My first article in the Foundations column on Windows Workflow Foundation is now live on the MSDN Magazine site.  I find tracking to be one of the most powerful features of WF and easily the most frequently used extension model, outside of custom activities, to solve real business problems.  The article was fun to write and I'm having fun finishing up the next installment on the ActivityExecutionContext.  That one should be published in the June issue. 

 

Enjoy and as always, any feedback is welcome. 

One of my students in the November Windows Workflow class suggested that we have an RSS feed for our public courses so people can easily stay up to date on where and when we are offering courses.  Now you can thanks to Aaron.  You can get to the blog or right to the RSS feed.  These entries will also show up in our Pluralsight aggregated feed, so if you are already subscribed to that, you will get the entries through that RSS feed also.  Other suggestions are always welcome and I look forward to seeing you in a class soon! 

 

Note that right now we have a single class on the feed, my Applied BizTalk Server class coming up in March.  We didn't want to flood the aggregate feed with all of our upcoming classes so we will add them in gradually. 

I've been crazy busy lately with BizTalk Server.  First, I'm happy to announce that Microsoft has recognized me as an MVP for BizTalk Server (and I got nominated for the Connected Systems group as well)!  I'm very pleased and look forward to doing as much as I can in the community this year to earn the reward. 

 

As for teaching BizTalk, I'm doing three deliveries of our Applied BizTalk Server for internal Microsoft groups, two of which are India.  So, I've just returned from Hyderabad and I'm heading back in a week and a half.  It is wreaking havoc on my internal clock, but the groups are great and I had a lot of fun teaching the class.  Awesome questions and great discussions as many of these people are working with BizTalk daily and already have some areas they wanted to understand more about. 

 

It was also fun to visit Hyderabad.  I've been to Bangalore once a year ago, so it was interesting to compare.  Microsoft has an impressive facility there and they are continuing to build.  A very exciting time for the city and the people from what I could tell.  I'm looking forward to my return trip and some more excellent Indian food (the Biryani was an especially good local specialty available right in the MS dining hall).  I also got some lessons in Cricket. I knew nothing going in, and I'm still mostly in the dark but at least not completely in the dark.  I have several pieces of information to help me know how it is different from baseball, as opposed to just knowing that it is different, which is where I started. 

 

I'm also frantically "playing" with some early bits of BizTalk R2.  I've got some upcoming talks where I am going to be showing BTS with WCF, WF and other technologies under the Connected Systems umbrella. So, I have some demos to get working so I don't get booed off the stage. :)  More on these talks in another post. 

 

Finally, I am doing an open enrollment BizTalk course here in Minneapolis in March.  If you want to get the best training on BizTalk Server (modest aren't I) then sign up on the course information page. I'd like to guarantee that the temperature won't be below 0 when you come, but who knows.  :)  Either way, it will be a fun informative week.