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BizTalk Server capabilities poster

From the source: This poster lists the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 capabilities bucketed in categories and is designed to provide both a high level and a detailed view of the capabilities and features that are included in the product. (When printed in full scale this poster size is: 35x 32) Download the poster here.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008 Read

FarPoint Spread for BizTalk Server 2006

If you’ve ever wanted or needed to parse Excel files using BizTalk, you can now. Some time ago FarPoint released a pipeline dissassembler component for BizTalk Server 2006 which is able to convert Excel files into XML. From their website: Spread for BizTalk Server 2006 provides a complete solution for integrating Microsoft Excel data seamlessly into your BizTalk applications. Spread includes a pipeline disassembler that parses Excel data (XLS, Excel 2007 XML, CSV, TXT) into XML, and a pipeline assembler that creates Excel (XLS, Excel 2007 XML) and PDF documents from XML data in BizTalk Applications.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008 Read

Map xs:string to xs:datetime

Remember that situation where you needed to convert a string representation of a DateTime to a valid DataTime using the BizTalk mapper? No? Well, I do. The parsing of the string as a DateTime is not the real problem here. Once you know how the string is formatted it is simply writing a way to parse it, either using substrings or using the DateTime.Parse method. Once you have a DateTime though, you need to format it to be valid according to the XSD spec.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008 Read

First look at WCF Adapter for BizTalk Server 2006 R2

Although the WCF adapter for BizTalk Server 2006 R2 has been released a while ago, I found that a coworker of mine had created a simple and short video explaining all the basics of using the WCF adapter. If you haven’t used the adapter before or just want to see how easy it is to use the adapter, go see the video here.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008 Read

Ext JS

Although I rarely develop front-end applications, let alone web applications, during my day-to-day job, I’m still practicing the skill in my personal time. Before my interests in application integration started to arise I was very much intrigued by all what is currently known as web 2.0 and Ajax. In the time we would simply call it DHTML, but that term was superseded by the more catchy ones. So if I see someting passing by that really looks cool and is built using simply Javascript and HTML I always take a quick look at it.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008 Read

BizTalk Server 2006 R3 just around the corner

Quote: “Once SQL Server 2008 (…) becomes generally available, we will follow with an updated version of BizTalk Server designed for the latest versions of Windows Server, the .NET Framework, Visual Studio, and SQL Server. This will mean that BizTalk Server customers will continue to take full advantage of the platform’s latest improvements including: scalability for mission-critical workloads, improved support for next-generation web and service oriented applications, improved virtualization support and better business insight through Office.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 Read

Status update on MCE Guide Editor

A lot of people are waiting for a new release of MCE Guide Editor which hopefully fixes the bug that the channel order gets mixed up again after a reboot. Somewhere in the comments of the old post I mentioned I thought I’d found the bug and it was just a matter of days until the fix could be released. I was testing the tool agains a simulated set-up with preconfigured UPC guide listings.

Sunday, March 16, 2008 Read

Jonas Butt, the new IT-talent?

IT-talent is an internship project which offers IT-talents an exclusive assignment with a prominent IT company. The goal is to create an unique experience and a solid basis for a successful career in IT. Check out www.it-talenten.nl (Dutch) for more information on this project. One of the eight participating students is Jonas Butt, who’s doing his internship at Avanade Netherlands. During his internship he’ll try to answer the following research question:

Wednesday, February 27, 2008 Read

Running

For about 5 months now I’m running with a couple of friends. We started out with a small route in the woods, but that got a little too dark in the winter. One time I was running right behind one of my fellow runners and I couln’t see anything but his white shoes. Suddenly I noticed the path was way to our right and we were standing somewhere in the middle of some schrubs.

Monday, February 11, 2008 Read

DevDays 2007, were you there?

DevDays 2007…I was there, but were you? For those of you living in the Netherlands, Microsoft held the 2007 edition of DevDays and off course Avanade was well represented. On the main plaza you could find our stand where we were running an XNA demo on two giant plasma screens. One was running on a laptop and the other live on a Xbox360. Okay, Avanade doesn’t actually do projects using XNA, but we didn’t mind.

Monday, June 18, 2007 Read

First release of MCE Guide Editor

Today I released the first edition of MCE Guide Editor. I created this tool because of the very long list of channels I got since I use satellite tv. Reordering the channels is a real pain in the ass if you use the Media Center user interface. Here’s where MCE Guide Editor comes in… MCE Guide Editor allows you to change the order of channels of your Media Center setup in an easy way, using drag and drop.

Thursday, May 24, 2007 Read

.Net Magazine article published online

Today I found out that my article on BAM for the Dutch .Net Magazine of december 2006 is published online. It’s an introduction to BAM and I wrote it because I think BAM is far underused at the moment. If you understand Dutch you might want to check it out here. Ex-collegue Dick Dijkstra also wrote an article for the same edition of the .Net Magazine. His article is about the new and improved error handling methods in BizTalk Server 2006.

Friday, February 9, 2007 Read