight 2, Second Edition	Programming Microsoft® ASP.NET 3.5
by Paolo Pialorsi and Marco Russo	by Laurence Moroney	by Dino Esposito
ISBN: 9780735624009	ISBN: 9780735625280	ISBN: 9780735625273

DocTools not working

2008-10-02T00:54:00.000-04:00

For one of the projects we are working on, we need to make sure our end user documentation matches correctly the template provided by the customer. I have started playing with one of the products that the Patterns and Practices at Microsoft is using to generate their documentation. Take a look at their package: http://www.codeplex.com/doctools

After going through all of the installation and pre-requisites. I was ready to try the sample Word Document they provide. Snag.!

First thing I notice is that the sample scripts are looking for the Microsoft DocTools in the c:\program files\Microsoft DocTools. Changing those scripts brought to my attention that the install program gives you the ability to specify the path on where to install the DocTools. However, it will always install to the (x86) directory on my Vista x64.

The main error I was getting was:

PS C:\DocToolsDemo> .\HTML.cmd

C:\DocToolsDemo>PowerShell ConvertToHTML.ps1 ESBIntro.docx .\outputHTML """C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft DocTools\Document Converter\Formatting\MSDN2\xsl""" convertESBConfig.xml

    Directory: Microsoft.PowerShell.Core\FileSystem::C:\DocToolsDemo

Mode                LastWriteTime     Length Name
----                -------------     ------ ----
d----         10/1/2008   9:10 AM            outputHTML

    Directory: Microsoft.PowerShell.Core\FileSystem::C:\DocToolsDemo\outputHTML

Mode                LastWriteTime     Length Name
----                -------------     ------ ----
d----         10/1/2008   9:10 AM            html
Add-PSSnapin : No Windows PowerShell Snap-ins are available for version 1.
At C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft DocTools\Document Converter\ConverterLibrary.ps1:9 char:15
+         Add-PSSnapIn <<<< ppConverter.Cmdlets
--Splitting: C:\DocToolsDemo\ESBIntro.docx
An Error Ocurred: The term 'Split-Document' is not recognized as a cmdlet,function, operable program, or script file.Verify the term and try again.

PS C:\DocToolsDemo>

After doing all of the regular stuff (check PATH, re-install, start/stop program, google), I could not get this error to go away.

The problem seems to be with the OS I am running. Since I am running a 64bit OS, I need to call the PowerShell that is on the c:\windows\syswow64 and not the one in the regular 32bit. This is accomplish by running the one marked with the (x86)

Once I opened this one, ran the set-executionpolicy remotesigned command. It ran and split the Word document successfully and generated my HTML help compile file.

One of those simple bugs that can waste a whole hour for you.!

Moving TFS Build Server from Single instance to Multiple Servers

2008-09-16T05:54:00.000-04:00

I have moved our Build server from a single installation to a 2 server installation. When putting together the new Build server, I used my own domain account, since I did not have access to the TFSService account. My thought was that I could work on setting up the system, then once I would get the correct userid/password, I could easily swapped that for my account...

I set the environment, and submitted a build type successful. Had a little issue with the directories permissions, but once I get that worked out, everything was building fine. Then, I got the correct domain account, and I went and change the Team Build Service to run under this domain account.

I got this error:

error MSB4018: The "CreateWorkspaceTask" task failed unexpectedly.

Here is the description for that error:

Build FAILED.

C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v8.0\TeamBuild\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets(306,5):

error : The working folder c:\TFS_Builds\Builds\Sample\awing_test2\Sources is already in use by another workspace on this computer.
error MSB4018: The "CreateWorkspaceTask" task failed unexpectedly.
error MSB4018: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client.WorkingFolderInUseException:
The working folder c:\TFS_Builds\Builds\Sample\awing_test2\Sources is already in use by another workspace on this computer. ---> System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: The working folder c:\TFS_Builds\Builds\Sample\awing_test2\Sources is already in use by another workspace on this computer.

From the studio client machine, I was testing some of the builds. Well, part of the script is to build a workspace on my behalf on that machine. Since it was running under my domain account, when I switch the services to run under the TFSService account, it was encountering a duplicate error.

The solution for this error is to remove the workspace entry from the client machine, and not the build server machine. This solved my issue and I was able to submit build types correctly.

BizTalk 2009 has been announced.!!

2008-09-05T15:49:00.001-04:00

Sweet. The new version of BizTalk server has been announced. I am so glad they dropped the BizTalk 2006 R3 name and went with the new BizTalk 2009.

Finally all of the OSLO technologies are starting to show up in the road map...

Read more on the Microsoft Site http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/roadmap.aspx

BizTalk Business Rules Engine Handy functions in .NET

2008-08-06T12:11:00.000-04:00

Working with the BizTalk 2006 R2 BRE api, I find myself going back to this code to start of as a base. These 2 functions get ALL of the versions of the policies or vocabularies. If you want to work with only the latest, or the published ones, change the RulesStore.Filter enum to whatever your needs.

List of Policies

   1: public void GetPoliciesList()

   2: {

   3:     Microsoft.BizTalk.RuleEngineExtensions.RuleSetDeploymentDriver breDriver =

   4:         new Microsoft.BizTalk.RuleEngineExtensions.RuleSetDeploymentDriver();

   5:     Microsoft.RuleEngine.RuleStore breStore = breDriver.GetRuleStore();

6:

   7:     Microsoft.RuleEngine.RuleSetInfoCollection colPolInfo = null;

   8:     colPolInfo = breStore.GetRuleSets(RuleStore.Filter.All);

   9:     foreach (RuleSetInfo pInfo in colPolInfo)

  10:     {

  11:         Trace.WriteLine(string.Format("bts- Info = [{0}].v.{1}.{2}",

  12:             pInfo.Name, pInfo.MajorRevision, pInfo.MinorRevision));

13:

  14:         //get the policies to extract rules

  15:         Microsoft.RuleEngine.RuleSet pol = breStore.GetRuleSet(pInfo);

  16:         Trace.WriteLine(string.Format("bts- Count = [{0}]", pol.Rules.Count));

  17:     }

  18: }

This is how to get a list of all policies published on the BRE database. Once you get all of the RuleSets, you can loop through each of them to retrieve the actual rules behind them. Before getting to the rules, you need to get a RuleSet out of the RuleSetInfo.

List of Vocabularies

   1: public void GetVocabulariesList()

   2: {

   3:     Microsoft.BizTalk.RuleEngineExtensions.RuleSetDeploymentDriver breDriver =

   4:         new Microsoft.BizTalk.RuleEngineExtensions.RuleSetDeploymentDriver();

   5:     Microsoft.RuleEngine.SqlRuleStore sqlRuleStore = (SqlRuleStore)breDriver.GetRuleStore();

6:

   7:     Microsoft.RuleEngine.VocabularyInfoCollection colVocInfo = null;

   8:     colVocInfo = sqlRuleStore.GetVocabularies(RuleStore.Filter.All);

   9:     foreach (VocabularyInfo vInfo in colVocInfo)

  10:     {

  11:         Trace.WriteLine(string.Format("bts- vInfo = [{0}].v.{1}.{2}",

  12:             vInfo.Name, vInfo.MajorRevision, vInfo.MinorRevision));

13:

  14:         //get the vocabulary to extract collection of definitions

  15:         Microsoft.RuleEngine.Vocabulary voc = sqlRuleStore.GetVocabulary(vInfo);

  16:         Trace.WriteLine(string.Format("bts- Count = [{0}]", voc.Definitions.Count));

  17:     }

  18: }

This is how to get a list of all vocabularies published on the BRE database. If you need to see how to get to all of the definitions on a particular vocabulary, see my previous post: How to access BRE Vocabularies from .NET.

Noticed that there are some subtle differences in how you retrieve each piece of information. For Policies you get a RuleStore while to get the Vocabularies you need to get a SQLRuleStore.

As usual, feedback is always welcome if you use this code.

Deploying Business Rules using C# in BizTalk 2006 R2

2008-07-29T01:01:00.000-04:00

In one of my last project, I have been working extensively with the Business Rules Engine in BizTalk. This project contains some complex Federal/State/Company/ rules. Being a Health Management Care related project I have to deal with many issues like requirements, changing policies, rules scope to a certain type, etc.

Delivering this project took some time and effort. Not only the requirements were *agile*, but trying to keep compliance with SOX laws was a challenge. I can summarized all of the requirements to these 3:

Requirements:

Policies have to be atomic (independent from changes to other policies)
Versionning of policies and being able to execute ANY version, any time.
Need to know which facts were used to determine an outcome.

For the main requirement, I have created a Master Rule that determine the outcome, then I've created several *supporting* rules that will help me determine which of the rules were evaluated. The versionning requirement was already implemented by the BRE in BizTalk.

a sample of this would be something like this:

It quickly became very obvious that I have to deal with lots of policies and vocabularies. If you ever tried using the Rules Deployment Wizard, you will see that it only allows you to export a SINGLE policy at a time. Having over 500+ policies and over 30+ vocabularies was not going to work out.

I have found the DeployRules.exe application written by Sreedhar Pelluru from Microsoft. Here is the original article. I took his program and modified to meet my needs. Since I was only testing a set of policies at a time (i.e. Federal policies only), this tool provide me the ability to only load those policies that were relevant to the type I was working on.

I know I have learned a lot about the BRE api from reading his well documented code. With his permission, I have posted his original work and the modifications done to it back to the community at http://www.codeplex.com/DeployRules. Yes it is still a work in progress.

Hope this help someone out there.

Importing BRE Vocabulary with Multiple versions

2008-07-08T00:52:00.001-04:00

If you ever tried merging all of the versions of a single vocabulary into one XML file, so that you can import it on a single task, you will find that even though the Rules Engine Deployment Wizard understand the file format, it has a huge limitation [Bug..? ;) ]. It only imports the last version of a vocabulary into the Rules Engine.

A sample vocabulary with 2 versions.

When Exporting this vocabulary I can't export all versions at once. I have to export a single version at a time.!!

However, on the import, you can import a file that can contain multiple versions on it:

Once you export all individual files, you can merged them into a single xml file.

The format of the merged exported vocabulary will be something like this:

<brl xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/businessruleslanguage/2002">

<vocabulary id="9ab458cc-427a-4cea-bb1d-224dd5f96d98" name="CustomerLevels" uri="" description="">
        <version major="1" minor="1" description="" modifiedby="awing" date="2008-07-07T23:22:33.401-04:00"/>
        <vocabularydefinition id="b36b276e-451d-4783-8a06-623823211f85" name="Silver" description="Silver Description">
            ....................
    </vocabulary>

<vocabulary id="2422362a-77c0-4d0f-b2aa-fe6c1fe1f1d7" name="CustomerLevels" uri="" description="">
       <version major="1" minor="0" description="" modifiedby="awing" date="2008-07-07T22:39:37.19-04:00"/>
        <vocabularydefinition id="ba912d07-f96d-49ac-a2c4-e619fcec027e" name="Silver" description="Silver Description">
            ........................
    </vocabulary>

</brl>

As you can see there you can add as many versions to this file as you want. However, the ReDeployWiz.exe only publish and import the latest one.

Trying to figure out why this is the behavior, I used my good old friend Reflector. Bringing Reflector on the Rules Engine Deployment Wizard, I see that there is a call to the RuleSetDeploymentDriver namespace. This doImport method calls the driver.ImportAndPublishFileRuleStore to import and publish at the same time.

RuleSetDeploymentDriver

It seems that there is no way around this call. It seems to be a limitation on the use of the tool. This ImportAndPublishFileRuleStore seems to only work on a single version at a time. If you split the versions into their own file, it can handle it. The down side of this, is that you need to make multiple calls for an import. And let's face it, the whole nature of versioning the policies and vocabularies becomes very cumbersome when you have over 500+ rules with multiple versions in them [yes, my current project has over 500+ policies and over 30+ vocabularies]

To get around this limitation on the tool, you will have to write your own application to deploy/export all versions of a vocabulary. To accomplish this you will need to to call the SqlRuleStore namespace instead of the RuleSetDeploymentDriver. This namespace have the ADD method which contain several overloaded parameters. One of which it allows you to publish or not publish your vocabulary.

Here is my sample code to import ALL versions of a vocabulary in .NET code:

    1 private static int ImportVocabulary(string filename)

2 {

    3     int result = 0;

    4     // FileRuleStore - gives access to the BRL (XML) file containing policies and vocabularies

    5     FileRuleStore fileRuleStore = null;

    7     // RuleSetDeploymentDriver has the following important methods

    8     Microsoft.BizTalk.RuleEngineExtensions.RuleSetDeploymentDriver dd = new Microsoft.BizTalk.RuleEngineExtensions.RuleSetDeploymentDriver();

   10     // SqlRuleStore - gives access t0 the rule engine database

   11     SqlRuleStore sqlRuleStore = (SqlRuleStore)dd.GetRuleStore();

   13     //Get VocabularyInfoCollection object based on the file

   14     fileRuleStore = new FileRuleStore(filename);

   15     VocabularyInfoCollection vocabularyInfoList = fileRuleStore.GetVocabularies(RuleStore.Filter.All);

   16     foreach (VocabularyInfo vocabularyInfo in vocabularyInfoList)

   17     {

   18         string vocabularyNameWithVer = string.Format("{0}.{1}.{2}", vocabularyInfo.Name, vocabularyInfo.MajorRevision, vocabularyInfo.MinorRevision);

   19         ExtractVocabularyNameMajorMinor(vocabularyNameWithVer);

   20         VocabularyInfo vi = new VocabularyInfo(App.vocabularyName, App.vocabularyMajorVer, App.vocabularyMinorVer);

   21         Vocabulary oVoc = fileRuleStore.GetVocabulary(vi);

   22         sqlRuleStore.Add(oVoc, App.publishVocabulary);

   23     }

   24     return result;

   25 }

There, now you don't have to be bound to import a single vocabulary version every time you need to move your rules from DEV to UAT to PROD.

Hope this saves someone lots of time and grief. Happy BRE'ing... ;)

MOCSDUG: ESB Guidance Toolkit for BizTalk 2006 R2

2008-06-06T09:36:00.001-04:00

Last night 2nd meeting was just as good as the first one. Richard Broida gave a good overview of some of the key points for the ESB Guidance toolkit, as well as some good background info on having a good architecture base.

There were some BizTalk developers in the room and there were some other ones that were interested on BizTalk. Somehow, the seating arrangement turned out to be all BizTalk developers in the middle section and everyone else out on the sides. ;)

Richard's blog is http://gloriousmonster.blogspot.com/, and I'm waiting for his slide deck to show up at the MOCSDUG site.

I have been interested on the ESB Guidance toolkit, and after tonight's meeting I have decided to install it and try some of their samples. Of interest to me are the Message Repair block and the Exception Handler block. Will post on my findings on those blocks when I get them running.

Distinguished fields of type xs:dateTime not Working on Orchestrations

2008-05-14T11:52:00.007-04:00

Writing a spyke for a simple program, I came out with this odd behavior when I try to compile my BizTalk project.

I have created a simple schema, and in one of the fields I have field of type xs:dateTime. Well, when I have tried to use this field on an expression shape, I get this build compiler error:

'System.Xml.XmlDocument' does not contain a definition for 'XXXX'

where XXXX is the field name of the element that I have declared as a xs:dateTime type. I then went and set it up as a distinguished field. Here is a sample generated xml from my test schema:

<ns0:Customer xmlns:ns0="http://DistingProperty.Test.Customer.v1">
<FName>FName_0</FName>
<DOB_datetime>1999-05-31T13:20:00.000-05:00</DOB_datetime>
<DOB_date>1999-05-31</DOB_date>
</ns0:Customer>

and this is the schema that I have used

When I am trying to use the distinguished field inside an expression shape, noticed that I get the Visual Studio IntelliSense:

When you try to read this value, it will always complain about the XmlDocument not being able to find the definition for the field that is defined as DateTime.

To get around this, you should use the System.Convert.ToString() instead of the .ToString() function;

    1 Trace.WriteLine(" bad:[" + msgIN.DOB_datetime.ToString() + "]");
    2Trace.WriteLine("good:[" + System.Convert.ToString(msgIN.DOB_datetime) + "]");
 

Another lengthy way to get around this issue is to assign the distinguish field to an xmlNode and then use the xml Namespace Manager to get to the node value instead.

The code on my expression shape looks like this:

System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine("bts- In here");
    2
//assign values to person
xDoc = msgIN;

xmlnsMgr = new System.Xml.XmlNamespaceManager(xDoc.NameTable);
xmlnsMgr.AddNamespace("ns0", "http://DistingProperty.Test.Customer.v1");
    8
xNode = xDoc.SelectSingleNode("/ns0:Customer/DOB_datetime", xmlnsMgr);
System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine("bts-[" + xNode.OuterXml + "]");

xNode = xDoc.SelectSingleNode("/ns0:Customer/DOB_date", xmlnsMgr);
System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine("bts-[" + xNode.OuterXml + "]");
   14
//this works as expected
System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine("bts- " + msgIN.FName);


Which ever way you choose, this looks like a limitation on the way the XLANG/s in the Expression shape interprets the command code.

How to Setup Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with BizTalk 2006 R2

2008-05-12T17:00:00.000-04:00

Today I have found this error AGAIN.! [old post]

Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):
This product requires ASP.NET v2.0 to be set to 'Allow' in the list of Internet Information Services (IIS) Web Server Extensions. If it is not available in the list, re-install ASP.NET v2.0.
Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup.

This time I am installing WSS 3.0 with SP1 on a Windows 2003 - SP2 machine. This is a greenfield installation of BizTalk 2006-R2.

Noticed that on my IIS Manager, there is no ASP.NET 2.0 service extensions

I ran the standard command that *everyone* should have memorized by now... ;)

c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis.exe -iru -enable

Now, when I open my IIS Manager I see the ASP.NET v2 service extension enabled

Running the setup.exe for WSS works fine now.

Hint: Don't forget to select Advanced settings and then select the Web Client configuration. This is a necessary step, if you want to specify the name of the database where the WSS configuration will exist.

Error trying to re-install SQL Server 2005 on a Failover Cluster environment

2008-05-08T23:23:00.000-04:00

I had to un-install the SQL instance that I have on my virtual cluster. The reason? I could not get the Service Pack 2 to be recognized by my BizTalk configuration. Apparently, the SP2 that I had installed was the 9.00.3027.0 and not the 9.00.3042.1 Monish pointed that out that I might have an older version of the Service Pack [he is the only person I know that reads those EULA information...]

I am trying to start from scratch the installation of SQL 2005, and when I run the setup I get this message:

TITLE: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Setup
There was an unexpected failure during the setup wizard. You may review the setup logs and/or click the help button for more information.

For help, click: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?LinkID=20476&ProdName=Microsoft+SQL+Server&ProdVer=9.00.1399.06&EvtSrc=setup.rll&EvtID=50000&EvtType=datastore%5cmachineconfigscopeproperties.cpp%40InvokeSqlSetupDllAction%40SqlInstallConfigScope.InstanceName%400x2

Well, clicking on that link, does not provided any more help. Click on the help and I get this other screen:

the last line tells me about the event type that has failed:

datastore\machineconfigscopeproperties.cpp@InvokeSqlSetupDllAction@SqlInstallConfigScope.InstanceName@0x2

Now, I have the code that causes the installation to fail. What's next? ;)

Then I found this other technical article on the MSDN 925976, this suggested cleaning up the registry. I went and clear all of the registry entries from my SQLNode1 and I still get the same error. I then follow the same instructions on my SQLNode2. This still did not allowed me to run the setup. So I went one step deeper and instead of removing just the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.X\ registry key like they suggested, I removed all hives starting from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server.

Success..! now I am able to run the setup on my primary node, and I *WILL* install the correct Service Pack this time.. ;)

Day of .NET - Wilmington, OH

2008-04-21T15:33:00.000-04:00

One more year of an awesome event.

Jeff Blankenburg has started what seems like a great tradition: Poker night...! After the appreciation dinner, we were all invited to room 506 for a poker night. It was amazing that almost everyone went up to the suite to just hang out. There was an equally amount of people in there just watching than playing.

Hopefully, Jeff will remember to bring something *ELSE* for those of us that just want to hang out and don't play poker. [Xbox 360 / Wii ;). It was a different way of bringing together all of the masses to a room where we could talk. thanks Jeff.

Sessions that I attended:

Mobile with Nino: I thought that the topic was very interesting; however, I think Nino was not all there. Maybe that trip to the MVP summit was too tiresome for him ;) His presentation was good, but I think he could have done a lot better. I could not attend his 2nd talk on Mobile development, but I heard it was very interesting as well...
XML Capabilities in SQL with Jason was great. Learn a couple of things that I have added to my to-do task of things I want to try when I have some spare time.
Soft Skills with Brian. What can I say, Brian delivered another thought provoking talk, good pointers in there. I am lining up for the swag-monkey position for next time. ;)
Reliable messaging with WFC with James was good. WFC is one of those topics that are so vast, and James really nail down the point that he was trying to make. He lived up to his *twitter promise* and in fact it was a MUCH improved talk from last year.
Agile Practices and TFS with the comrade was good. I like the way that he show the agile implementation by using a tool like TFS.

I had a blast at this day of .NET event. The new location was awesome. We all got to eat sitting at a table.!! (unlike last year's... ;)

Following last year's tradition, it was Monish time to oversleep. And HE did. I have never seen a Prius doing more than 70mph (or for that matter Monish driving THAT fast...;) One thing is that me and Alexei learned is that Monish does not know how to avoid things on the road. On the way to finding a Bob Evans for early breakfast, he hit a dead skunk.! Even thought we smell the dead skunk and saw the body over 100ft ahead.!!

Looking forward next year's when it will be Alexei's turn to drive... ;)

VPC 2007 not running on Virtual Server 2005 R2

2008-04-15T15:14:00.001-04:00

I have been trying to port a VPC 2007 to run on our Virtual Server 2005 R2 with no success. This is the error I am getting:

Virtual Machine
The "Virtual Hardware Standard" (Virtual PC 2007) in the configuration .vmc file for "XXX Server" was not created by Virtual Server. "XXX Server" can start, but some settings may be changed and some settings may not be used.

other errors that I am getting:

Virtual Server
The virtual machine “XXX Server” could not be started. An unexpected error occurred.

Virtual Machine
"XXX Server" could not be started because a disk-related error occurred.

I am still not sure as to what the error is. So I ran the Inspect and also the compact utility on the hard drive hoping that this action might *magically* fixed this issue.

I get the message that it did succeed compacting:

Virtual Disk Operation
The virtual hard disk "E:\Virtual Machines\XXXServer\BaseWin2K3 Hard Disk.vhd" was compacted.

However, I still get the unexpected error message. At this point, I decided to merge the diff disk with the parent and then keep a single file. Clicking on the Merge virtual hard disk link yielded this:

After this is done, I get this message:

The parent virtual hard disk appears to have been modified without using the differencing virtual hard disk located at "E:\Virtual Machines\XXXServer\W2K3 Diff.vhd". Modifying the parent virtual hard disk may result in data corruption. It is strongly recommended that you lock the parent virtual hard disk to prevent this in the future. If you recently changed time zones on your computer, you can safely continue using this virtual hard disk.

So, I decided to create a new virtual machine. First step, I deleted the VMC file. Then create a new Virtual Machine with no Virtual Hard Disk defined.

After that was done, clicked on the Configurations for that new Virtual Server, then clicked on the Virtual Hard Disk properties, and added the Virtual Hard Drive that was merged earlier:

Started the New Virtual machine, and PRESTO..!! it's alive [muahh, muahh, muahh] and it has all of my latest changes into it.

Blue Screen on Vista SP1

2008-04-03T01:25:00.000-04:00

Do blue screen still exists in the new and latest Operating system from Microsoft... ?

[Main Instruction]
Windows has recovered from an unexpected shutdown

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name:    BlueScreen
OS Version:    6.0.6001.2.1.0.256.4
Locale ID:    1033
Additional information about the problem:
BCCode:    a
BCP1:    0000000000000000
BCP2:    000000000000000C
BCP3:    0000000000000001
BCP4:    FFFFF800026742D4
OS Version:    6_0_6001
Service Pack:    1_0
Product:    256_1
Files that help describe the problem:
C:\Windows\Minidump\Mini040208-01.dmp
c:\temp\WER-374105-0.sysdata.xml
c:\temp\WER6B5F.tmp.version.txt

Clicking on the Check for Solution button, it deleted those files and close the dialog box really quick. So I went and check on the Windows Error Reporting folder located at C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportArchive

In there I found two files: Report.cab and Report.wer. Opening the Report.cab yield those 3 files reported on the Dialog box.

Now I went and open the version.txt file:

Windows NT Version 6.0 Build: 6001 Service Pack 1
Product (0x4): Windows Vista (TM) Enterprise
Edition: Enterprise
BuildString: 6001.18000.amd64fre.longhorn_rtm.080118-1840
Flavor: Multiprocessor Free
Architecture: X64
LCID: 1033

The sysdata.xml contains a list of all of the drivers currently loaded:

so right now I don't know what caused the blue screen, and I am not sure if this information was ever transmitted to Microsoft. For the record I have a Dell D820 with 4GB Ram running Vista Enterprise 64bits.

I have started to see more and more people getting blue screen's on Vista after they installed SP1. Coincidence? ;)

MOCSDG: Mid Ohio Connected System Developer's Group - OSLO

2008-04-02T15:56:00.001-04:00

Yeah, the first meeting of this group will be kicked off this Thrusday.!! Don't miss it. If you want to be on the mailing list, email Monish and he will add you to the list. The meeting will be held at the Microsoft Office in Columbus, OH.

Topic: Microsoft Oslo: Past, Present, Future.
Time: 6-8pm
Place: 8800 Lyra Drive [4th floor]

This first meeting, is going to be started with a presentation from Delbert Murphy. He is one out of 90 MCA's that holds this certification. He is the only Certified Architect in both Microsoft .NET and Java that I have met. So this is a good opportunity to meet him (even if you DONT believe in Certifications... blog post coming....;)

He will be talking about OSLO, which is not just the next version of BizTalk, but the next generation of a unified platform for integrating applications and services. (lots of buzzwords... ;) This is all part of the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft and I believe these set of technologies that Microsoft is working on will have everything including the kitchen sink!! Don't believe me?

... the technology to deliver these capabilities will be delivered through BizTalk Server "V6", System Center "V5", Visual Studio "V10", BizTalk Services "V1" and .NET Framework "V4". The code name for this effort is "Oslo"...[read whole article]

Visual Studio v.10
System Center v.5
Biztalk Services v.1
.NET framework v4.0
Biztalk Server v.6

and that is very powerful.! And if you are a Challenge Junkie like Brian said, then OSLO will give you something to get excited about.

ReSharper 4.0 upgrade

2008-04-01T09:57:00.000-04:00

I am taking the plunge and going for the EAP nightly builds of ReSharper. Since I have started using Visual Studio 2008, and it is REALLY annoying having to disable ReSharper everytime I want to do any work on it. Plus Harman talks so much about the new features and how they are very stable. So if HE uses it, why not me. ;)

So far, I have an un-easy feeling about this and the message does not provide any comfort...

Hope that QSI Management hurries up and approved that PO to buy us personal licenses of ReSharper before I run out of trial days.

Here is what happened to my v.3.1 License: License to version 3.x is not acceptable since issued before 12/21/2007.

30-days trial vs Full license... argghhh..

let's see what happens after 30-days.!

DVD Collection = 800..!

2008-03-30T22:25:00.000-04:00

I have finally reached a milestone [800 dvd's..!] in my DVD collection.

These are the last 25 dvd's that I have added to my collection. The software that I used to keep track of my massive collection is DVD Profiler. This software allows me to keep track of all of the details on my collection. From how much I have spent, to when did I purchased it, location, etc. It also allows me to keep track of dvd's that I have loaned to friends. There is even a section about ratings, choosing a random movie to watch, etc. Well worth the price of it [$25.00]. The price includes putting your collection online. Here you can view my complete collection online.

General information on my collection.

noticed that the average price for this year is about $6.13 / dvd..!!

The number one question I get asked is how much have I spent? Not a secret. In this chart you can see, is not that I am buying less in the past 3 years. Instead, it is that the price of the DVD's have significantly come down. Also, I am buying mostly used DVD's, so it affects the average price I am paying for them.

Shutdown Event Tracker

2008-03-25T10:32:00.000-04:00

A small annoyance. When I get a Virtual PC image that has Windows 2003 on it, it seems that the I am always looking for this information on google on how to disable the Event Tracker.

Here is a good article that I used all of the time

Disable Shutdown Event Tracker Windows 2003

Now, I won't loose it... :D

Windows DNA and Biztalk 2000

2008-03-20T09:32:00.001-04:00

Being the certification freak, I subscribe to anything Microsoft related. A few weeks back, I have received an email notifying me that the Exam for BizTalk 2000 is going to be retired.! http://www.microsoft.com/learning/exams/70-230.mspx

Of all of the certification tests that I have taken, this is the one that has the most meaning to me.

It's been almost 10yrs since I first hear about this product. Why BizTalk? This is my story. Right at the beginning of the dot COM era, I was an independent consultant doing COM and MTS. I actually knew how to get Windows NT4 to work with DCOM. Those were the years that I have abandoned C++ and their MFC for VB4 and VB5.

I remembered being part of the beta tester for VB5 and VB6 and signing NDA's. I was just starting to play with SQL Server 6.5 when I got this offer from a consulting company up north. They were based on Michigan and they were looking for Developers to work on this new joint application with Ford Motors [carpoint.com]. They mentioned that I would be working alongside Microsoft Consultants developing this new application that was going to revolutionize the automobile industry. I passed all 2 tech phone interviews and drove up there to meet them. Everything went fine, and I did get the Michigan Battle song played while talking to one of the PM's.! Funny, I don't really care about Football.

When the offer came, there were so many factors that I had to take into account. It was just about the same that I was making at that time in Columbus, so the money factor was not there. The challenge factor was there. It was the beginning of Internet boom, and as I can remember signing bonuses and stock options were very popular. Moving up north did not seem like a good career move, so with great dispair, I passed on this one offer.

2 years later, I am playing with this technology preview called BizTalk. Oh yeah, that was it. I am still doing the *what-if's* all of the time.

The buzzword of the day back then was Windows DNA [Windows Distributed InterNet Applications Architecture], then Microsoft stated their new strategy with the eCommerce .NET servers: Commerce Server 2000, Exchange 2000, SQL Server 2000, Application Center 2000, ISA 2000, BizTalk 2000 and some other that I can't remember. And BizTalk was one of the main core that will glue them all together.

I embraced this technology fully. It was the time that there were lots of mergers and acquisitions. Integration was starting to become a real enterprise problem. I had my share of integration projects with Unix and Windows.

The certification for this BizTalk 2000 did not come out until about 2001. I had to admit, I had to take this test 2 times to pass it. There were no materials to study for. At the time there were only 2 books that I could study from:

So finally I conquered this test.

Now, after obtaining every single BizTalk Certification (including the ones that dont exist... ;), I can only say that I will miss this test the most for the significance it had in my life..

It is amazing to sit here and think that this product has evolved so much in the past 10yrs. I can't hardly wait when Oslo comes out.

ADIOS

2008-03-10T00:46:00.003-04:00

Arnulfo Wing Caceres
Born: August 15, 1938
Decease: March 4, 2008
Married: October 18, 1964

fyi, my dad passed away at 5:30am, I arrived at 2:10pm. :S

Grok talk on Business Rule Engine Essentials

2008-02-29T22:28:00.000-05:00

I have presented a grok on BRE essentials tonight at our monthly Solutions Group meeting. The main focus on my presentation was to give a quick glance at what is available to developers when they enter the realm of BizTalk. Some smart guy once said that knowing what's available out there is half the battle.

Anyways, the main points of my talk was to show how you can interface with the BRE (from BRE to .NET, and from .NET to BRE). I have found the BizTalk rules engine to be very efficient and fast. In the last project we have, we had over 450+ policies, and each policy had an average of about 5-7 rules on each of them. On top of that I had an orchestration that call the vocabularies, determine the policy that needed to be executed, and then execute that policy. The time for all of this to happen, is between 1-2 seconds from the time the message enter BizTalk to the time it gets send back to the calling routine.

How do you show this much functionality in 20 minutes or less? Well, I came out with this fictitious company that had the following requirements:

The first thing that you do in BizTalk is that you need to define the schemas that will contain the inputs and output of the message that you are dealing with. So a simple schema:

Next, I have implemented those rules in the BRE composer

So now that I have the rules implemented, we need to get a way to call them and executed them. Here is the sample solution code that will call this policy.

I have also included some code that shows how to call the vocabulary. And some code to show how to implement a .NET assembly that can be called from the BRE.

Feedback [good|bad] is always welcome. Hope this help someone get a small peek into the vast universe of BizTalk.

How does a BizTalk guy pack?

2008-02-22T23:47:00.001-05:00

From Brian Prince's questionnaire, here is my response.

A BizTalk guy knows that the whole world could be fit into a set of enterprise patterns (scatter/gather, aggregator, resequencer, etc). So, we don't pack, we orchestrate the moving of all of the other so called *entities*.

Moving is what BizTalk does best. A BizTalk guy will correlate the moving to a scatter/gather pattern application. Each crate will be considered a message, and the content of each crate will be the message content. Since BizTalk is all about messages (your stuff), each crate will be labeled (just like a promoted property) and it will be marked with a GUID (Angie...;).

Once the contents are inside the Crate, the labels will be used for routing and destination. As each crate is handled by different external entities, the content will still be private, yet still managed to be transported to the correct destination.

A BizTalk guy does not care what's inside each crate (Message content), all it cares is that it is delivery correctly to the final destination. The order of the crates departing the old office will not be the same order as they arrived to the new office. But it is OK, since a BizTalk guy knows how to handle asynchronous messages and knows about scheduling, service window, failed delivery and re-routing.

A BizTalk guy will set a pipeline component that will take all of the inputs and translate them to a canonical message (Crate). A BizTalk guy will take all of these crates from different sources (admin, sales, recruiting, pmo, app dev, management, etc) and orchestrate a smooth move by processing them by their labeled information and not their content.

Being BizTalk of course, this crate will have a guarantee delivery that the contents are the exact same that when it was submitted. The BizTalk guy will create an orchestration that implements the scatter/gather pattern. All boxes are then send out in no particular order, to different locations, but they will be find their target destination correctly.

Since this is going to be an asynchronous transportation, the BizTalk guy will make sure that a single receive port location will handle the gather pattern and a confirmation receipt will then be issue. A confirmation receipt can then be handled and after the identity is confirmed a FAB key can be issued.

Of course, a BizTalk guy will create an orchestration:

and then attach another orchestration to it

so while other entities talk about

Some Borat character(Uzbekistan) and/or browsers add-ins ,
how cool is to stay late coding for free ,
about boxes and their colors ,
color boxes labeled v.2.0 that are not yet delivered,
how to pack a box in 5 minutes, versioned it, and then unpack it and repack it on changesets,
how to move your stuff by writing random xml code,

only a BizTalk guy does know how to move and in the process deliver quality :P

Not only a BizTalk guy will deliver all crates and their contents to its destination, but it can also get real time monitoring (BAM) on the moving process and then once the move is done, we can provide with KPI's on the whole process as whole, bringing meaningful reports for ROI.

yeah, that's right... ;)

How to restore TMM settings

2008-02-14T12:53:00.000-05:00

If you have deleted the TMM settings from your task scheduler as I have mentioned on my previous post, and need to get them back, here is the xml. Create an xml file and copy the following xml to it and import this file into your Task Schedule under the MobilePC hive:

---- Cut here 8<----

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"?>
<Task version="1.2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/windows/2004/02/mit/task">
<RegistrationInfo>
<Source>MobilePC Display Handling</Source>
<Author>Microsoft Corporation</Author>
<Description>Microsoft Transient Multi-Monitor Manager</Description>
<URI>Microsoft\Windows\MobilePC\TMM</URI>
<SecurityDescriptor>D:(A;;FA;;;BA)(A;;FA;;;SY)(A;;FR;;;AU)</SecurityDescriptor>
</RegistrationInfo>
<Triggers>
<LogonTrigger>
<Enabled>true</Enabled>
<Delay>PT00M02S</Delay>
</LogonTrigger>
</Triggers>
<Principals>
<Principal id="Users">
<GroupId>Authenticated Users</GroupId>
<RunLevel>LeastPrivilege</RunLevel>
</Principal>
</Principals>
<Settings>
<IdleSettings>
<Duration>PT10M</Duration>
<WaitTimeout>PT1H</WaitTimeout>
<StopOnIdleEnd>false</StopOnIdleEnd>
<RestartOnIdle>false</RestartOnIdle>
</IdleSettings>
<MultipleInstancesPolicy>Parallel</MultipleInstancesPolicy>
<DisallowStartIfOnBatteries>false</DisallowStartIfOnBatteries>
<StopIfGoingOnBatteries>false</StopIfGoingOnBatteries>
<AllowHardTerminate>true</AllowHardTerminate>
<StartWhenAvailable>true</StartWhenAvailable>
<RunOnlyIfNetworkAvailable>false</RunOnlyIfNetworkAvailable>
<AllowStartOnDemand>true</AllowStartOnDemand>
<Enabled>true</Enabled>
<Hidden>false</Hidden>
<RunOnlyIfIdle>false</RunOnlyIfIdle>
<WakeToRun>true</WakeToRun>
<ExecutionTimeLimit>PT0S</ExecutionTimeLimit>
<Priority>7</Priority>
</Settings>
<Actions Context="Users">
<ComHandler>
<ClassId>{35EF4182-F900-4632-B072-8639E4478A61}</ClassId>
</ComHandler>
</Actions>
</Task>

------ cut here 8<-----

WSS 3.0 studio extensions not working on x64 Vista

2008-02-13T08:26:00.001-05:00

One more of those little annoyances. I can't play with this new set of tools on my laptop: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Tools: Visual Studio 2005 Extensions, Version 1.1, because it does not support 64bit.

bummer. Time to fire off my Windows 2003 Virtual machine.. :(

Amazon Web Services and Ruby

2008-02-12T00:04:00.000-05:00

I have been using Amazon Web Services for quite some time. I have a large collection of DVD's, and a fairly amount of eBooks. I have written applications against the aws to get detail information for specific books and stuff. My user interface skills are much to be desired ;), but the important thing in here, is that Amazon, make it very easy to connect and query their services.

Today, I attended the Ruby user's group meeting. The presenter was Mike Culver from Amazon.com, his title is Web Services Evangelist. How cool of a title is that.? During his presentation, he mentioned how Amazon is empowering developers to come out with creative ideas on how to use these services.

He showcased 2 websites that are kind of unique in the way of their approach using the AWS. One of them created a full front end to amazon.com, so that they can get referrals: www.tvmojo.com

The other site that is more impressive is www.zoomii.ca this one is really neat. The user interface is very visual, and for what I saw seems to be very resource intensive. Unfortunately, the site is still in Beta, and it is not open for the public, but trust me, it is very interesting.

In all, I did learned quite a few things out of this meeting about Ruby. One of these days I will write my first hello world on Ruby, or maybe I might take the challenge like Steve Harman suggested and write my own blog engine using Ruby... :P

Data Dude for Studio 2008?

2008-02-07T15:08:00.000-05:00

Does DataDude works for Visual Studio 2008? The answer can be found on this blog post by Gertd:

visual-studio-team-system-2008-database-edition.aspx

Awesome, so it is time to create a new DB project.

I get this dialog box:

going back. I have followed the instructions and set my options to use my SQL server instance:

and my data connections is set to my local instance as well

since I don't have SQLExpress running, I decided to follow the instructions on it. I click CANCEL on the previous dialog box, and I get this error:

---------------------------
Microsoft Visual Studio
---------------------------
An error has occurred while establishing a connection to the server. When connecting to SQL Server 2005, this failure may be caused by the fact that under the default settings SQL Server does not allow remote connections. (provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 - Error Locating Server/Instance Specified)

I remember this error from before. I has something to do with having the SQL Server Browser running for it to find it.

I go and turn this service on. I usually have ALL services stopped and I only run the services on demand when I need to use them. Yes, I do have lots of batch files that the only thing they do is to start/stop services... :D

humm. I still getting the error about not being able to connect.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that I am running the 64-bit version of SQL server? Just for kicks, I delete the name of my instance on the tools-Options

BINGO. It works like a charm. I went back and turn that SQL Server Browser service off. It still works... :D [one more service that I don't need to run.!]

My environment is Vista Enterprise 64-bit, SQL Server Developer Edition 64-bit, BizTalk 2006-R2, Visual Studio Team Suite 2008. I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but by leaving the instance name blank, Studio 2008 was able to connect to my local SQL Server instance.

oh well.

70-504: Windows Workflow Foundation 3.5

2008-02-05T21:36:00.001-05:00

Part of working in the Solutions Team for Quick Solutions, Inc., is that we get special offers for all kind of Microsoft stuff. The latest one was an invitation to participate in the Beta Test for the exam 70-504- MS .Net Framework 3.5 Windows Workflow Foundation.

In order to study for this beta test I have to install vs2008.

Since I am not doing any C++ programming, I decided not to install any of the C++ components. By unselecting it, I saved almost 2GB in space...!! However, when I open Studio 2008 for the first time, I've got this error:

Package Load Failure

Package 'Visual C++ Resource Editor Package' has failed to load properly ( GUID = {74AAD8B2-3294-49CB-BB5D-E9BAB132BFD5} ). Please contact package vendor for assistance. Application restart is recommended, due to possible environment corruption. Would you like to disable loading this package in the future? You may use 'devenv /resetskippkgs' to re-enable package loading.

Selecting Yes, got rid of this dialog box. Now I went and try to create a sequential workflow application, and this is what I got:

An error occurred while loading the workflow. Please correct the following error and try reloading the document to view the workflow.

The designer could not be shown for this file because none of the the classes within it can be designed.

Using my 2nd brain, aka Google, I came across a lot of other post relating to this error, but none of them applied to my configuration. My configuration is Vista x64, with BizTalk 2006 R2, and Visual Studio 2005 Team System installed. I have installed the SDK for .NET 3.0 some time ago.

I can create workflow projects in 2005. However, using the .NET 3.5 does not seems to work.

When I compare both projects VS2005 and VS2008, the only differences I've found is that the 2008 reference these assemblies: System.WorkflowServices .Net 3.5, and the System.ServiceModel. The new assembly points to this location:

c:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.5\System.WorkflowServices.dll

Then I started to dig out more information on the Event Logs. Then I found the culprit:

The Windows update "Update for Windows (KB929300)" was successfully installed. (Command line: ""C:\Windows\system32\WUSA.exe" "e:\setup\..\wcu\dotnetframework\dotnetmsp\x64\NetFX3.0-KB929300-v6000-x64.msu" /quiet /norestart")

It seems that after the setup has finished installing, it needed to reboot my machine. However, the /quiet and the /norestart flags did not report anything back to me. So I did not know I had to reboot for the workflow application 3.5 to work.

Now I can get back to reading Pro WF Windows Workflow in .NET 3.0, and try to run some samples out of the SDK before my test.

Agile methodologies and Spelling bee?

2008-01-20T12:51:00.000-05:00

Yes, I am the proud father of a little walking dictionary. My oldest son qualified to be part of the team that might be representing his school to compete against other schools for the Scripps National Spelling Bee Competition. Now, how do you study those 870+ words needed for the competition with a 11-year-old whose parent's first language is not English?...

Geek time.! I have an old iPaq 5555 that is pretty much sitting collecting dust. So I decided to write a program that will allow him to practice those words. A pocketPC seems to be the perfect platform for it, since it has built-in support for hand-writing and sound. So it is like having an interactive flash card.

My idea is to have the word being pronounced by a native speaker, and then have him write the word. This is my first take on this idea:

I also put a show button for studying/reviewing. So that as he moves around the list of words, not only he can click on the PLAY button and hear it, but he will be able to see: language, definition, sample use.

One of the trickiest part of the program was getting it to play those wave files.! Yeah. My Google skills are either fading out, or there was not that many people writing media applications for the pocketPC. :( I have to admit it took me longer that I expected to find the right information.

Here is the link to MSDN to the article that I use http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229685.aspx

Basically, it uses the CoreDll.dll library to accomplish this

[DllImport("CoreDll.DLL", EntryPoint="PlaySound", SetLastError=true)]
private extern static int WCE_PlaySound(string szSound, IntPtr hMod, int flags);

In true agile fashion, I have written the alpha 1.0 and tested it with my *end user*. Feedback is always good when you are writing an application with so little requirements. This version 1.0 is very crude, but it accomplishes the primary objective. Now while he is *testing* the first iteration of the application, I am working on features for the 2nd iteration.

Then I have shown the program to the PM of the Wing's house(aka. Wifey), and now my feature list has grown by 2x, and of course my deadline is still the same... :'(

I have put this program on Codeplex/FlashBee. It is more of a rough 6hr-POC. The cool thing is that he and me sat down and wrote the application together (not all 6hrs). Anybody said pair programming? ;)

KidzMash @ Codemash

2008-01-14T22:08:00.001-05:00

I had an opportunity to volunteer some time for Kidzmash at Codemash. This is a great way to try to influence young minds to stay on a technical career.
The slides and sample code that I was "planning" on using can be downloaded here.

Jim Holmes, told me that he did not know how many kids will come or what the ages were. Well, I have volunteered before at my son's school, and I had 30 kids in the computer lab [previous post]. Of course,the kids at school were 10-13yr-olds that knew how to read and type on a computer..... ;)

Hello KidzMash..!! I had like 10+ kids with their parents showing up. Oldest one? 9-year-old.!! Youngest one? 5-month baby... yikes..!! I asked who knew how to read.? like 4-5 hands went up.

After about 5 minutes of Kids Programming Language (KPL), where you could hear crickets on the background, I decided to dump KPL, and I switch to Scratch.

Scratch is programming tool developed by MIT, to teach kids about programming concepts. I have download Scratch about 2 weeks ago, and I have put it to the test with my kids and they were able to use it within 5 minutes. Since this program is aimed at a younger age, I decided to use this program.

Kids were more receptive to this program. Thanks goodness.!! Here is the link for Scratch:

http://scratch.mit.edu/

Doodle Game included:

The intuitive editor for some of the graphics is just plain simple, they were able to draw, and play with this one character all of the time.!!

I have asked for volunteers helpers, and they were all raising their hands to take a turn at using the laptop. :D

Once again, this was just another way to influence young minds to the wonderful world of programming.

Codemash - Day One.!!

2008-01-10T23:30:00.000-05:00

Brian decided to dress as the head gear dude from the Codemash logo.

So this great company I work for: Quick Solutions is giving away a Rock Band set for the Xbox 360 after Codemash. During the conference they are running a special contest to see who can score the highest point in Rock Band. Even Scott Hanselman got into the competition (singing and/or playing the drums).

Today was a blast. Neil Ford and his Poliglot programming keynote was very thought provoking. However, it was Scott's presentation about himself that just got everyone laughing very hard.

Favorite keynote moments:

Neil Ford:

1 Test = 1000 opinions

Scott Hanselman

a VI version of clippy...!!!

looking forward tomorrow sessions.

Bill Gates Last day at Microsoft video.

2008-01-08T10:55:00.000-05:00

This is hilarious... :D

http://on10.net/blogs/larry/Bills-Last-Day-CES-2008-Keynote-Video/Default.aspx

favorite part? Seen him playing Guitar Hero.!!!

One of the most influential person in the IT industry shows everyone that he still has a great sense of humor.!

Codemash...

2008-01-07T13:21:00.000-05:00

So there is this new unique conference that will take place THIS week. It is a nice, well thought out conference unlike anything I have been before. It has the feel of a CodeCamp but with a wider selection of topics.

The main theme is not to hear Microsoft talk about how great are its products (which they are..!!!) or to hear about how Java is so awesome that it is everywhere. No. The conference is about learning other technologies. Seeing what else is out there. Learn something outside your comfort zone. That's the key to this conference.

Last year's Codemash was awesome, it was nice to see how people were embracing the new paradigm of learning something new.

This year we were promised a lot more quality sessions by great speakers, not to mention the keynotes... (Scott Hanselman, Neal Ford, Brian Goetz).

And the Kalahari resort is an awesome place to see a real-live herd of white-pasty-oversize-developers with their offsprings... ;)

Dan and Matt build this cool Session scheduler..!! Here is my agenda for Codemash: Agenda for Arnulfo Wing.

I am looking forward seeing some Eyebrows being shaved this year (shaved heads is not cool anymore... ;)

COM Interop with .NET 2.0

2007-12-13T21:30:00.000-05:00

For the month of December I am working on this small project (3-weeks) involving making some information available to end users through a mobile device. Yeah, that's cool. However, the code that grabs the information from the backend was all written in good old VB6 and classic ASP.

I am running into this one issue that is driving me nuts. I am trying to assign a class object to a property in the COM object. While it works for some properties/methods, it does not seem to be working for some other.

VB6 code that works:
[

    1 Private mAuthor As clsSomething

    2 Private mAuthorID As Long

    4 Public Property Get Author_ClassParam() As clsSomething

    5     On Error GoTo handleError

    7     If mAuthor Is Nothing Then

    8         If mObjectID = 0 Then

    9             Err.Raise 111, , "xxx item not initialized"

   10         End If

   12         Set mAuthor = New clsSomething

   13         [--- deleted stuff---]

   15     End If

   16     Set Author = mAuthor

   17     Exit Property

   19 handleError:

   20     mError.Raise Err.number, "[xxxxHistoryItem]" & Err.Description, False

   21     Set Author = Nothing

   22 End Property

   24 Public Property Set Author_ClassParam(ByVal value As clsSomething)

   25     Set mAuthor = value

   26 End Property

]

VB6 code that does not works:
[

    1 Private mAuthor As clsSomething

    2 Private mAuthorID As Long

    4 Public Property Get Author_VariantParam() As clsSomething

    5     On Error GoTo handleError

    7     If mAuthor Is Nothing Then

    8         If mObjectID = 0 Then

    9             Err.Raise 111, , "xxx item not initialized"

   10         End If

   12         Set mAuthor = New clsSomething

   13         [--- deleted stuff---]

   15     End If

   16     Set Author = mAuthor

   17     Exit Property

   19 handleError:

   20     mError.Raise Err.number, "[xxxxHistoryItem]" & Err.Description, False

   21     Set Author = Nothing

   22 End Property

   24 Public Property Set Author_VariantParam(ByVal value As Variant)

   25     Set mAuthor = value

   26 End Property

]

this is the .NET code that calls that VB6 COM object:
[

    1 public void ClassAssignment_COM()

2 {

    3     clsSomething oAuthor = new clsSomething();

    4     oAuthor.AuthorID = 15;

    6     clsTransaction oTrnx = new clsTransaction();

    7     oTrnx.Author_ClassParam = oAuthor;

    8     Trace.WriteLine(String.Format("bts- ClassParam.AuthorID: [{0}]", oTrnx.Author_ClassParam.AuthorID));

9 }

   11 public void VariantAssignment_COM()

   12 {

   13     clsSomething oAuthor = new clsSomething();

   14     oAuthor.AuthorID = 15;

   16     clsTransaction oTrnx = new clsTransaction();

   17     oTrnx.Author_VariantParam = oAuthor;

   18     Trace.WriteLine(String.Format("bts- VariantParam.AuthorID: [{0}]", oTrnx.Author_VariantParam.AuthorID));

   19 }

]

I get this error message at compile time:

Error 3 Property, indexer, or event 'Author_VariantParam' is not supported by the language; try directly calling accessor methods 'xxxx._clsTransaction.get_Author_VariantParam' or 'xxxx._clsTransaction.set_Author_VariantParam(object)'
C:\vsProjects\Tests\mock.cs 168 27 xxxx.yyyApplication.Web.Test

I have not found a solution to this problem. I know that variants are not supported in .NET, but com'on, there's got to be someone out there that knows a workaround this issue...

How to edit rich text in SharePoint 2007 forms

2007-11-21T08:08:00.000-05:00

Since I have been using Window Live Writer, I have not had the need to write all of that html code (what is HTML?). I edit using Live Writer, and then I switch to HTML view, copy and paste the formatted text into the SharePoint text box. I thought it was weird that Microsoft will only give a blank text box and you need to go and figure out all of the markup tags.

Then I saw on this other developer screen that his text boxes look a lot different from mine..!!

Clicking on the

Click for help about adding HTML formatting.

just take you to the normal help, nothing useful there.

Well, I found out that it was just another x64 vs x32 bit kind of deal. Since moving to the 64bit bandwagon, I almost exclusively use Internet Explorer (64 bit). It is a great way to get to the Microsoft sites without being bogged down by all of the flash advertisement (oh yeah, those flash do not work on 64bit... ;)

However, there is a whole new world out there if you use the 32bit version of Internet Explorer.!!

yikes.

How to install assembly to GAC on build event

2007-11-16T10:44:00.000-05:00

I keep forgetting this line, and end up having to dig it out from other projects. I am putting it in here so that I can access it faster.

Basically, every time you build/rebuild your .NET assembly, it needs to be in the GAC for BizTalk to be able to use it. So, I put this code on the Build Events to move the assembly to the GAC.

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin\gacutil.exe" /i $(TargetFileName)

there. Now I won't forget.

Enum.Parse

2007-11-15T15:22:00.000-05:00

I had this issue, in which in one of my C# class, I had a enum type. Then I wanted to send a string to a method, which will populate this object. The problem was that the enum type was an integer, and I was passing a string down to the object.

    1 public enum ProductTypeEnum : int

2 {

    3     blue = 10,

    4     red = 20,

    5     green = 30

6 }

Here is the class that I was using to populate with values:

    1 public void GetDiscountTest_BLUE_Preferred()

2 {

    3     OrderDetail inOrder = new OrderDetail();

    4     inOrder.ProductType = (Int32) ProductTypeEnum.blue;

    5     inOrder.Quantity = 100;

Now, I wanted to replace the code with something like this:

    1 public void GetDiscountTest_BLUE_Preferred(string sColorName)

2 {

    3     OrderDetail inOrder = new OrderDetail();

    4     inOrder.ProductType = ConvertToEnum(sColorName);

    5     inOrder.Quantity = 100;

Here is the code to accomplish that:

    1 public void WorkingDiscount(string sColorName)

2 {

    3     OrderDetail inOrder = new OrderDetail();

    4     inOrder.ProductType = (Int32)Enum.Parse(typeof(ProductTypeEnum), sColorName);

    5     inOrder.Quantity = 100;

now I will remember this.

Biztalk 2006 R2 Upgrade gotchas?

2007-11-13T11:18:00.001-05:00

I just finished upgrading to R2 on my Vista x64. So far everything seems to be running fine, except....

Business Rules Engine:

There is a new location for the assemblies now. On Biztalk 2006, the location for the BRE assemblies was this

c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\Microsoft.RuleEngine.dll

However, after removing my 2006 version, and freshly installed the R2 version, I have to go and recompile all of my assemblies that had a reference to the Microsoft.RuleEngine. The new location is

C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft BizTalk\Microsoft.RuleEngine.dll

Other than this, everything seems to be running smoothly (Orchestrations, pipelines, etc...) so far. I will update this post as I find any more gotchas (if any... ;)

My Biztalk Tools

2007-11-06T19:58:00.000-05:00

For our group [Connected system] we started talking about what each of us was using to develop on BizTalk.

We come out with a list of tools. Here I am going to publish the tools that I have installed and that I used most of the time.

DebugView: of course this is the number one. ;) I like to use it with a filter, so that I only see the trace information that I send. For instance I pre-append the word: bts- to all of my trace.writelines.

System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine(String.Format("bts- args: [{0}]", args));

DTC Tester Tool: this will test the configuration of your Distributed Transaction settings. It will come in handy when you have to setup BizTalk in multiple environments.

Biztalk Best Practice Analyzer tool: this will evaluate the installation of BizTalk. Helpful in those cases that you come into a client that has pre-installed BizTalk on their environment.

It not only analyzes your BizTalk installation, but it also give you the documentation as to why this is important. It also gives you the steps to go about fixing any problems that it find with your configuration.

SmartPaster: this is one of those ideas that one person implements, and now after using it a few times, I can't live without. Nice work.

CopySourceAsHtml: I use this add-in to html-encode my source code before I post it on my blog.

Biztalk Documenter: This tool out of codeplex is a good addition to that *finish* touch on your projects. One thing that I like about it is that it takes a snapshot of your orchestration and create the MSDN style documentation. It is also a great tool to document those BRE's. It creates a treeview like view of all your rules and their predicates. I run this during and at the end of the projects to document my artifacts and Business Rules Policies and Vocabularies.

Notepad 2: Another free tool that is in my list of AWESOME tools to use. No installation required and it provides all of the functionality needed from a simple editor. One of the features that I like the most of this editor is the fact that it can format XML and it has the Always On Top option.!! I love to be able to copy long xpath's from the Biztalk schemas and paste on this editor. Keeping it on top of the other windows, make it very useful.

FoxitReader: I am a big fan of NOT installing tools. Specially when I am at a customer site, and have to use their equipment. I love to put my thumb drive in and be able to use any of the the tools in there without having to install them. FoxIt has a small footprint, and it lighting fast to open any PDF document.

Process Explorer: Yet another jewel from SysInternals. This one is a better task manager. it is very useful to see some of the process that are running on the background, and some of those *hidden* programs on the network.

WebService Studio: I have talked about this tool in the past here. It is still my favorite tool to quickly test an asmx web service.

Database Publishing Wizard: good to get data to and from different sql servers. I used it primarily to get schemas from the customer environment to my vpc sandbox, so that I can reproduce whatever condition/data that they require.

XML Spy: Although it is a commercial tool, I love their grid representation for xml schemas and just plain xml data. I have been a fan of this product since XML Spy version 3.0...!!

Another cool feature of this tool is that it can instantiate Soap request into a web service.

HyperSnap: my screen capture tool of preference. I like the fact that you can capture a region and then you can save that snapshot to any of the major picture formats out there.

Beyond Compare 2: Windiff is child's play when you compare it to Beyond Compare 2. Download the 30-day and try it yourself. It allows you to visually pinpoint differences in 2 files down to the character that is not equal. It also provides editing within the comparison main screen, and it allows you to synch any changes from either of the files into the other one.

ReSharper 3.0: Last but not least my FAVORITE add-in for visual studio 2005.!! I started using this product back on DotNet 1.1, and I have been hooked on it ever since.

How to create your own industry...

2007-10-28T16:14:00.000-04:00

Recently, I was in my native Panama on a personal trip. Being raining season, the best way to get around is to get a 4x4, so I rented a 2008 Land Cruiser. Driving on the rain forest of Chiriqui made me realized that this 4x4 was the right choice.

Everything was dandy and fine, 'till Tuesday. That day I came to find out that there is a whole new industry that has exploded in the past 10yrs: Trading of Car logos.!

Yes. Those precious logos we don't even pay attention in the US, are the striving goods in Panama. This is how the story unfolds. I parked in front of a well lit, populated commercial area. It is 2:30pm and I am talking to a veterinarian inside the clinic. Next thing I know, some guy walks in and tells me that he saw this other guy stealing my car logo. WTF?

As I walked outside, I see 2 guys running about a block away and turning into this open market. So I decided against chasing them into the public market. With a regular screwdriver, they have popped the front logo of my brand new rented car while walking by.

So what's one to do? call the policy of course.!! I waited for about 1.5hrs for the policy to arrive. They checked my US passport and they told me that this is quite common and that there is nothing they can do. If I had caught the guys that have stolen the logo, then they could arrest them and file charges. (hummm... am I missing the point?, I thought that was their job.!!

They wont even give me a police report for the insurance company. I have to go to the local county office and filed a complaint. So here I go to this building that everybody goes to. They *investigate* robberies, assaults, murders, stolen goods, etc. It was awesome to see some of the stuff that they have recovered: (check out the portion of fence against the wall...)

Yes, those are toilet seats that were stolen, and have been recovered.!! [...honey, let's save some money and buy a used toilet seat. ;)

Well, after my grievance was officially filed, I call the insurance company and they told me that this kind of things do happen regularly. However, they do NOT cover partial thefts... WTF? Yeap, if the car have been stolen completely, then I did not have to pay anything. However, now I am responsible to pay $85.00 that the manufacturer charges to replace the logo.!!

Talking to some guy walking by, he suggested that I checked the local Chinese Autopart that sell replicas for about $8-$10. However, the car being rented and all, I decided against it.

The very next day, talking to a customer of the Vet, she mentioned that she knows someone that knows someone that could get me an original logo for cheaper that I could pay the dealer. hummm. She goes and give me her cell phone and tell me to give her a call the next day at 9am.

This is getting very interesting. Of course I call the next day, I talk to her, and yes she said that she was able to get me an original Land Cruiser 2008 logo for $40.00.

After some haggling over the phone, we settle for $25.00. She was to drop off the logo at the vet clinic with the secretary there where I am supposed to leave the money (cash only of course.!) and that will complete the transaction. Funny, this sounds so fishy. I get my logo stolen in front of the vet clinic, and then 3 days later, I am paying $25.00 to a completely stranger for an original logo... ;) But, under the circumstances, I rather pay that $25.00 that trying to explain and haggle with the rental agency, which I know will make me pay for the replacement.

Then I start noticing on the other cars, that their logos have either been stolen or that they have paid someone to make sure no one steals their logo:

I have also heard that some transportation buses pay $3-$4 per logo, no questions asked. I was not able to get a picture of these buses, but they told me that they use the logos as decorations, just like trophies, and they display them all over inside the main cab.

No, I did not place the logo back on the car. One hour before I drop off the car at the airport, I pop the logo back onto the car and drove straight and returned the car.

Supply and demand at its best.!

Evaluation Period has expired

2007-10-24T10:58:00.000-04:00

I have run into this issue today. I was trying to update some business rules on a client's computer. They have a SQL and a separate BizTalk environment. So I have tried opening the SQL Management Studio from the BizTalk box, and I got this dialog box:

it says:

Evaluation period has expired. For information on how to upgrade your evaluation software please go to http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy

which of course takes you to a Microsoft Page not found. ;)

Apparently, they had installed the evaluation trial version of SQL Server 2005 client tools. BTW, this was never an issue with SQL Server 2000. If you went and installed the client tools, they did not expire.!

I put the Enterprise SKU binaries for SQL Server 2005, and ran the Setup.exe from the tools directory, and then I got this information:

clicking on the messages details, it mentions this:

- Edition Change Check (Warning)
Messages
Edition Change Check

To change an existing instance of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 to a different edition of SQL Server 2005, you must run SQL Server 2005 Setup from the command prompt and include the SKUUPGRADE=1 parameter.

FYI, you will need to run the setup.exe that is located in the SERVERS folder and not on the tools folder. Bring up a command prompt window and execute the

cmd> SETUP.exe SKUUPGRADE=1

then after running through the wizard, it will upgrade your SQL Management version to not be the trial version.

ahhh, that's much better.!

C# Generated code from Biztalk Orchestrations

2007-10-08T15:10:00.000-04:00

Sometimes you get some odd error messages on your Orchestrations. And it gives you the line number where the error is occurring. To get to the source code generated from the XLang when it is creating the C# code, you can use this is old trick from the 2004 days.

It is still valid in Vista x64 and Biztalk 2006. :D

Open your registry and look for the following hive:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0

now create a key named BiztalkProject

under this key, add a DWORD named GenerateCSFiles. Set the value to 1.

Now, close all instances of Visual Studio. Open a new instance of Visual Studio and create a Biztalk project

Build it. After it built, click on Show All Files:

Bingo, you will see the C# code:

BizTalkDTADb (Suspect)

2007-09-26T08:51:00.000-04:00

While trying to undeploy a Biztalk BRE Policy, I had this error:

Error inserting tracking information for ruleset "Final_WI_EmpMedical_HospitalCare" version 1.0 into the tracking database: Error encountered while connecting to database: "Initial Catalog=BizTalkDTADb;Data Source=xxxxx;Integrated Security=SSPI;"

Looking at the Management Studio, I soon discover that the tracking database was marked as suspect.

a quick google for it, turn out some instructions to get the DB out of the suspect state. I have tried most of them (reset status, emergency mode, detach data files, DBCC with data loss, etc.)

However, nothing seems to be able to get this database out of that status. The Sql configuration manager was taking a long time to execute a refresh. I have tried to shut down the SQL Agent service, and it was not allowing me to stop it.

Then I decided to check on the System event log and I found this entry in there:

The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0.

hummmm... Nothing else seems to be wrong. Then the BiztalkMsgboxDb went into suspect mode as well.

I went ahead and reboot this server. However, it did not come back and it was giving me the gray screen on the Virtual Server Manager. Running out of time, and being pressure to get this machine up and running, I hit the PANIC button and undo all changes (Turn Off Virtual Machine and Discard Undo Disks)

Now the machine is back and running fine. I have started deploying all of my artifacts and BRE's to it. Then I noticed than on the other VPC's I have the same message on the system event log.

Jim Holmes pointed out that I should be looking at the Host Event Log instead, and yes, there it was:
The volume "E" only has 0 MB of space left. The virtual hard disk "E:\Virtual Machines\bztXXXXX\VirtualPCUndo_biztalkXXXXX_0_0_0_14495508212007.vud" associated with the virtual machine "biztalkXXXXX" has been expanded, and very little space remains. The virtual machine will be paused.
It would have been nice to see this error somewhere else, but I guess I have learned to not hit the PANIC button to soon and start thinking outside the box.

Like BLindman says "...the error in front of you might just be the symptom of a bigger issue..."

I am wiser now.

Microsoft.RuleEngine.XmlHelper

2007-09-16T00:52:00.000-04:00

Recently I have a requirement for a project involving the use of the BRE. The customer wanted to know which rules were being evaluated. They wanted to know the outcome of each of the business rules as they were applied to the facts submitted. More importantly, they wanted to know why *each* of the rules failed.

Here are the requirements

NumberDays >= 300
StateEmployment = OH
HoursWorked >= 1000
Gender = M
Condition = Final

The solution to these requirements was to implement a MAIN Policy that will test and evaluate for all conditions. Then writing a single business rule for each fact and negating that, would take care of the reasons for the policy to fail.

To maintain a list of those failed business rules, we can make use of the XMLHelper class that comes with the Business Rule Engine Assembly.

The first step is to add a reference to Microsoft.RuleEngine assembly. On the .NET Classes tab, right click and select Browse.

Now select the Microsoft.RuleEngine assembly.

After you click OK, you can see all of the interfaces exposed by this assembly. Select the Microsoft.RuleEngine.XMLHelper one, and you will see the methods

As you can see, there are several overloaded methods for the AddNode function. We will use this function to keep track of executed business rules.
Here is the schema that I will be using to illustrate the use of this handy feature:

I will be evaluating the information in the INPUT node, and I will be updating the information on the OUTPUT node. Inside the RulesApplied, there will be a node of RULE that will contain each business rule that was evaluated.

Here is the sample output xml that I should get after the BRE executes:

    1 <ns0:Root xmlns:ns0="http://AW.SampleSchema.v1">

    2     <Input>

    3         <NumberDays>300</NumberDays>

    4         <StateEmployment>OH</StateEmployment>

    5         <HoursWorked>1000</HoursWorked>

    6         <Gender>X</Gender>

    7         <Condition>yxyxyx</Condition>

    8     </Input>

    9     <Output>

   10         <OutputStatus>false</OutputStatus>

   11         <RulesApplied>

   12             <Rule>

   13                 <RuleName>negGender</RuleName>

   14                 <RuleMessage>not a valid gender</RuleMessage>

   15             </Rule>

   16             <Rule>

   17                 <RuleName>negCondition</RuleName>

   18                 <RuleMessage>not a valid condition</RuleMessage>

   19             </Rule>

   22         </RulesApplied>

   23     </Output>

   24 </ns0:Root>

For this implementation, I will have one main business rule and 5 negative rules that will give me the reasons for failure.

The MainTest would look like this:

and each of the negative test will be a single test with the NOT predicate:

For the actions, I will be adding a RULE node to each negative rule. The important thing to remember in this xmlHelper is the xpath function:
./Rule[position()=last()]
This xpath function will place the insert location at the last position.

The Actions panel for the Main test will be:

The Actions panel for the negative rules will look something like this:

Notice that the first action is a call to the XmlHelper.AddNode. This will add the parent node named Rule.

Then there are 2 calls to the XmlHelper.AddNodeWithValue. These calls will add the child nodes and their corresponding value.

The default value for the outputStatus field is set to False by default. Then I only update that value if the MainTest passes.

Ahh. more importantly, read this article from Richard Seroter regarding static objects. You will need to add a value on the registry to get this function to work. On a windows 2003, the location will be:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\BusinessRules\3.0\StaticSupport

but on a Vista x64, the location is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\BusinessRules\3.0\StaticSupport

Internal SOAP Processing Failure at Microsoft.BizTalk.WebServices.ServerProxy.Invoke

2007-09-12T00:24:00.001-04:00

Searching for that Beautiful code, I have decided to do some refactoring of an existing ODX that gets published as a web service and gets consumed by another .NET application. This ODX was like the diamond on the rock. Except I did not name the schemas correctly to begin with. So I went ahead and change the schema and their types, etc...

Long story short, it executed almost all of the ODX, but it will always fail at the end with the Internal Soap Error. :@

SOAP exception error:

    1 The Web service returned an exception.

    2 System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException:

    3 Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.

    4 System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException:

    5  Internal SOAP Processing Failure

    6 at Microsoft.BizTalk.WebServices.ServerProxy.ServerProxy.Invoke(String functionName, Object[] parameters, ParamInfo[] inParamInfos, ParamInfo[] outParamInfos, Int32 bodyPartIndex, String bodyType, ArrayList inHeaders, ArrayList inoutHeaders, ArrayList& inoutHeaderResponses, ArrayList& outHeaderResponses, Type[] outHeaderTypes, String[] outHeaderNamespaces, SoapUnknownHeader[] unknownHeaders, SoapUnknownHeader[]& unknownHeaderResponses, Boolean oneway, Boolean spsSsoEnabled, Object cookie)

    7 at Microsoft.BizTalk.WebServices.ServerProxy.ServerProxy.Invoke(String functionName, Object[] parameters, ParamInfo[] inParamInfos, ParamInfo[] outParamInfos, Int32 bodyPartIndex, String bodyType, ArrayList inHeaders, ArrayList inoutHeaders, ArrayList& inoutHeaderResponses, ArrayList& outHeaderResponses, Type[] outHeaderTypes, String[] outHeaderNamespaces, SoapUnknownHeader[] unknownHeaders, SoapUnknownHeader[]& unknownHeaderResponses, Boolean oneway, Boolean spsSsoEnabled)

    8 at BRE.Application.BRE_Application_EligibilityResolver_SoapEligibilityPort.GetEligibility(CustomerCaseRoot part)

    9 at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.ReadResponse(SoapClientMessage message, WebResponse response, Stream responseStream, Boolean asyncCall)

   10 at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.Invoke(String methodName, Object[] parameters)

   11 at BRE_Application_EligibilityResolver_SoapEligibilityPort.GetEligibility(CustomerCaseRoot CustomerCaseRoot)

   14 --- End of inner exception stack trace ---

   15 at System.RuntimeMethodHandle._InvokeMethodFast(Object target, Object[] arguments, SignatureStruct& sig, MethodAttributes methodAttributes, RuntimeTypeHandle typeOwner)

   16 at System.RuntimeMethodHandle.InvokeMethodFast(Object target, Object[] arguments, Signature sig, MethodAttributes methodAttributes, RuntimeTypeHandle typeOwner)

   17 at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.Invoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture, Boolean skipVisibilityChecks)

   18 at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.Invoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture)

   19 at WebServiceStudio.MainForm.InvokeWebMethod()

this error is not the most useful error found. After re-starting all of my process from scratch (delete the application, the bindings, restart the host, restart VStudio), then I still could not find the offending bug.

Usually when I find myself trashing for more than an hour, I try to get some help in the form of "pair-debugging", so I asked my friend Monish to pair with me. After finding out that I had the wrong receive pipelines (PassThru Transmit instead of XML [default behavior when publishing through the wizard]). we got this other error:

    1 A response message sent to adapter "SOAP"

    2 on receive port "WebPort_EligibilityService/AppEligibilityResolverSoapPort"

    3 with URI "/EligibilityService/AppEligibilityResolverSoapPort.asmx"

    4 is suspended.

    5 Error details: There is an error in XML document (33, 25).

    6 MessageId:  {3460C12E-A95A-4108-8112-63244EA9D10D}

    7 InstanceID: {C9B8E15C-FF4E-4B36-AFD3-1550B83AE01D}

which seems to point to an XML validation. :D

Now we are getting somewhere.!! On my refactoring of the schemas for BizTalk, I have changed all of the ID's from INT to string, *ALL* of them except one... ;)

Lesson learned: Either get a smart friend named Monish, or be prepare to spend lots of time if you refactor Biztalk schemas.

How to access BRE Vocabularies from .NET

2007-09-07T22:56:00.000-04:00

Let's assume that you need to access a Biztalk Business rules vocabulary definitions from a .NET assembly. You need to understand how the BRE API is setup to handle this.

Let's create a vocabulary with a definition constant of type string:

Now create the definition with the type of string as follows:

Exporting this vocabulary using the Business Rules Engine Deployment Wizard, the xml will look like this: [notice all 6 fields in green...]


1 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

    2 <brl xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/businessruleslanguage/2002">

    3   <vocabulary id="1d3ad67e-1ed3-46ed-88a7-23199eef8fcd" name="Sample_ValidNames" uri="" description="">

    4     <version major="1" minor="0" description="" modifiedby="LocalDC\awing" date="2007-09-07T21:55:45.545-04:00" />

    5     <vocabularydefinition id="cdff8b38-e565-4942-b76f-72161449a457" name="Definition1_DefinitionName" description="Definition1_DefinitionDescription">

    6       <literaldefinition type="string">

    7         <string>Definition1_DefinitionValue</string>

    8       </literaldefinition>

    9       <formatstring language="en-US" string="Definition1_DefinitionDisplayName" />

   10     </vocabularydefinition>

   11   </vocabulary>

   12 </brl>

To access the different part of this vocabulary, I use this C# code to access all of the parts for this vocabulary definition.

Add the namespaces:

    1 using System.Diagnostics;

    2 using Microsoft.RuleEngine;

then copy the following code:

    1         public void GetAllDefinitionsFromVocabulary(string vocabularyName)

    2         {

    3             RuleStore breStore;

    4             RuleSetDeploymentDriver breDriver = new RuleSetDeploymentDriver();

    6             breStore = breDriver.GetRuleStore();

    7             Trace.WriteLine(string.Format("bts- ## Vocabulary:[{0}] ##", vocabularyName));

    8             Trace.WriteLine("bts-");

   10             VocabularyInfoCollection breVocInfoCol;

   11             breVocInfoCol = breStore.GetVocabularies(vocabularyName, RuleStore.Filter.All);

   12             foreach (VocabularyInfo oVoc in breVocInfoCol)

   13             {

   14                 Vocabulary _vocab = breStore.GetVocabulary(oVoc);

   16                 foreach (VocabularyDefinition vocDefn in _vocab.Definitions)

   17                 {

   18                     ///string x = o["en-US"].Format;

   19                     Trace.WriteLine(string.Format("bts- Definition.Id: [{0}]", vocDefn.Id));

   20                     Trace.WriteLine(string.Format("bts- Definition.Name: [{0}]", vocDefn.Name));

   21                     Trace.WriteLine(string.Format("bts- Definition.Description: [{0}]", vocDefn.Description));

   23                     LiteralDefinition literalDefinition = vocDefn as LiteralDefinition;

   25                     //literaldefinition

   26                     if (literalDefinition != null)

   27                     {

   28                         if (literalDefinition.Value != null)

   29                         {

   30                             Trace.WriteLine(string.Format("bts- literal: [{0}]", literalDefinition.Value.ToString()));

   31                         }

   32                     }

   34                     //formatstring definition

   35                     foreach (FormatString frm in vocDefn.FormatStrings)

   36                     {

   37                         Trace.WriteLine(string.Format("bts- frm.Language: [{0}]", frm.Language));

   38                         Trace.WriteLine(string.Format("bts- frm.Format: [{0}]", frm.Format));

   39                     }

   41                     Trace.WriteLine("bts- ----------------------------------");

   42                 }

   43             }

So if I call my method with the vocabulary name = Sample_ValidNames. Then in DebugView you can see that we get all 6 fields that we set on the wizard and on the XML exported file.

    1 [5844] bts- ## Vocabulary:[Sample_ValidNames] ##

    2 [5844] bts-

    3 [5844] bts- Definition.Id: [cdff8b38-e565-4942-b76f-72161449a457]

    4 [5844] bts- Definition.Name: [Definition1_DefinitionName]

    5 [5844] bts- Definition.Description: [Definition1_DefinitionDescription]

    6 [5844] bts- literal: [Definition1_DefinitionValue]

    7 [5844] bts- frm.Language: [en-US]

    8 [5844] bts- frm.Format: [Definition1_DefinitionDisplayName]

    9 [5844] bts- ----------------------------------

   10 [5844] bts- Done

There, hope this helps someone. [dont forget to post your comment if this code helps you out.. ;)

Removing Strong named assembly from GAC

2007-09-05T08:01:00.001-04:00

I have created a .NET helper to provide me access to the BRE. In Vista, I stumbled upon this weird error. Everything has been working fine for the past month or so, now I am trying to deploy a newer version of this .NET helper, and I found that I could not un-deploy this assembly from the GAC.

After closing all programs, I still see this reference:

Looking at the Process Explorer I find that there is an instance of the MMC running. BTW, if you use regular Task Manager, you wont even see this instance. This instance has this command:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\BTSmmc.msc" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\BTSmmc.msc" -32

Funny thing is that I can't kill this process in my explorer. When I try killing it from the Process Emplorer, it gives me this error:

Error opening process: The parameter is incorrect.

If I try to un-install it from the GAC directly (right-click on assembly), I get this error:

Assembly Cache Viewer = Uninstall failed

Access is denied: 'BRE.EDSHelper'

Running out of ideas, I decided to run the gacutil with elevated privileges in Vista.

Yeap, that did the trick... :D

gacutil /u BRE.EDSHelper

    1 C:\Windows\system32>gacutil /u bre.edshelper

    2 Microsoft (R) .NET Global Assembly Cache Utility.  Version 2.0.50727.42

    3 Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

    6 Assembly: bre.edshelper, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=47ef5031caf5d372, processorArchitecture=MSIL

    7 Uninstalled: bre.edshelper, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=47ef5031caf5d372, processorArchitecture=MSIL

    8 Number of assemblies uninstalled = 1

    9 Number of failures = 0

Ahhh UAC is a beautiful and dangerous feature. And yet, I still keep it turn on (it rocks...;)

Service Unavailable when deploying an ASMX Service

2007-08-29T08:39:00.000-04:00

I deployed an ASMX service to a newly configured machine.
When I open the ASMX, I get the dreaded Service Unavailable error.

looking at the system log, I see this entry:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: DCOM
Event Category: None
Event ID: 10016
Date: 8/29/2007
Time: 8:35:35 AM
User: NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE
Computer: CONTOSOQABTS
Description:
The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{A9E69610-B80D-11D0-B9B9-00A0C922E750}
to the user NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE SID (S-1-5-20). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

all of the IIS settings seems fine. When I set the DefaultAppPool to the administrator account, I get this other error:

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: W3SVC
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1057
Date: 8/29/2007
Time: 9:14:43 AM
User: N/A
Computer: TAMSQABIZTALK
Description:
The identity of application pool 'DefaultAppPool' is invalid, so the World Wide Web Publishing Service can not create a worker process to serve the application pool. Therefore, the application pool has been disabled.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Then Dan found this article on MSDN that seems to solve this issue. Basically, you need to add the account that the application pool is running under to the IIS_WPG [IIS Worker Process Group].

Resetting a BRE policy that has been deployed

2007-08-18T06:36:00.004-04:00

During the development and testing of Business Rules Engine policies, you will find yourself having to modify a policy that has already been published and deployed. You can go directly to the SQL server and run this command to reset those policies.

    1 USE BizTalkRuleEngineDb

    2 go

    4 DECLARE @RuleSetID int

    6 SELECT @RuleSetID = nRuleSetID

    7 FROM RE_Ruleset

    8 WHERE strName IN ( 'LoanApproval', 'LoanNotification')

    9 AND nMajor=1 AND nMinor=0

   11 UPDATE RE_Ruleset

   12 SET nStatus = 0

   13 WHERE nRuleSetID = @RuleSetID

   15 DELETE FROM re_deployment_config WHERE nRuleSetID = @RuleSetID

   16 DELETE FROM re_tracking_ID WHERE nRuleSetID = @RuleSetID

To reset a vocabulary that has been published, you will run this other command:

    1 USE BizTalkRuleEngineDb

    2 go

    4 DECLARE @nVocabularyID int

    5 SELECT @nVocabularyID = nVocabularyID

    6 FROM re_vocabulary

    7 WHERE strName = 'Contoso.ValidStates'

    8 AND nMajor=1 AND nMinor=0

   10 UPDATE re_vocabulary

   11 SET nStatus = 0

   12 WHERE nVocabularyID = @nVocabularyID

There will be times, that a particular policy, after you have reset its status on the BRE database, it does not go and clear up from cache. If this is the case, then you will need to stop/start the BRE service:

    1 NET STOP RuleEngineUpdateService

    2 NET START RuleEngineUpdateService

note: [The WROX Professional Biztalk Server 2006 book explained this concept]

DebugView on Dual Monitors

2007-08-16T18:22:00.000-04:00

Dealing with dual monitors sometimes leave some programs on the secondary window. One of the utilities that I use daily for all of my BizTalk development is DebugView.

Since I constantly move from dual monitors (dock station) to a single monitor (laptop display), sometimes I forget to close the DebugView program on my primary monitor. Of course, this means that when I am demo something, I can't get to my DebugView program. It is really frustrating at times, since once you close the application, it saves the coordinates of where the application was last open. arghhhh.... I wish there was an option to turn this off.

Anyways, if you can't find your DebugView on your main window, open the regedit command and go to this hive:

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Sysinternals\DbgView

and remove the Settings entry.

Now start DebugView, and it will be back to the center of the screen.

SQL Server Database Publishing Wizard

2007-08-14T08:36:00.001-04:00

I keep losing this url, so I am keeping a reference in here.

http://www.codeplex.com/sqlhost

this is the link to download it:

SQL Server Database Publishing Wizard 1.1

How to Publish an ODX on a machine without BTS

2007-08-13T22:30:00.000-04:00

Recently I got this question from a client and even thought the answer is no, it is still very confusing when wadding through all of the documentation.

This is the question: Can I deploy/host an orchestration as a web service to a machine that does not have BizTalk Server installed on it?

If you look at the BizTalk documentation, the answer seems a little bit deceiving:

They indicated that there is no Biztalk needed. However, once you keep reading more, it mentioned that you need to have a reverse proxy setup for this setup to work.

Ok, so what if you try deploying the orchestration as a web service, using the Web Services Publishing wizard? Here is the answer:

I took one of the samples from the SDK: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\SDK\Samples\Orchestrations\ExposeWebService

I make sure it worked in the localhost. Then I went and published to an Windows 2003 Server that was setup as an application server only [no Biztalk installed]. The web publishing wizard did not report any errors and it completed deploying the service.

Once I tried calling this service, this is what I got:

The error message clearly states: Could not load file or assembly 'microsoft.biztalk.webservices.Serverproxy, .... '. So it is looking for this assembly: Microsoft.BizTalk.WebServices.ServerProxy.dll. This seems obvious that you cannot just copy the missing assembly over to this server without breaking some EULA's ;)

HAT Debugging on demmand

2007-08-07T08:16:00.000-04:00

In my quest to optimize the resources being used in my laptop, I have been very picky about what services are needed to get my task done. I have a script to turn on/off all of the services that I need. Today I try debugging an orchestration, and I was not getting any information at all on the Health and Activity Tracking (HAT). As it turn out, I had not started this service: BizTalk Server Application Service.

All of my Orchestrations were working fine without this service. Hummm... I know now if I need to run the HAT, then I can turn this feature on/off. And the best thing, is that it when you start up this service, it will pickup all of the instances that have been ran. NICE... ;)

FYI, the service name is BTSSvc$BizTalkServerApplication. I have set its startup type to be manual, and then I have this batch script to turn it on/off:

net start BTSSvc$BizTalkServerApplication
net stop BTSSvc$BizTalkServerApplication

BTW, don't forget to add your login account to the Biztalk Server Administrators group, or you won't be able to attach to the Orchestration in Debugging mode.