February 2005 - Posts
The Microsoft Webcasts Series page is pretty good in giving a broad overview of whats available, but it is by no means complete.
I got the following links from George for the Modern Software Development series.
Modern Software Development in .NET and C# to start on March 1 2005
Modern Software Development in VB.NET – Previously held live and recoded Jan – April 2004
I think they should collate all the series into that page so people can always get to them especially when multi-part webcasts are involved. The Blog community could do this, but it wouldnt be the same as having it all in one place.
For our internal knowledge portal I have collated all the BizTalk webcasts so that people have a one page overview of whats available (whether they then go and view them is another thing altogether).
Just found some good posts (part 1 and part 2) on Joe Wood's blog dealing with mapping XML Schemas to classes and responded to part 2 also. Check them out.
Here's an article summarising the webcasts that are available for DotNetNuke 3.x on MSDN. I have included some of the blurbs to make it a sort of one stop shop. Hope this is useful for DNN afficionados
This is really cool stuff. An MSDN Developer Centre for Webcasts and links to webcast blogs and other resources. Finally, a discussion point for webcasts. Maybe they will bring in a forum and a voting list soon ? Also check out George's blog on all webcast stuff.
I'm currently digging through the entire Essential ASP.NET Webcast series and trying to get them all downloaded so I can sit and watch them at my leisure. In between these and the BizTalk set, I think I'm going crazy. That reminds me, there are some new webcasts on BTS 2004 to do with strategy, SOA Service provisioning, J2EE interop with JNBridgePro etc. They look very interesting. I need to download and check them out.
I really like the way MS is now sending WMV and PPT links for the webcasts. Such a timesaver!!
Happy downloading and viewing.
Had a good time this week going up to one of our offices in York to get my colleagues up to speed in BizTalk 2004. Looks like they got the 'message'. :-) which is good, but will it 'transform' their lives?
The demo went off quite well and avoided Murphy's Law almost to the end. I used the first integration sample from the BTS Unleashed book. As I have mentioned in a previous post, theres quite a lot of typos and mistakes in the book, but anyhow, I had done it once before so I wasnt totally caught out. In spite of that I got a couple of warnings while deploying the solution and when i placed the sample file in the recieve location, guess what - it didnt do anything.!!!
But I like to think I'm resourceful. I had a working copy of the exercise all tested out and ready for such an eventuality. So i showed them that. As a final option I would have shown them Scott's webcast (which I did for an earlier demo), but it didnt have to come to that.
I've also started writing up a note on a BTS Development Framework in our internal knowledge sharing portal and have included in links to material on GDN etc. I might make a public version of that available in one of the articles here and have the benefit of comments from the wider BTS community.
Had a narrow escape today. Installed DNN 3.0.9 and updated the site I'm working on at home. Just after finishing up some menus and pages, I decided to set the re-direction of who sees what page. So this way ordinary users get directed to, say, the main page, registered users, on logging in, may get directed to a special page with announcements and news for members. Anyway, for some reason, there is also an option to direct the LOGIN menu somewhere other than the Login page (perhaps to an enriched login module ?). In retrospect, I'm not sure this should even be allowed cos it can lock you out of the site if you are not careful.
I accidentally directed the login page, from a default of [NOT SPECIFIED] to [HOME]. Since I was doing this in a hurry, I didnt stop to think of the fall out. As a consequence, whenever I clicked the Login link, it just showed me the home page and never allowed me to log in. It took me a while to realise what I had done and in the meantime I restarted IIS, backed up and restored the DB, all to no avail.
Anyway finally it dawned on me where I could go and check. Sure enough, in the Portals table the Tab ID's for each of those options are shown. I tried setting the LoginTabID column to 41 which is the actual TabID for the User Accounts module, but that didnt work. It turns out that it has to be updated to NULL to allow the login screen to be shown.
The lesson therefore, boys and girls, is that DB hacking on your own system can be invaluable :-). [Of course, common sense is even better!! If i had done the configuration mistake with the site being hosted by an ISP, that would have been the end - in terms of experimentation. There is a SQL module in the Host option, but the ISP may not give enough DB permissions to do this kind of stuff].
A Note on 3.x Menus: It's also worth noting that the new fancy Horizontal and Vertical menu styles are available in all the skins out of the box in 3.x. Of course, if you load a 2.x skin, it wont have these new structures, but most 2.x skins work if they have been developed correctly. Probably also good to mention that you need to be logged in as host to upload new skins. Admins dont appear to have enough permissions (or maybe thats just some settings playing up).
I seem to have lost the link to the page which listed all the tools that will become endangered or obsolete species by the advent of VS2005 (and yes, the list included Re-Sharper).
If someone else has read that post and knows the link would you please send it to me ?
Thanks in advance.
Looks like some of this information is now in the public domain. As most of us BTS users know HWS aint going very far. But whats more interesting is that it will soon die an official death. Just like WSS (or an extension to it), there is going to be an Orchestration Engine baked into Windows and newer versions of BizTalk will build on top of it.
This is actually pretty good since most products need orchestration and workflow and MS CRM, SharePoint, BTS etc can all do with one. In fact it would be easier to make simple workflow applications with just InfoPath and WinOE / WSS.
Some of the posts also mention that there is speculation that MS will buy out K2 completely. (Or maybe they will just help K2 to build a more enhanced product on top of WinOE). That may not be good news for K2 (although it might be alright for K2 users if they are provided with migration and upgrade tools), but from a license cost point of view, it does help quite a bit since we dont have to consider an add-on product just to do workflow. I dont favor be-spoke development for this and I would opt for a tool like K2 any day in the current environment, but if its going to be baked into Windows, thats a nifty cost saver.
Whatever the outcome of all this, there are some very interesting days ahead for all of us.
Whew! Was just working through the BTS Unleashed book to prepare a demo for some folk next week and the amount of errors/typos/missing instructions in the sample orchestration project in the second chapter is awful. I had to strike out so many things and make notes in the margin.
I should probably start collecting the Errata and inform Sams Publishing and Scott to correct the errors when they bring out the revised edition. Do you think a collection point like this would be useful to you? Is there one already or should I go ahead and start one? Do send me your thoughts on this.
A strange thing i found was with the Orchestration Diagram and the presence of drop downs inside the shapes! That never happens inside VS.NET 2003 (including BTS SP1). Is that from the Visio ODX designer? I havent tried that out so maybe it is. Its not a big issue for people with some experience of BTS but i can definitely throw a newbie off for a while.
I cant help thinking that this must be Dr.Watsons Revenge. In my previous post I had accused the system of lying to me about the configuration errors (although I did say that HWS would come back to haunt me sometime later).
Now I installed Sp1 and lo and behold, the installation worked fine but a custom action to do with updating the database for HWS has failed! Here's an excerpt from the log file.
If anyone has seen this problem before and knows the solution, do let me know. I will post the issue to the BTS newsgroup later. Right now if I have to post it i need to use my email address and that is setting myself up for a ton of spam
SETUP LOG FILE EXCERPT
[02/03/05 10:31:48] Apply patch: Server="UKLDN005123", Database="BizTalkMgmtDb", Script="C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004\Hws\Hws Admin Server\SQL\Hws_ActionManager_SPs.sql".
[02/03/05 10:31:48] dataSource.Open HRESULT=0
[02/03/05 10:31:48] session.Open HRESULT=0
[02/03/05 10:31:48] file.Open HRESULT=0
[02/03/05 10:31:48] Processing... HRESULT=0
[02/03/05 10:31:48] ExecuteCommand HRESULT=0x80040e14
[02/03/05 10:31:48] There is no such user or group 'HWS_WS_USER'. HRESULT=0x80040e14
[02/03/05 10:31:48] SQL error: 42000 Native error code: 4604 HRESULT=0x80040e14
[02/03/05 10:31:48] file.Close HRESULT=0
[02/03/05 10:31:48] session.Close HRESULT=0
[02/03/05 10:31:48] dataSource.Close HRESULT=0
[02/03/05 10:31:48] Failed to apply patch. HRESULT=0x80040e14
[02/03/05 10:31:48] Abort distributed transaction.
[02/03/05 10:31:48] Failed to patch one or more BizTalk databases. See log for details. (HRESULT=0x80040e14)
[02/03/05 10:31:48] The custom action returned -2147217900.
[02/03/05 10:31:48] One of the custom actions failed. The installation cannot continue. See log for details.