This year the usual TechDays event focused exclusivelly on Dev contents, and reduced to two days. I was help at IST’s campus on Tagus, a smaller but also cosier space. I did three sessions, all of them on the ARChitecture track: ARC206 Patterns & Anti-Patterns. I did this session together with Tiago Pascoal, and we mostly talked about ...

Microsoft just published a very interesting an in-depth 86-page document about BAM, one of the most under-used features of BizTalk Server, “Business Activity Monitoring in Depth for Developers”. You can download if here, and find more overview info about it here. Highly recommended. Additionally, if you have been following the new features of ...

There’s an announcement around for the ESB Guidance 2.0 CTP (October 2008). It’s good to know that this is already getting worked on to have new features and work with the upcoming BizTalk Server 2009. The strange thing is that I can’t actually find the download anywhere: it’s not at Codeplex, and I can’t find it at Connect. According to the ...

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Next week I’ll be off at PDC08, which is shaping up to be as good as PDC05 was, with a lot of sessions on Today’s hot topic: Cloud Computing. One week later, I’ll be at the Ask-The-Experts booths at TechEd EMEA 2008 Developers in Barcelona (my colleague and SharePoint God Raúl is also attending the conference), focused on making contacts and ...

For me, this year's PDC in LA will totally be about the "Cloud". Sure topics that interest me are Mesh and Sql Server Data Services (SSDS), but I'm sure there's more to come, about things like Oslo and other European cities, perhaps BizTalk Services and a curiously colored and mysterious canine, RedDog. There are two things that ...

While developing BizTalk projects I frequently end up developing mini-tools to automate small and/or repetitive administration tasks. One of these, which I recently generalized, I use to turn on or off multiple "Enable Failed Message Routing" options. Here's how you can use it: TurnFailedMessageRouting * on DbServer - turns on the ...

A few years back I read Francis Fukuyama's ''The End of History and the Last Man'', a book that presented and defended the theory that the current political and economical status quo/zeitgeist is as good as it gets. There's supposedly no better system, hence the title of the book. This was a book I profoundly disagreed with, but had to admit it ...

A few days back I delivered a presentation on Microsoft's ESB Guidance Package at TechDays 2008 in Lisbon. The session included demos of the ESB and BizTalk 2006 R2. The slide decks (mostly in portuguese) are avaliable at my skydrive: INT05 and INT06.

I've been playing with the ESB Guidance for some time now, in preparation for the session I'm presenting at TechDays 2008 on that topic. While doing this, I had to solve several small problems during installation, and also getting the samples running. Here are some tips for those who are brave of heart :-): Follow the installation steps as ...