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.   

 

 

Next month Pluralsight has our first public offering of Introducing Windows Workflow Foundation right in my own town of Minneapolis.  We did a Double Feature with WF and WCF back in August and it was great.  If you are looking for some training on WF, check out the information page and register now "Space is limited" as they say.  

 

We'll have great hands on labs mixed in with lecture to give you the right balance of concepts with experience.  Hope to see you there. 

 

Minneapolis not convenient for you?  Leave a comment as to where you would like to see us do public Workflow courses.  Boston?  Dallas?  Seattle? Denver?  Atlanta?  Vegas?  :)  If we get enough interest for a location, we'll get a course up and running and I'll be sure to announce it here. 

 

So, I haven't blogged in MONTHS, and here's why. 

 

I'm getting ready to blog again and post some samples, etc. in the coming months, so for those of you still "listening", there will be something to read.  :) 

My article on VS.Net templates is finally up on the MSDN Magazine web site [1].  I had a lot of fun diving into this feature and look forward to being able to use them in creating classroom materials and templates for my customers. 

 

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/01/CodeTemplates/default.aspx

Well, I apologize for being so lax in my posting.  I finished off the year with a bang and haven't had time to post.  I've been traveling to exotic places like Bangalore, India. I had a great time with some ISVs and the folks from Microsoft talking about Workflow and Windows Communication.  This was my first trip to India and it was a fun one.  I did have some huge trouble with jet lag; I didn't sleep until the fourth night there and it took me a full week to get a decent night sleep.  But, all that aside, I had a great time with some fabulous food, great hospitality, and lots of good conversation about technology! 

 

Starting off the new year, I am going to try and get some posts out before I head out to London and Paris in a couple of weeks.  I've got a post that I'll put up tonight along with this one related to the business rules engine in BizTalk.  I'll also be posting some items on workflow and some sample activities that will hopefully prove helpful in showing off features. 

 

 

For me, Tech Ed 2005 was a great experience.  I got to spend some great time with several of the guys from Pluralsight and enjoyed presenting both my cabana session on orchestration port bindings in BizTalk and the instructor led lab on the business rule engine. 

 

For those that asked, the lab manual and starter solutions are here.  I'll work on getting the finished solutions loaded here soon as well, but most of the work is in the business rule creation anyway and that is covered in the lab manual. 

 

Also, I have uploaded the solution I used in my cabana talk so people can take a look and get a sense of the different binding and correlation options available when using orchestration ports.  I've included information describing the solution which includes direct, dynamic, and correlated ports as well as role links.  The solutions is not a real world scenario, but shows off the different options for binding ports. 

 

Enjoy the samples and I hope they are helpful!

I've finished up a short round of travel starting with my trip to Omaha for day 2 of the DevCon.  DevCon was fun and I think people enjoyed the information on Unit Testing.  The unit testing framework in VS 2005 is definitely an improvement over NUnit not only for the integration into the development environment and the team system environment, but also because of some of the cool test generation features.  Not only can the tool generate unit tests for any class in your project and allow you to rerun the tool to generate tests for new methods, but it also creates tests for private methods using some cool reflection. 

 

For those of you that attended and wanted slides, they are available here. 

 

 

I've got a couple of fun events coming up in the next month that I hope people will be able to join in on.  At the end of May, I'm going to be speaking at DevCon 2005 which is a central region developers' conference focused on Visual Studio 2005.  Topics include the new Visual Studio Team System, ASP.Net, Smart Client application development and SQL Server 2005 for developers.

I'll be presenting in Minneapolis (June 1) and Omaha (June 2) on the Unit Testing, Code Coverage and Code Analysis features of Team System. 

 

Check out the link below for more details:

 

The next week I'll be traveling to what I hope is SUNNY, Orlando, Florida to lead a lab on Developing Agile .Net Applications Using the Microsoft Business Rule Engine.  Plan on attending the lab if you want to find out how to leverage this powerful tool in your .Net and BizTalk solutions.  I'll be covering everything from simple rule concepts to get you started as well as some advanced topics to really make it worth while. 

 

I'll also be doing a cabana session on using ports in orchestrations where we'll talk about all of the various binding options and their tradeoffs and how the various direct binding methods work.  Stop by and chat, this should be a fun interactive session with lots of good conversation, but that will only happen if people attend and speak up! 

 

Just a note, the last time I checked, the session content on the Tech Ed site was incorrect for the lab but should be getting updated soon.  Just do a search on my name and you should find the Business Rules lab. If you get some other lab, try back in a few days.