Have you had a chance to play yet ?

Many folks have noted that a lot of the Visual Studio elements that have been present within BizTalk to support the development experience are no longer...quite so BizTalk specific!  BizTalk projects now build upon C# projects, and thus a lot of the differences that you used to see in navigating property pages, compilation settings and build mechanics are now gone.  This is a very good thing - it allows you to leverage skills you already have on your team.

MSBuild support is now first class.  Everyone who went through the trouble to install (and invoke) DevEnv.exe on their build server in order to build BizTalk projects will be glad to know that this is no longer required.  (Builds can be ever so much faster when you aren't relying DevEnv...)

Because of the close relationship with C# projects, you can now have C# artifacts directly in your BizTalk projects.  Many people have noted that when you "Add new item...", C# classes aren't offered as an option.  The product group has explained that this is because currently, the designers (such as the Orchestration designer) are unable to provide intellisense for types that are within the same assembly.  So, you are required to use "Add existing item...".

(This sort of reminds me of the interaction between pipelines and schemas - the former require fullly qualified assembly information at run time, which they won't get if you combine these two artifacts in the same assembly.)

If this limitation persists, will the feature get used?  I tend to think so.  There are often cases where the smart thing to do in an orchestration is to delegate to a component...but the work you do in that component is, at times, so specific to the orchestration that it makes sense for them to be co-located for deployment and organizational purposes.  What do you think ?

The support for unit testing is extremely welcome - check it out.  Debugging maps is great as well, but I'm now (often) partial to the external XSLT approach these days.

A tool that has been an important part of the BizTalk Deployment Framework has been updated by Loren – see the codeplex project here.

XmlPreProcess is a general purpose tool in its own right for managing configuration files across multiple environments.  The tool has pulled in previously separated functionality (the excellent stuff done by Tom) so that it can consume spreadsheets (that describe environment variations) directly, rather than needing a separate process for that.  Very slick stuff !

 

I had a chance to sit down with Jeff Brand while down in Omaha for my presentation at the HDC.  We recorded a podcast on all (most) things Scrum and TFS – you can check it out here.  It was great fun – thanks Jeff!

I’m not able to attend the PDC this year, but its been interesting to watch the definition of Oslo take better shape after watching it for a long while.

I was reading Jon Flander’s post on the topic, where he reiterated the “Oslo as language, model repository, and visual editor aka Quadrant” theme.  The language, known as “M” – draws this quote from John: “visual models are useful for a certain portion of the developer population, but for the most part developers like to write code, which means text.”

Text is good.  I can store text in a version control system, and branch it when needed.  I can merge it with well-known tools later on, and compare the differences between versions easily.  I can have multiple developers work on it at once with a sane reconciliation process upon check-in. 

Even visual models that have a textual representation behind the scenes struggle with these basics…because the text is not first class – it is (often) just a convenient serialization format that is sufficiently opaque for the benefits of text to be lost.

So I’m all for “M”.  It will be fun to watch the vision unfold further. 

I’m down in Omaha today at the Omaha edition of the Heartland Developer’s Conference 2008.  I’m presenting on Scrum with TFS 2008 – with just a little bit more content than at MDC 2008, since both the Conchango Scrum template and the Task Board UI were both updated recently (like…yesterday!) 

This is a great conference – they do a great job organizing this event, and there is a ton of great content.  I did my session this morning, and then had a chance to record a podcast on Scrum/TFS with Jeff Brand later in the day – more on that when it actually posts.

Slides I presented today are here.

I had a great time presenting at this year’s MDC – thanks to all of you who attended.  We covered Conchango’s newest Scrum template for TFS 2008, as well as their very cool new Task Board UI.  We covered eScrum, VSTS Lightweight Scrum, Scrum itself, process customization in TFS…come to think of it, it was a lot of content for an hour and a half…

My slides are available here.

Suppose you have delivery notification set up on a logical orchestration port (along with a catch block for DeliveryFailureExceptions).

Gotchya 1: If that port is bound to a send port that executes the flat file assembler, and you send improper xml to the assembler, you’ll get a warning in the event log along the lines of:

The adapter "blah" raised an error message. Details "Cannot find definition for the input: foo”

But you won’t get a DeliveryFailureException (or any other, for that matter.)  Nor will the orchestration progress past that point.

Workaround: Consider putting an xml validator as the first step in the pipeline (the flat file assembler will come next.)  That will cause an exception to be raised that you can catch in your orchestration…

Gotchya 2: If the message heading for a send port is terminated within the admin console for some reason, you will never get a DeliveryFailureException, nor will your orchestration progress past that point.

Workaround: No idea on this one.  Leave comment if you do…

At this year’s MDC, I’ll be doing a talk on Team Foundation Server 2008 and Scrum – all about where state of the art stands with TFS 2008 and Scrum process integration.  We’ll cover Microsoft’s eScrum, Conchango’s Scrum for Team System, and perhaps a few others to boot.

September 9, 2008 – Marriott Southwest.

The whole conference looks great – check out the speakers and sessions.

Jeff Brand has tagged me to answer a few questions on how I got started in this business…

I never do anything personal in this space, so this will be a first.  Here goes:

How old were you when you started programming?

Ummm, my grandfather supplied us with a TRS-80 Model 1 Level 1 (4k, cassette drive) when I was about 8 years old.  It started there, and proceeded through everything Radio Shack had to offer for quite some time.  No artsy Commodores/Amigas/Apples at our house…

What was your first language?

BASIC.

What was the first real program you wrote?

Gosh.  I tried my hand at writing a basic word processor for the TRS-80 – I think I called it TextStar.  I’m sure I lost some school reports as a result.  In that general timeframe were some text-based adventure games, too…

What languages have you used since you started programming?

Hmmm.  Basic and QuickBasic as a kid.  Pascal and Fortran in college.  C and C++ in all my early jobs in this field (along with VB6 to test all those COM components...)  After that, the only language I’ve approached seriously is C#.  (Does BizTalk count?)  I dabbled in a lot of other languages, but haven’t done project work, where you learn all the ins and outs…

What was your first professional programming gig?

As a college intern at CyberOptics, writing all kinds of applications for laser and vision-based inspection systems.  Very fun stuff, and some of the best mentoring I’ve ever had.  And hey, what doesn’t spell fun like writing your WndProcs for Windows 3.0 ?

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Certainly!  This has been a great industry to be a part of.  I had serious dreams of pursuing music as a career at one time, but as David Chappell once said, regardless of what artistic value you might attach to a given gig, you’re really just there to sell beer.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Focus on the practice/art, more so than individual technologies.  Realize that the people you work with are the first order function for success, rather than a given technology choice.

What's the most fun you've ever had...programming?

I’ve always had the most fun when I’ve had the opportunity to work with a team that is “long-lived”, small, and dangerously focused. 

Often in this industry we work with team sizes (and organizational dynamics) that breed ineffectiveness.  It is amazing how much more apt you are to wake up before the alarm when team productivity is at its peek — and “in the zone” becomes normal.

Who am I calling out?

Loren Halvorsen

Matt Milner

Jon Flanders

Stephen Kauffman