Thomas F. Abraham – On Technology

Starting a couple of days ago I was suddenly unable to sign into Windows Live Messenger.  The signin graphic would just spin endlessly, or I’d get a “service not available” message.

In case you have also run into this (many have), Microsoft did a bad thing (supposedly now fixed), and the effect is that bad data may have been cached on your PC, which prevents you from being able to log in.

Here’s some info on the problem.

The solution if you are using Windows Live Messenger 8.0.x is to delete the registry key HKCU\Software\Microsoft\MSNMessenger\Policies.  As always, don’t attempt this if you are not comfortable editing the Windows registry.

Another related issue they describe is specific to ZoneAlarm firewall users, and that one is pending a fix as of this writing.  They suggest dropping back to an older version of Messenger until that fix is available, so hopefully the registry key will fix it for you.

Thanks again to everyone who attended my session entitled “Effective Techniques for Handling Large Messages in Service Oriented Solutions” at the Microsoft SOA & BP Conference.  The session covered the difficulties of working with large messages in service-oriented environments, then provided general strategies and specific guidance for both BizTalk Server 2006 and ASP.NET Web services.

Here’s the PowerPoint presentation from the session.  I’m still debating how to release the Slice/Splice BizTalk pipeline component code.  One option is to create a new community project at either CodePlex or GotDotNet.  Another option is to use a GPL or similar open-source license.  Any ideas?  Please let me know what you think.

soa04_abraham.zip

It’s the last day of the Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference and just about time to head for home.  I’ve had a great week in Redmond and have had a chance to talk with many other members of the BizTalk community.  The conference has more than 700 attendees, and I was surprised to discover that 40% or more were international.  QuickLearn has been running some great training classes on BizTalk, WCF, WF and Atlas both before and after the conference.

Thanks to everyone who attended my session on working with large messages in BizTalk and ASP.NET Web services!  The session was well attended and, not surprisingly, a lot of people are having these issues.  As soon as I get approval from Microsoft, I’ll get a post together with the PowerPoint slides and the pipeline component code.

Overall, the conference was worthwhile, but I would have preferred much more detail in the sessions and greater presence from the MS product developers.  Hopefully that will be improved for next year.  No real news from the conference other than the limited availability to partners of an ESB guidance package for BizTalk.

Thanks for reading and please stay tuned for the session materials.

You might have used the VB6 to VB.NET Upgrade Wizard in Visual Studio, or maybe the Java Language Conversion Assistant (JLCA) to convert Java code to C#.  These tools have something in common - the technology comes not from Microsoft, but from a company called ArtinSoft.

This is a company with some very intriguing products based on artificial intelligence engines.  Their business is all about source code and platform conversion – VB6 to VB.NET, Java to C#, PL/SQL to T/SQL, Linc to J2EE – you name it, they can probably do it.  They have two AI-based engines, and the one called Freedom is behind JLCA and the VB.NET Upgrade Wizard.  Through a complex process, this engine creates a langage-agnostic intermediate representation of the original source code, which can then be written out in a completely different language.

Now, people tend to complain a lot about the VB.NET Upgrade Wizard, but if you stop and think about what the tool has to do, it works incredibly well.  The quality of the original source is obviously going to be a major factor.  If the VB6 source has Option Explicit off and looks, well, like most VB6 code does, it’s amazing that the wizard can make any sense of it.

One important thing to know is that ArtinSoft sells their own versions of both of these tools: the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion and the JLCA Companion.  These products are much more advanced versions of the free tools.  The VB Upgrade Companion can even convert your VB6 code to C#.  Yes, VB6 directly to C#!  How cool is that?  ArtinSoft also offers consulting services to help with your migration projects.

Sometimes the right answer is to redesign and rewrite your code.  Other (most?) times, that is very hard to justify to your CIO, and that’s when your company might want to consider ArtinSoft’s paid applications and services.  Cost may still be an issue, since I hear that these tools are licensed by number of lines of source code, but that’s something to evaluate while you look at all of the pros and cons and make a final rewrite/upgrade decision.

The Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference is coming soon.  This is a great 4-day conference held at the Microsoft campus at an awesome price – only $199!  Consider that TechEd costs nearly $2,000!  Of course you have to pay to get there, but really, this is still a terrific deal.

The conference features four tracks, three technical and one business:

• Service Oriented Architecture (incl. BizTalk 2006, WCF, WF, HIS and more)
• Connected Systems Technology and Products (.NET 3.0 and BizTalk 2006)
• Business Process Management (Office System 2007 and BizTalk 2006 R2)
• Business Value (Why care and what are the opportunities)

The agenda and sessions are still being finalized, so keep checking the conference website for updates.

I’m pleased to announce that I will be presenting the following session in the SOA track, so I hope to see you there!

Effective Techniques for Working with Large Messages in a Service-Oriented Architecture

In a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), small messages are easy to work with and don’t create extra challenges of their own, but various issues arise when the message size grows to megabytes in size. This session will identify the issues you should consider and then explore specific techniques that you can use to work effectively with large messages in ASP.NET 2.0 Web services and BizTalk Server 2006.

One of the coolest resources that Microsoft employees have is an internal website filled with hundreds and hundreds of small but useful apps and utilities, many of which were written by Microsoft employees.  Sadly, few of the tools are made available outside of Microsoft, but here are a bunch that have made it out and places to look for more.

Fiddler: In the author’s own words: “Fiddler is a HTTP Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP Traffic, set breakpoints, and “fiddle” with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler is designed to be much simpler than using NetMon or Achilles, and includes a simple but powerful JScript.NET event-based scripting subsystem.”

Sandcastle: This is the actual tool that Microsoft uses to generate the .NET Framework’s MSDN-style documentation.  NDoc works fairly well, but Sandcastle is the new tool of choice for building help files.

FxCop: The same tool behind “Code Analysis” functionality in select Visual Studio 2005 Editions, this is one of the most important tools for .NET software developers. This outstanding tool analyzes managed code assemblies for over 200 types of defects, and will point out all kinds of “gotchas” that you never would have noticed on your own.

LogParser: A truly amazing tool, LogParser allows you to write SQL queries against data stored in random files in all kinds of different formats, including XML, CSV and various IIS log formats, and it can write the results to lots of different formats — all without loading the data into a database! If it doesn’t support the format you need, you can write an extension for it.

WiX: One of the first, if not the first, internal Microsoft tool to go open-source.  A set of command-line utilities that build MSI/MSM files from XML command files.  Great for building installers in an automated build process.

RoboCopy and much more: RoboCopy is a very powerful and reliable file copy/move tool that also includes directory synchronization.  It is packaged with dozens of other great tools in the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools package.  (Many of the tools do not require Windows Server 2003.)

One of the newest and fastest-growing places to find Microsoft-created tools is CodePlex, Microsoft’s newest “community development” website. There is no good way to determine exactly which projects originate from Microsoft, but some are clearly stated. One of the tools you will find here is the Team Foundation Server Administration Tool.

Some tools turn up on the official Microsoft website as unsupported downloads.  For example, Lookout, released in early 2005, is an Outlook add-in that lets you quickly search all types of Outlook and file system data.  Not very useful, perhaps, in this age of Windows Desktop Search and Google Desktop, but it’s an example of what you can find if you dig around in Microsoft Downloads.

Browse the GotDotNet User Samples area — look for the Microsoft logo next to the sample title.  XML tools and Web Service tools are also available on GotDotNet.

Know of more useful tools that originated inside Microsoft?  Please share them!

I’ve been doing my best to procrastinate taking all of these certification exams, so I finally had to just schedule and go, ready or not.  So, a week after the 70-536 .NET exam and feeling a bit rusty with BizTalk 2004, I took 74-135, the BizTalk Server 2004 TS exam.  Passing is 700, there are 40 questions and you have two hours max.

Fresh hands-on experience definitely helps with this test, as well as a lot of facts and useless knowledge like the command-line parameters to the management tools.  Microsoft’s expert test writers seem to believe that one will not have access to the product documentation to simply LOOK UP command-line parameters!

Having not laid a hand on BizTalk (2004) for at least three months, and having procrastinated studying again, I wasn’t looking forward to test day, but I passed and it’s done, so it was worth the trouble.

So how did I prepare (or not, in this case)?  I read the first 300 pages of BizTalk 2004 Unleashed in the three evenings prior as a refresher.  Beyond that I relied on my brief experience of 6-8 weeks earlier this year developing with BizTalk messaging and orchestrations, and I have done many BizTalk installs with both 2004 and 2006, not to mention debugging other peoples’ BizTalk solutions.

The test manages to hit almost every aspect of BizTalk, including Messaging, Orchestrations, HWS, BAM, BAS, installation and management.  That’s why the hands-on experience is so important.

While the blog has been silent over the last couple of months, I’ve been preparing for and taking more certification exams.  That amidst never-ending yard and house work in this unusually dry, hot summer.

A couple of weeks back, I took the 70-536 exam and walked away with a score of 895.  Disappointing (yes, all things are relative) because I got 100% on the sections that should have been the hardest for me and missed questions on “easier” sections.  However, a lot always depends on how they phrase the questions and how much you read into them.  This was no better than any of the past MS exams in that regard.

I’m now certified as an MCTS: .NET Framework 2.0 Distributed Applications.  Could they make these titles any longer?  My end goal is MCPD, which requires three more exams (argh).

The majority of the 45-question, 2-hr max test was code questions where you have four or five code samples from which to choose.  There were also “choose and order” questions where you have 6-7 actions and you have to pick just the ones you need and put them in the right order.

None of the exam prep books were available when I prepared for this test, and the scope of this exam is so large that I resorted to simply reading the MSDN class library documentation.  I went through each class in the exam prep list, looked it up and read the docs.  Yes, it was every bit as painful as it sounds.  I used the MeasureUp practice test after I had read through everything.

The official MS Press prep book is finally available, with another non-Microsoft book supposedly coming soon.  Here’s the exam prep guide.

As most of you probably know, MSBuild is the new XML-driven build tool provided with .NET Framework 2.0.  You do not need to install Visual Studio 2005 to get and use MSBuild.  I’ll never understand why Microsoft went away from nmake and make files when they moved to Visual Studio .NET from the old C/C++ compilers.  It was a big design mistake and one that has made it difficult to create automated builds or build scripts of any significant complexity.  Thankfully they finally decided to clone nAnt and give us a real build tool again.

In any case, the real point of this post is that .NET 1.1 projects have just as much, if not more, to gain from MSBuild as .NET 2.0 projects do, and that has just become much easier.  The “MSBuild Extras – Toolkit for .NET 1.1″ is now available.  If you’ve been using nAnt, this is a great way to prepare for .NET 2.0 and take advantage of MSBuild’s power today.

Also of interest, you’ll find that the download for this toolkit is on a Microsoft site called CodePlex, stated to be “Microsoft’s community development” site.  I’m not quite what this means to GotDotNet, which has filled exactly that role for many years now.  Perhaps Microsoft is hoping to create their own SourceForge in CodePlex.  It will be interesting to see how it is ultimately used, but it seems to be picking up a bunch of interesting projects.

If you’re ready to install SQL Server 2005 SP1, you should also be aware of the recently-released cumulative hotfix package (build 2153).  Unfortunately, Microsoft has created an unusual situation that is bound to lead to confusion.

SQL Server 2005 SP1 was released less than a month ago, yet we already have a post-SP1 hotfix package that includes a significant number of additional fixes (33+).  There are two things that stand out with this release.

First, the update files are available for public download, whereas in normal practice the article describes the fixes and says “contact PSS to obtain this update.”  Second, the article does not contain the usual disclaimer of “install this update only if you are experiencing the problem described.”  However, it also notably lacks a statement recommending its installation.  As a result, there is neither a negative nor a positive statement about whether it should be widely installed.

So what do you do?  My recommendation is to always install SP1 and this cumulative update package together (and in that order).

As I had suspected, this odd timing was just a result of Microsoft’s release schedule, and the updates in this rollup didn’t quite make the SP1 cutoff.  You don’t need to take my word for it — Euan Garden of the SQL Server product team anticipated the confusion.

How to install?  This should go without saying, but it’s worth the time to back up your databases first, including the master and msdb databases, and to install these updates on a test server before updating your production server.  Install SP1 first, reboot if required, then install the cumulative update and read the directions first.  This update comes in six separate files that must be installed in a specific order, namely, the top-to-bottom order in which they are listed in the KB article.