dotnet.org.za

TechEd, calling all Developers!

Eben — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:54:07 GMT

(To understand this blog entry and get more detail, visit Ahmed's blog.)

From TechEd Sun City to TechEd Durban, all is about to change. Bigger venue! More attendees! More sessions! More depth! More vibe!

However, without you, there is no TechEd :-)

I'm sure you're looking for more topics. This year we're doing it with 70 developer breakout sessions across all TechEd tracks. That's excluding Chalk and Talks, labs and other sessions. Go check Ahmed's blog for the 50 purely developer sessions.

I'm sure you're looking for famed international presenters. This year we're doing it. Go check Ahmed's blog.

I'm sure you're looking at having a good time. This year we're doing it with street parties, etc.

We believe it's a great deal!

Yet, all of this may not be enough to get you to attend.

So, tell us, what will it take to get you to TechEd. Or, what will it take to get your boss to let you go, sponsor your ticket, and give you 2 days leave to recover after TechEd?

The calculation is simple: more developers attending this year, means more sessions and more international speakers next year. We can grow a mountainous developer experience, every year building on the previous!

But, first of all,we need your feedback. We like honest feedback.

What is happening with Teched Africa?

ahmeds — Fri, 16 May 2008 08:56:53 GMT

It occurred to me that I have not blogged much about TechED. Firstly my role - I am no longer the primary owner of the developer tracks at TechED. Eben is. I am, however, the secondary owner, and very much involved with the process of selecting sessions and recruiting speakers. This posting is a bit long, but I wanted to share some information on where we are - and why!

A little background

TechED has always been held at Sun City. This has resulted, due to capacity limitations, that we could only have around 1600 attendees and approximately 100 sessions. From a developer perspective, around 30% of the audience was made up of developers and around 35% of the content was dev focused. Now 35 sessions might seem much, but by the time you look at the technology stack, you quickly realize that you can only have 1 or 2 sessions per technology. This use to be a huge problem in terms of determining what sessions we decide to do. Some of the factors

Technology Focus - Do you focus on new/emerging technologies or more of the existing stuff? Is the focus 50/50 or something else?
Audience Profiling - How much does your audience know? How many of them know what etc - truly critical
Depth of content - How deep do you go. This is related to (2). I can remember doing an advanced TFS session a few years ago. Within 5 minutes I figured out that at least 80% of the audience was lot. It would have been a better idea to do an intro BUT... there comes the problem. How do I cater for the other 20%. They were probably quite happy with the session. We find this scenario very often - that the majority of the audience might not even have seen/worked with the technology. Now when you have limited sessions, we are usually inclined to go with the sessions that appeals to a broader audience.
If we have around 400 developers present, it is sometimes difficult to convince MS international speakers to come down. In a breakout they might have 100 attendees, and they want a better return on the trip.

The overall feedback we get (via eval forms) is very positive. We generally rate around 80% satisfied/very satisfied. This equates to an average rating of around 7.4 on a 9 point scale. Very few sessions get rated below a 7 (typically around 5%).

BUT..BUT... We get anecdotal evidence - probably from someone like you reading this - that TechED does not provide enough value. This is not from everyone from certainly from some segment. We get feedback like:

It is too expensive.
TechED is a party.
The speakers (some) are not great.
The content is not deep enough.
The event is more marketing.
You can let me know what else by commenting in the blog.

TechED 2008

TechED is moving to Durbs so we can have more attendees and more sessions. We now have around 70 dev focused sessions in total (across all tracks).Some of the decisions Eben and I took was that:

We would have more depth sessions.
We would try and recruit good international speakers - and make them do the depth sessions where possible
We still need to take into account the factors above.

With that in mind, below is a list of speakers we are currently trying to get to South Africa. This is not a promise that all these will come as there are many factors that influence who will ultimately come. We reckon at least 60% of these guys will be here. I will not put down their profiles here but would be interested in your comments.

Bart De Smet
Brad Abrams
Brian Randell
Chris Menegay
Daniel Moth
Doug Seven (SVTS PM)
Gert Drapers
Goksin Bakir
Kate Gregory
Lisa Feigenbaum (VB PM)
Rafal Lukawiecki (truly brilliant)
Ron Jacobs
Roy Osherove
Shyam Pather (Entity Framework PM)

What does the draft session list look like. Again we would be keen on your feedback (in some case the session is a placeholder - so you do not see the final title). This list is not final but expect to see 80% of the sessions.

· Next-Generation Manageability with Windows PowerShell 2.0 and MMC 3.0

· IIS7 Extensibility

· Custom LINQ Providers

· C# 3.0 and LINQ Inside Out

· Team Foundation Server: Team Build

· Understanding Branching and Merging in Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server

· A Developer's Life with Team Suite

· Realistic Software Testing with Visual Studio Team System

· From Gleam to Grave: Managing the Complete Lifecycle of a Software System

· Sharing Assets between the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework and the Microsoft .NET Framework

· Beyond Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0: Windows Vista and the Managed Developer

· Developing Solutions with Parallel Extensions

· Five Cool Things to Know and Use for Smart Client Development with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5

· What's new in Team Foundation Server 2008

· Introduction to VSTS Database Professional

· VSTS Database Professional Advanced

· Developing Applications with WCF and XOML Powered WF

· S+S , Saas, Web2.0.? What, when, how?

· Creating Rich Content with Windows Presentation Foundation

· Developing Solutions using Expression Web

· Developing Solutions using Expression Blend

· Microsoft Visual Basic 2008: Microsoft LINQ Language Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices

· Visual Basic IDE Tips and Tricks

· Introduction to Patterns and Practices

· Patterns and Practices: Desktop Applications

· Cryptography for Developers

· .NET 3.5 Security

· Choosing Communication Styles: SOAP/WS-* vs. REST

· Getting Workflows Running and Talking in Your Applications

· What Is the Context of This Conversation? Enabling Long Running Conversations in Workflow Services

· The Road to “Oslo”: The Microsoft Services and Modeling Platform

· Introduction to Regular Expressions in .NET

· Understanding Reflection

· Designing for Testability: Bridging the Gap between Design and Testing in Object-Oriented Software (Repeated from 6/4)

· Introduction to Mock Objects and Advanced Unit Testing

· Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Data Access Guidance

· Understanding the ADO.NET Entity Framework

· XML LINQ: Linking in the real world

· ADO.NET Data Services for the Web (a.k.a. Project “Astoria”)

· OBA End to End

· Light Up Your SharePoint Web Site with Microsoft Silverlight and AJAX

· Language Integrated Query Technical Overview

· LINQ to SQL

· Introduction to the Sync Framework

· Overview of .NET Framework 3.5 Enhancements

· Introduction to Windows Communication Foundation

· Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation

· Patterns and Practices: Web Services

· Windows Live for developers

· CRM for Devs

· General Security Strategies

· Advanced/Best practices ADO.NET

· Advanced SQL Compact Edition

· Introduction: SQL Server 2008 for Developers

· What's new in Visual Studio 2008 for Windows Forms

· Virtualization for developers

· Advanced AJAX development

· Introduction to AJAX development

· Introduction to MVC Web Development

· Performance and Scalability in ASP.NET development

· What's new in Visual Studio 2008 for ASP.NET developers

· What's new for developers in Internet Explorer 8

· Advanced Silverlight Development

· Introduction to Silverlight 2

· What's new for developers in Windows Mobile 6

· Vista App Compat

· What's new for developers in Windows Server 2008

Finally FEEDBACK, FEEDBACK

Tell us what you think. Are you going to TechED. If not - why not? We want to make TechED better for developers. We need the developers to come!

Service Guidance Packages

willy — Fri, 16 May 2008 08:09:10 GMT

During the BizTalk 2006 R2 drill down I have 'fortunately' had an opportunity to check-out the latest service guidance from the Microsoft patterns and practices team. WOW ... there has been major innovations. If you are developing ASMX or WCF services, make sure that you install the relevant guidance packs, i.e.

The documentation is exceptional and looking at the generated code and the guidance, best practices are promoted.

Useful link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-za/library/ms998572(en-us).aspx ... takes you to the patterns home on MSDN.

Email Rain-Storm ... trying a new tactic to regain some sanity

willy — Fri, 16 May 2008 07:18:46 GMT

After an interesting dinner with Willie and Ruari, talking about the South-Africa technology communities, what we are doing and could be doing, I came home and was on the verge of slotting in my 3G card and checking "email" just before mid-night.

Both Willie and Ruari know just how tired I was last night, after not sleeping much during the BizTalk boot camp this week, because I was the zombie trying not to fall of my chair. I would like to apologise to both Ruari and Willie for being in the state I was in ... getting to old for the 3-0 hours sleep a night mode.

Fortunately my brain was able to fire an interrupt, make the hand move away from the laptop and 3G card, and insert a new trial assembler module. Why assembler? Well, my brain is still one of the older models, with limited memory and processing bandwidth ...

The new module will be a test, namely to run Outlook in offline mode in future and to check email reactively at predefined time slots (which I will not publish) and no longer continuously/regularly/interruptive.

The core objective of the test is to stop the continuous and relentless email rain storm that seems to dominate my life. The first problem is that I am currently in a check-respond-to-email-automatic email addiction mode which I need to break and the second is that everyone who is used to me responding to emails as soon as possible, will in future be faced with longer delay period.

Let's see how it goes ... if you send me an email, expect a 24 turn-around time during business hours in future, assuming I can refrain from hitting the Send|Receive key in Outlook over the weekend.

Worthwhile visit to my old home

Willie Roberts — Fri, 16 May 2008 04:28:09 GMT

I arrived in JHB yesterday morning at 7:45. I was strangely not surprised at the roadblock outside the airport and the traffic running from the Airport to the ITI offices, but did however realise I don't miss a moment of it. Effectively I walk to work, as my office is 2 blocks down from my house. I had a few rushed but very productive meetings with Microsoft as well as internal ITI meetings that will be continuing today, addressing various issues. One of the people on my meeting list was Ruari...(read more)

MVP Interoperability Workshop

ZaydKara — Thu, 15 May 2008 14:21:18 GMT

The Microsoft MVPs from South-Africa invite you to come and discuss the world of interoperability in the development environment. See SAArchitect for more details register for event here. Hurry seats are limited!

Hello world!

Tessa Hanekom — Thu, 15 May 2008 12:53:00 GMT

I joined Faritec as a SharePoint administrator in December 2007 having previously been employed at a large corporate in the financial services industry. Having done all the configuration and administration courses over the past 2 years and having worked with both WSS2 and MOSS 2007 for most of that time there is one thing that I've come to accept - there will always be another way to do anything you want to do with SharePoint. The trick comes in knowing where to look for information and what is the most appropriate solution in any given instance.

I will focus my efforts (but not restrict them) to finding the best sources for "how to" tutorials and useful tips as I am by no means the expert in this myself (yet ).

Funny

Thea Burger — Thu, 15 May 2008 12:24:00 GMT

Sorry Steven, stole this from you, but I found it very funny and applicable...

Visual Studio eXtensibility (VSX) Video - How Do I: Add a New Tool Window to Visual Studio?

hiltong — Thu, 15 May 2008 09:15:32 GMT

The most recent How Do I video was recently published. It covers adding a custom tool window into the IDE with its own toolbar. The example is simple (just a web browser) but it covers some of the main core concepts. Here's a screenshot:

MVP Interoperability Workshop ... TFS/Java/WCF/Linux/BizTalk/... join the "happy" techno family!

willy — Thu, 15 May 2008 06:15:01 GMT

“Interoperability – a difficult word to say, an easy concept to understand”

The Microsoft MVPs from South-Africa invite you to come and discuss the world of interoperability in the development environment, exploring how we can integrate and interoperate with other technologies.

The event will allow you to explore new ideas and solutions, collaborating with Microsoft Consultants, Community Leads and Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) from South-Africa who will be giving an independent and vendor agnostic view.

The objective is to become INTEROPaware and INTEROPable, proving that Interoperability is no longer a technology, but a mind set problem … creating one happy technology family.

NOW

... and bring an open mind!

We thank the sponsors allowing us to host this event:

Microsoft DPE
Microsoft MVP PM
Microsoft MVPs
SA Architect
Barone, Budge & Dominick

At this stage the sessions include:

Interoperability using Microsoft WCF and Linux Mono
Interoperability using BizTalk as an Enterprise Service Bus
Integrated development environment using TFS 2008, TeamPrise and Java
Microsoft Technologies Interoperability Improvements for PHP
Open Q&A Session
Web Interoperability: Did you know ...?

Outlook 2007 Pain

Pieter — Thu, 15 May 2008 03:57:02 GMT

Decided yesterday I needed to install VS2008 on by base machine so that I could do a spike on some new features. What a shitty idea that turned out to be. Outlook 2007 decided it didn't want to work anymore. Outlook would happily start in safe mode, but just would not start normally. So I tried tracing it, uninstalling all add-ins, used process explorer, searched google, etc... In the end I uninstalled VS2008, uninstalled Office 2007 then re-installed Office 2007 and whooop there it started working again. Aaaaargh +/-4hrs of productive time down the drain. Thank God for VM's otherwise I would have been totally unproductive.

BizTalk Bootcamp - Day 3b Diary: Nuggets (Orchestrations)

willy — Thu, 15 May 2008 01:10:15 GMT

Continued from http://dotnet.org.za/willy/archive/2008/05/14/biztalk-bootcamp-day-3a-diary-nuggets-lab.aspx. We continued with Orchestrations.

After today my brain really hurts suffering from absolute information overload with John not slowing down throughout the day ... anyway here we go with the notes on the theory and an orchestration lab:

Orchestration Theory

Orchestration Types

Types include:

Message Type, defining messages used by the process
Port Type, defining port operations used across multiple ports
Correlation Type, which defines the routing mechanism and dispatching of messages
Role Link Type (aka Service Link), defining logically consistent group of ports
Orchestration Variables, which are instances of types

BizTalk Host

Represents runtime processes into which we deploy services, pipelines, etc.
One host can have one or more instances
There is a limit of 20 threads per host
Multiple hosts are useful to:
- Separate receive, processing (orchestration), sending
- Define different host identities needed

Orchestration Persistence Points

Defines points within an orchestration where persistence is written out to the MessageBox.

Deterministic persistence points occur with:

Send shape within a non-atomic scope
At the end of each transactional scope
When starting a new orchestration instance
At debug break points
At system shutdown
With Orchestration dehydration

Immutability

Messages received by an orchestration are immutable, which means that a new message must be created when changes are needed.
Changes to messages can only be done within construct shapes.

Scope

Scope is a framework for organising actions, acts as a container for variables and is used for exception handling. IN fact, if you know C#, you can relate the orchestration scope with the {}.
Scopes can be nested up to 44 levels deep.

Correlation

Correlation is a messaging pattern matching incoming messages to the appropriate orchestration instance.

Transactions

BizTalk orchestrations support:

Atomic transactions which are ACID (atomic, consistent, isolated, durable)
Long running transactions which are CD (consistent, durable)

The following extracts shows the properties of the transactions for none, long running and atomic:

Orchestration Lab

Scenario

Serial uniform convoy that will gather all received messages into a single variable. You will then execute the XmlAssembler send pipeline component to create a single aggregated message.

Main Steps

Build a serial convoy that will correlate line item messages by supplier information
1. Create Orchestration AggAggregateOrders
2. Create Orchestration Variables
3. Create Orchestration Messages
4. Create a Property Schema for Supplier Correlation
5. Design a Uniform Convoy
Configure the orchestration to collect multiple messages, and then send the messages to a pipeline, which will create a single aggregate message.
1. Reference the Pipeline Assembly
2. Define the Orchestration Process
3. Call a Pipeline from the Orchestration
Configure the AggregateOrders orchestration to receive XML messages from LineItemsIn and send the results to the SupplierOrdersOut folder.

Illustration - Orchestration

Illustration - Send Pipeline

Schemas

Schema - Supplier Correlation Property Schema

Schema - Line Item

Note that supplier element has been promoted to the property schema.

Input Message Example

Output Message Example

Well, it is 3AM ... need some sleep before John starts the next Tsunami of information.

Brad Abrams in Cape Town

Ernst Kuschke — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:46:00 GMT

As Hilton's blog indicates, we'll have the pleasure of chatting with legendary Brad Abrams soon, right here in Cape Town! He will be doing a talk on the planned ASP.NET MVC Framework for SADeveloper.net. Scott Guthrie explains the MVC pattern nicely over here. This is an exciting framework that might(!) remind you of Ruby on Rails. Some open source efforts to bring the rails mentality of CoC and DRY to the .net platform has been attempted before, most notably with the Castle Project.

One of the main concerns with the new ASP.NET MVC Framework is that, instead of allowing client-server interaction via the current postback model, your postbacks will now be directed to a Controller class. This is in fact not a concern as much as it is a breaking change - it is in fact a much cleaner seperation of concerns, which the current ASP.NET model does not have.

RSVP over here to book your seat.

S.A. Developer.net Event - June 2008 - MVC (With Brad Abrams!)

hiltong — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:50:01 GMT

That's right, the one and only Brad Abrams from Microsoft will be visiting us at the end of June and he'll be giving a talk on the upcoming Microsoft ASP.Net MVC framework.

Here's Microsoft blurb on the MVC framework:

ASP.NET MVC provides a framework that enables you to easily implement the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern for Web applications. This pattern lets you separate applications into loosely coupled, pluggable components for application design, processing logic, and display.
ASP.NET MVC is not a replacement for Webforms. It provides an alternative choice when designing a Web application. Using ASP.NET MVC offers the following advantages:

It enables you to achieve and maintain a clear separation of concerns
It facilitates test driven development (TDD)
It provides more control over the URLs you publish in the application and over the HTML that is emitted by the application

Brad is a real .Net superstar, so don't miss this one out. Here is an extract for his official bio:

Brad Abrams was a founding member of both the Common Language Runtime, and .NET Framework teams at Microsoft Corporation where he is currently the Group Program Manager for the UI Framework and Services team .... Specific technologies owned by this team include ASP.NET, parts of Silverlight, and Windows Forms.

Please RSVP for this event, as we need to determine seating. You can RSVP on the main S.A. Developer event thread or email me using the Contact page on my blog.

Bonus extra - check out the most recent DotNetRocks episode with Brad on .Net 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1

BizTalk Deep Dive

Ryan CrawCour — Wed, 14 May 2008 09:26:00 GMT

So this week I am attending a deep dive course presented by John Callaway from Quicklearn.

I must say the sesison is very informative and even though I have been using BizTalk for almost 8 years now I am still picking up lots of little pieces of fun things that I never knew about before. Little things that will make my life as a BizTalk developer much, much easier.

This is the kind of content that us local BizTalk developers have been starved for; for such a long time. Thanks to Microsoft for bringing these guys out here ... now that you've wet our tastebuds can we have more

I will aggregate these bits and pieces, tips and tricks, into a session which I will present at the next BizTalk user group meeting, So if you missed out ... don't worry you can either catch the notes from the session on Willy's blog as he is posting regular titbits from the inside, or you can attend the next session and you'll gain a lot of this deep insight for gratis!

*grin*

ps. it is VERY good to see this session is jam packed with eager beavers ready to learn! i see the potential for a very bright future for BizTalk in South Africa.

now all i have to do is get back on to REAL [] development projects where i get to use this stuff daily and not stuck on the stuff i am doing now ....

ciao for now

Steve McConell on Software's Classic Mistakes - 2008

cjlotz — Wed, 14 May 2008 08:15:37 GMT

Steve McConnell, author of the excellent Code Complete, has published an updated version of the Software Classic Mistakes he identified in his book Rapid Development published in 1996. The idea was to see what the industry is like 12 years later. Read more about it here.

BizTalk Bootcamp - Day 3a Diary: Nuggets (Lab)

willy — Wed, 14 May 2008 08:01:53 GMT

Continued from http://dotnet.org.za/willy/archive/2008/05/13/biztalk-bootcamp-day-2-diary-nuggets-schemas-maps-pipelines.aspx. This post summarises one of the last labs we did last night and which I dry-ran again this morning to get a clear understanding on what is going on.

Lab Scenario

Frequently, companies find it useful to break messages containing several hundred or thousand line items into individual messages for processing; for example, batches of invoices or orders that need to be updated separately. Tailspin Toys receives their store restocking requests containing multiple items, but the individual items contained therein need to be ordered from various vendors. In this lab, you will split these restocking messages for subsequent processing.

The following image is a summary:

If you are wondering, the magic of splitting StoreOrder is done by the DIS-ASSEMBLER of the receive Pipeline based on the envelope and BodyXPath properties if the RestockOrder message. The BodyXPath defines where the envelope ends and the body begins.

In other words, the receive pipeline splits the RestockOrder message into an envelope and line items, based on the SplitOrder schema. The LineItem_to_StoreLineItem maps the LineItem messages to StoreLineItems.

The property demotion (re-population) of the StoreNumber element in the StoreLineItem is done automatically by the XMLTransmit send pipeline. If you set the pipeline to PassThruTransmit, the magic of default demotion ends.

StoreOrder Schema

SplitOrder Schema

LineItem Schema

StoreLineItem Schema

LineItem_to_StoreLineItem Map

Set the Value property for the StoreNumber field to <empty>, which ensures that the map creates the StoreNumber field, although it has no value at mapping time.

Promoted Fields

What if we suddenly have a flat file coming in?

Some rough notes:

Must use a pipeline to split the incoming message.
Create header, body and trailer schemas for the incoming message.
Promote elements in the header if necessary, i.e. if needed during mapping process, and create a property schema.
Promote elements in the outgoing message schema, if necessary. Add property schema of (3) to the promotion and match the relevant values. In fact the property schema is now shared by the incoming header and the outgoing message.
We need a custom Flat File receive Pipeline, which:
- Includes two flat file disassemblers, one which processes a single message and the other a batch of messages.
- Take note that flat files are split "all or nothing", i.e. if the last data element is bad, none are split
We need a custom Flat File Send Pipeline, which:
- Includes a flat file assembler
Set the custom receive and send pipelines for the receive and application, otherwise we will receive, pass-through and resend message with no changes.
Optionally create a utility application, set a send port, with a filter ErrorReport.ErrorType == FailedMessage, to trap and process any failures.

HINT: If you have common artifact, i.e. schemas and pipelines, you can set a reference to the common application containing the artifacts. Go to your application, right-click, Add and choose References.

HINT: Has the schema changed? Remember, the host caches the schemas. Select Platform Settings -> Hosts and restart the host instance to refresh the cache.

HINT: Q: Where does one find properties such as FailedMessage? A: It is a keyword ... would be great to have a drop down in the admin tool q;-|

Now for day 3 stuff. Watch the space ...