February 2004 - Posts
A fellow MSDN Regional Director and renowned author/speaker has written a very interesting
letter on the ideological dream of the OSS movement. It is well worth reading...
Scott Woodgate just posted some information on the webscasts for the upcoming launch of BizTalk Server 2004 on March 2nd.
Here is some more information on the live Canadian launch events beginning March 3rd: http://www.microsoft.com/canada/events/biztalk/default.mspx
I will be on stage at the Toronto event to represent Avanade Canada.
I just found something a little disconcerting in BizTalk 2004.
Under the older versions (2000, 2002) when using the database lookup functoid in a map, you could use DSN connections to make your maps portable and ease deployment to production. This worked because functoids would simply inject VBScript into the generated XSLT file.
This no longer works in 2004! It looks like functoids now inject inline C# and they no longer support DSNs. In my current project where we have dozens of maps with one or more lookups, this means we will have to edit the maps and recompile them everytime we go from dev->QA->staging->production. Ouch!
We asked Microsoft about htis and they said “So what? that's how we do it“
Not a satisfactory answer.... Obviously no one on the product team thought about this.
We ended up writing our own lookup functoid that uses a .config file to find the server and database name.
Sylvain
I've been reading an excellent book lately: Enterprise Integration Patterns, by Gregor Hohpe, Addison-Wesley. ISBN: 0321200683 (Martin Fowler's Signature Series)
If you are interested in learning more about message-based enterprise integratioin architecture, this is a great resource. It is well written and very comprehensive. It gives examples for both the J2EE and the .NET crowds.
The only drawback to the book is that it only discusses message-based solutions. Still, that covers about 80% of integrations scenarios.
If you are a fan of patterns, you might as well check out the companion book in the series: Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, Martin Fowler, Addison-Wesley. ISBN: 0321127420
Enjoy!
Welcome to my blog!
I am the MSDN Regional Director for Ottawa (http://www.microsoftregionaldirectors.com) and a Solution Architect at Avanade Canada where I lead the Enterprise Integration Practice.
So given my job, I intend to use this blog mostly to talk about Enterprise Integration with the Microsoft Platform, in other words Mostly BizTalk Server 2004.
This will be a journey of discovery as I gain more real-life experience with this exciting new version of BizTalk Server. Thanks for joining me on this journey!
Sylvain Duford
More Posts