Having 3 sessions in 1 day at the conference, this was session number 2.
 

We had a great session here and all my demos came off again!!! Except for the screen size and the projector this particular 'room' used.
I was presenting at 800x600 - talk about feeling techno chlostrophobic. I feel like I was in quick sand, trying to gasp for air...but we use what we have.

I was hoping to do an RFID demo but 'last minute technical difficulties' forced that one on the back burner - I had more than enough demos for this session.

Thanks to all the folks that attended this - I had fun as I hope you did. This session made the top ten sessions at TechEd! Whooo hooo

The demos went something like:

1. Publishing and Consuming WCF Services from R2 - published a couple of Orchestrations and consumed the published WCF WS Service from a basic client app.
   I then moved the published IIS WCF WS Service into the BTS Instance host by using a custom WCF Adapter and configuring it accordingly.
   Next I exposed the same service as a Socket Address - all called from the same client with no code recompile. Which is what we want to highlight using WCF Services.
   
   I then fired up a WCF WF Webservice and consumed it from BizTalk - all pretty simple, but good to highlight.
   
2. For the second major demo I created a WF workflow and using the BizTalk Extensions for Workflow, hosted this within BizTalk.

Slide Deck: CON309 - Mick_Badran_Advanced BizTalk R2 Concepts.pdf (595.48 KB)
Demos: BizTalk TechEd2007 demos.zip

Well firstly what a fantastic TechEd and all my 3 sessions went very well (with respect to all the demos - 15 in ONE day! :)



For this session - CON308 Building an Enterprise-Wide Instrumentation Solution Using the Microsoft BizTalk BAM Infrastructure 
I had the pleasure of Rahul Garg our great local Microsoft BTS TS. I had the pleasure of being his first ever Microsoft presentation (virgin presenter).

So to set the scene - we discussed earlier that during the session we would both be up on stage together and he would do a bit (20 slides) and I would do a bit (15 sldies) then a demo. He was driving my slides (i.e. moving next through them while I was talking)

To add a small amount of spice to the session I decided to *hide* a BSOD slide I made in the middle of my part of the deck. This came up when Rahul was driving up on stage - worked a treat! Very funny BSOD Slide.pptx (361.73 KB)

Rahul took it like a pro and the folks in the room loved it - this came up when Rahul was hiting next through my slides.
Slide deck: CON308_MickRahul_BAM.v1.1.pdf (1.54 MB)

The Demo:  (all TechEd2007_Demos.zip (7.25MB))
Essentially the whole running system reported back to the following Vista Desktop Gadget - green light, orange light, or red.


We did an End to End Demo of BAM + a WF exposed via a WCF Service which highlighted the following technologies:

1. Simple BRE call
2. Dynamic Party Resolution with Role Link Shapes
3. Dynamic Send Ports + Correlation.
4. Publishing Orchestrations as an Isolated WCF Service (+ also a one-way WCF WebService)
5. BAM - Activities, Views + the BAM Portal
6. Publishing BAM data from Windows Workflow
7. Intermixing BAM Tracking Profile Editor (TPE) and BAM APIs within an Orchestration.
8. Creating Alerts, Subscribing to Alerts and using a Vista Gadget to reflect the state of the System.
9. WF BAM Interceptor Configuration file
   

Here's the Orchestration that drives it all - takes an OrderProcess Request in, then sends it to the resolove Supplier through a Role Link shape and waits for the return call via the one way WCF WS.

In the interim the Supplier calls a WF Workflow to help their process and returns the results back to BizTalk.

The Client application (that is the first to iniate the whole process)


The supplier fulfills the request via a WF and returns the results back to the client (in the received section above)
 

The supplier's Workflow that basically assigns the FulFilled and Comments elements depending on the Total of the Order.
It's all pretty simple stuff here, just illustrating a concept - this workflow is hosted within the Supplier WinForm application.

Another piece of software has come up and saved my bacon - a couple of days out from a conference and I would love to Demo RFID. Do I migrate my images to VMWare? (that's another story in itself - I've heard good + bad)

After researching I came across this....... USB Anywhere
*** UPDATED: USB Redirector solves a  couple of 'driver not working' issues I found on the others ***

This guy is GREAT!! Let's you share USB devices via IP addresses between host + remote machines.
(you even get plug and play messages!)

Now all my RFID devices are rocking!!!

Hey folks, I've been flat chat lately burning the candle at both ends getting ready for my sessions at TechEd/Deep Dives.

In a *spare* moment - I am asked to do a Channel9 GeekSpeak session - talking about Workflow and BizTalk Integration.
(I've had my xbox360 confiscated for 1 month to help me get through this month - that's a story for another time :)

This session is on tomorrow morning - so for those of you feeding babies, can't sleep etc. I'd love to have you along for moral support as this will be my very first session in Geek Speak.

So if you're up for a 5am - 6am start Thursday morning I'll see you there. Put something Aussie in your nick name!

Update: The Results have come in.......well this was done at 4am my time in the morning and all I can say is thanks to the folks that attended for being understanding :)

Customer satisfaction scores are based on a scale from 0 to 9 points.  
The average score for a webcast is 7.8.

Usefulness of Information: 8.0
Speaker Presentation Skills: 7.8
Effectiveness of Demonstration: 8.0
Overall Presentation Rating: 7.8

Link to see the webcast over and over again
 Looks like I got around the average at 4am in the morning.....I'm amazed I even made sense!!!:)

Hi folks, I'm busily preparing for TechEd2007 and one of my session is developer focused  about Workflow in Microsoft Sharepoint.

This will be where all my slides and sample code will be shortly :)

See you soon.....

If you're like me and run a few virtual machines each day, then running them with ease is key I reckon.

Generally I've found on dual core machines etc. virtual server makes better use of multi-cpu based hosts than what Virtual PC2007 does (VMWare vs VPC is another debate :)

The only draw back is that I've always had to setup this IIS based website and it gets painful, particularly on a laptop etc. when all sorts of things get installed and uninstalled etc. IIS sites sometimes stop working and thus your only lifeline to the running virtual machines.

Well VMRCplus is the answer! (This used to be an internal MS tool which it looks like they've released to the public)

YOU DO NOT NEED IIS with this baby - it uses the COM Api behind the scenes.

Grab it here........

VMRC PLUS

Some features to wet your appetites:

• Direct control of local or remote instances of the Virtual Server service. IIS and IE browser are no longer required!
• Tabbed interface to quickly jump between Virtual Server hosts and guest VMRC sessions.
• Reusable saved states: this feature allows users to preserve a particular saved state and return to that state at any time.
• Multiple guest selection supported for startup/shutdown/save/display.
• Browse button navigation for media, hard disk images, ISO images, .VMC files, etc.
• Drag and Drop support for .VMC files, ISOs images, VHD and VFD files.
• Resizable desktop support for guests running Virtual Machine Additions (maximize VMRC window supported).
• Limited cut and paste of text from host to guest (only).
• A built-in utility to take JPG screenshots of running guests. Useful when filing bugs.
• Built-in error notification with Virtual Server eventlog viewer.
• A Virtual Networks Manager and Virtual Disks Manager that cover all features.
• Keyboard shortcuts (e.g. Ctrl-S to save state a guest).
• Create multiple guests at once.
• Create guest from parent (or multiple guests)!
• Automatic reconnect to a designated Virtual Server host.
• Toolbars in both Guest and Console Manager for quick access.
• Unlimited number of guests.
• Maximum of 32 Virtual Server hosts.
• Sorting on columns of guests so you can sort based on status and multi-select.
• Automatic detection of Virtual Machine Additions and notification.
• Detection of Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1.

There's the whole suite of products on here now! From 2004 to R2 (you thought I was going to say BTS2000!!!! ....I try to push that out of my mind)

http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/evaluation/roadmap/default.mspx

Whether it's BTS04 or 06 - you can always generate the schema behind the magical binding file from the following command (courtesy of Mark Berry):

xsd.exe "C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006/Microsoft.BizTalk.Deployment.dll" /type:BindingInfo

-Mark Berry

Pretty cool - thanks Mark. (obviously change '2006' to '2004' if on BTS 2004)

You now have an XSD that corresponds to all the options in your Binding File.

Enjoy!

We've got a decent PDF IFilter from found on the MS IFilter Blog.

The IFilter team have been busy and while this IFilter is by a third party, I believe it has under gone some internal MS testing.

One of the things I've had trouble with in the past has been Native Adobe Compression within PDFs. In the later versions of PDF writer/distiller etc. when outputting a PDF, one of the options is to select the amount of compression (a slider bar from memory).

I was onsite and noticed that out of the 400 PDFs in our 'test' folder, around 50 were not being properly indexed (only filename, filesize, location etc were 'extracted').

All of these 50 documents had PDF compression set to 'high' (there were 4 different compression settings)

You may or may not have to add the work around below - Foxit have updater their installer.

---- snip ------

Long awaited 64-bit PDF IFilter finally available.

Finally we have a 64 bit PDF IFilter - surprisingly the solution is not from Adobe or Microsoft, but from a company called Foxit Software.The IFilter is compatiable with the following Microsoft products: Windows Indexing Service, MSN Desktop Search, Internet Information Server, SharePoint Portal Server, Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), Site Server, Exchange Server, SQL Server and all other products based on Microsoft Search technology.

 There's one simple workaround to get the filter running on 64 bit MOSS 2007. The steps are given below.

1. Install Foxit 64bit PDF Ifilter. http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/ifilter/

2. Add a pdf extension in MOSS search settings

3. Open regedit, locate [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\.pdf]

4. Change the default value to {987f8d1a-26e6-4554-b007-6b20e2680632} .

5. Recycle the search service: net stop osearch
                                              net start osearch

6. Start a full crawl to index your pdf documents :)

Years ago we struggled when clients surfed to web pages, to try and get any sort of information out about them.

To get more info, we would present a little page with some client script to determine ('mine' being the operative word) their capabilities (cookes, script, even had access to Navigation History etc etc)

I was recently contacted by a site and part of the request I was presented with my User_Agent string for my initial request.

HTTP_USER_AGENT=Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; Tablet PC 2.0; InfoPath.2; FDM)

Who can determine the most out about this machine?

So your default User Agent strings *do* tell alot about the software you're running. We can modify this, but you run the risk of websites etc. not interacting fully with you (and I know how much we all love our Ajax!)

Over the times parents have named their kids many things...but I do feel sorry for this little girl being called Vista.

A father called his daughter Vista....does this mean the son will be called 'LongHorn' and who knows about upgrades, boyfriends and remote offsite camping trips.

Wonder no more why so many people change their names over in the US.

Monday's tidbit.

MOSS and reporting services integration......

After installing SQL2005 SP2 and SharepointRS.msi (Sharepoint 'extensions') you're left to do a 'small' amount of configuration. Basically telling the MOSS environment where to find the Reporting Services Server.

Previously this has been a difficult step - almost a journey of discovery. Here's the answer.

From Central Admin->Web Application->Reporting Services Configuration Integration

From below the 1st box always gives grief - the label title and the description seem to indicate different things.

So just to put this to bed - the Web that you have ReportingServices installed - point off to the ReportService WebService - you're good to go!