Jon Flanders'

I guess I should be flattered

jon-flanders — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:22:11 GMT

That some spammer thought my wiki pages where hit enough to warrant modifying them on a daily basis with links to various "odd" sites ;-)

Thanks to Craig I've upgraded to FlexWiki 2.0 and now those pages are locked down - I apologize if you've visited them and they haven't been right, should be ok from now on.

My Workflow Sample Page

My BizTalk Sample Page

Ok - semi-technical post

jon-flanders — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 04:46:47 GMT

Mostly this post is here to motivate me to actually get this book done ASAP -

http://www.amazon.com/RESTful-NET-Jon-Flanders/dp/0596519206/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214538175&sr=1-2

Yes - I am writing a book on WCF and REST. Not a big suprise ;-)

cross posting testing

jon-flanders — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 04:34:37 GMT

still going on

WF Down Under

jon-flanders — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 20:19:00 GMT

I've had alot of people ask when I am teaching WF next - if you are interested in sitting through me talking about WF for four intense days - come to laid-back Australia. Pluralsight is teaming up with Readify to offer the course. I'm super excited since this will be my first trip to Australia. I can't wait. If you are in the area - or just want an excuse to come to Australia - sign up ;-)

Applied Windows Workflow Foundation in Australia Nov 13-17th

TechEd Session

jon-flanders — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 21:57:00 GMT

I just got done with my TechEd session on using WF and WCF - if you attended the session - here is the code: teched2007.zip (474.59 KB). If you didn't attend my session "This is not the code you are looking for ....." ;-)

Thanks for everyone who came (295 people - wow!).

BTW - here are the three best and worst thing about teched 2007 according to the people in my session:

BEST
1)HOL (hands on labs)
2)Just the Information
3)BOF (birds of a feather sessions)

Worst
1)Bathrooms (this was the men only of course)
2)Buses(slow/scalable)
3)Session are too short

My 15 seconds of fame (aka Jon Flanders of Jon Flanders' Delivery Service)

jon-flanders — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 00:58:00 GMT

So today I was lucky enough to be invited on stage during the TechEd 2007 Keynote.

I got the job of carrying a box that was tagged with an RFID tag. You can watch the video here . I appear at 1:09:11 (not that you shouldn't watch the whole thing ;-))

Here I am carrying a box that has an RFID label on it. Mike Woods is about to scan the RFID tage with an RFID reader. He annouced me as being "Jon Flanders from Jon Flanders' delivery service" :-)

So why am I up on stage holding a box? Have I given up dev for package delivery?

The reason I was lucky enough to be on stage with Mike Woods and Bob Muglia - is that I wrote the RFID event handler code that was used in the software for the keynote. It took the tag read from the device - and then enriched the data with GPS data from a GPS deviced that was attached to the same computer that the RFID reader is attached to. Pretty cool stuff.

You can read more about Microsoft BizTalk RFID here. Many thanks to Cathexis - who provided the RFID reader device

Another new Pluralsight course

jon-flanders — Thu, 31 May 2007 20:56:00 GMT

I and Pluralsight are excited to announce another new BizTalk Server 2006 R2 course - one specifically geared toward RFID! Check it out here - http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/AppliedBizTalkRfid.aspx no public offerings schedule yet - but there should be one RSN.

Orchestration performance

jon-flanders — Wed, 30 May 2007 22:04:00 GMT

So I had to fire up my XP laptop today because my new Rode Podcaster microphone (which is otherwise is totally awesome) won't start on Vista despite getting a usbaudio.sys hotfix from MS Support (which was a suprisingly painless experience).

Anyway - cleaning out my old harddrive I found this picture:

This is a picture of the BAM portal. What I was doing was using BAM to give me some rough performance metrics between two version of an orchestration. In the "XmlDocument" version of the orchestration I was reading in a 9MB Xml file into BizTalk. In the orchestration I was passing the document to a .NET component as "XmlDocument" and reading the whole document. This is the typical example code you'll find for reading BizTalk messages from .NET code.

In the "XmlReader" version of the orchestration - I was passing the message as XLANGMessage. This is the underlying datatype that the Orchestration compiler uses to represent a message. Only when you pass it to a .NET component as XmlDocument do they actually convert it to an XmlDocument (even if your message type on your orchestration is System.Xml.XmlDocument btw). Inside of the method my code looked something like this:

public static XmlDocument FromMsg(XLANGMessage old)
{
    //get at the data
    XmlDocument ret = new XmlDocument();
    XmlReader reader = (XmlReader)old[0].RetrieveAs(typeof(XmlReader));
    //construct new message from old
    //read property
    object msgid = old.GetPropertyValue(typeof(BTS.MessageID));
    return ret;
}

By calling RetrieveAs and passing typeof(XmlReader) I avoid loading the BizTalk message into a DOM - and can read the message using standard XmlReader techniques.

As you can see from the BAM metrics (which is not an absolutely high performance timing mechanism - but in this case should be close enough) the XmlDocument version took about 3xs as long as the XmlReader version. So rule of thumb - if you care about performance - use XmlReader with XLANGMessage - not XmlDocument for your .NET methods from an Orchestration.

Unfortunately the XLANGs compiler won't allow us to return XmlReader as the return value - so for constructing we are still stuck with the DOM.

My upcoming schedule

jon-flanders — Mon, 14 May 2007 15:39:00 GMT

A few people have asked me about what courses I am teaching in the near future.

Coming up in June - I'll be teaching Pluralsight's Applied BizTalk Server 2006 in Dallas - http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/appliedbiztalkserver2006.aspx

In July - I'll be teaching the R2 version of the same course in Los Angeles - http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/appliedbiztalkserver2006.aspx. Come and we'll have a big party - the course starts on my birthday!

Phidget provider released

jon-flanders — Sun, 13 May 2007 23:44:00 GMT

Thanks Irving! - http://blogs.msdn.com/irvingd/pages/biztalk-rfid-device-provider-dspi-for-phidget-devices.aspx

San Diego .NET UG

jon-flanders — Sun, 13 May 2007 15:39:00 GMT

Thanks to my friend and fellow BizTalk MVP Brian Loesgen - I'll be speaking May 22nd at the San Diego .NET User Group on two of my favorite technologies - WF and WCF and how to use them together successfully today - even without Orcas! Come out if you are in the SD area.

WF and WCF

jon-flanders — Mon, 07 May 2007 01:50:00 GMT

So if you are interesting in how to integrate WCF and WF today (yes all the cool new WCF/WF stuff in Orcas is really cool - but still some number of months away) - please come to my pre-con at TechED US - https://www.msteched.com/public/precons.aspx#PRCN15 I'll be doing it with my good friend Richard Blewett - which should be a good combination of technical learning and fun.

Phidget provider will be released soon

jon-flanders — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 16:24:00 GMT

If you've attended my R2 jumpstart training you've seen me use the phidget device. Irving is the author of the provider - watch his blog as well - but I'll post here when he posts it (which he says will be RSN) - http://blogs.msdn.com/irvingd/

Ahh - workflows in the clouds

jon-flanders — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 18:07:00 GMT

Coming soon - http://labs.biztalk.net/

BizTalkGenerateStrongName Redux

jon-flanders — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 08:15:00 GMT

I've been traveling the world (ok technically traveling to Redmond, London or Dublin) teaching BizTalk Server 2006 R2 training. I have some interesting posts planned around the technology in R2 - this post is about a tool I built quite a while ago - and that Carlos Medina improved. I've been doing demos around BizTalk and one of the tedious things I find when developing with BizTalk is that there isn't anyway to "auto-sign" a BizTalk project. If you've ever seen me demo BizTalk - I always at some point create a BizTalk project - and I have a tool under the Tools menu in Visual Studio which autogenerates a .snk file and puts in the proper path to that file in my project settings. Another thing I've done since building that tool is work alot with vsi files in Visual Studio (template files) which allow you to package up a addin, template, or macro into a nice easy to install package. So here is the latest BizTalkGenerateStrongName code as well as a vsi. Just download and double-click the vsi - and you should get a new tool the next time you open Visual Studio. Highlight your BizTalk project in the solution explorer - then hit the BizTalkGenerateStrongName command under the Tools menu. Enjoy.

BizTalkGenerateStrongName1.zip (60.61 KB)

biztalkgeneratestrongname.vsi (19.88 KB)