Sergio Del Piccolo's Weblogs

New Blog Site

noreply@blogger.com (Sergio Del Piccolo) — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 09:55:00 +0000

I recently moved to a new blog site. My blog can now be found at http://delpiccolo.com

Please take a minute to update your RRS feed to http://delpiccolo.com/feed/

Come on over!

How to: Reference GAC'd assembly from VS2005

noreply@blogger.com (Sergio Del Piccolo) — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 22:47:00 +0000

The other day I was trying to add a reference to an assembly that was in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) from Visual Studio 2005. I couldn't find the assembly listed in the Add Reference dialog. I noticed that none of the GAC'd assemblies were showing up. So after a little research I found a way to add the reference. Go to the Browse tab and type the file path with assembly version and token in the File name: textbox. As an example, if you want to add a reference to the PIA interop assembly for Word 2003, you type:

C:Windows\assembly\GAC\Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word11.0.0.0__71e9bce111e9429c\Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.dll

K2.Net 2003 Server Evaluation Expired

noreply@blogger.com (Sergio Del Piccolo) — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 06:28:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago while developing a K2.Net 2003 workflow solution the application stopped working. My application kicked off a new process using Visual Studio 2005 web forms.

My web page had a submit button with the following code:
protected void Submit(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
// declare K2 variables
SourceCode.K2ROM.Connection k2Conn = new SourceCode.K2ROM.Connection();
SourceCode.K2ROM.ProcessInstance processInstance;

// instantiate K2 objects
k2Conn.Open(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["K2ServerName"]);
processInstance = k2Conn.CreateProcessInstance("K2ProjectName\\K2ProcessName");

// map the data to the K2 process data fields
processInstance.DataFields["DataFieldName"].Value = textBox1.Text;

// start K2 process and close the connection
k2Conn.StartProcessInstance(processInstance);
k2Conn.Close();
}

The following line threw the error:
processInstance = k2Conn.CreateProcessInstance( "K2ProjectName\\K2ProcessName");

In the Event Log I found the following error:
Event code: 3005
Event message: An unhandled exception has occurred.
Event time: 2006-10-20 10:52:23
Event time (UTC): 2006-10-20 17:52:23
Event ID: 959c2128ccda4635a95e5206eca1bd1b
Event sequence: 13
Event occurrence: 2
Event detail code: 0

Application information:
Application domain: /LM/W3SVC/1/Root/xxxxxxxxxx-8-128061853925301760
Trust level: Full
Application Virtual Path: /xxxxxxxxxxxx
Application Path: ...\Website\MyWebsiteMachine name: k2server

Process information:
Process ID: 3752
Process name: w3wp.exe
Account name: k2server\DEVsvcWssAppPool

Exception information:
Exception type: Exception
Exception message: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.

Request information:
Request URL: http://k2server/.../MyPage.aspx
Request path: /.../MyPage.aspx

User host address: xxx.xxx.xx.xxx
User: k2server\Administrator
Is authenticated: True
Authentication Type: NTLM
Thread account name: k2server\DEVsvcWssAppPool

Thread information:
Thread ID: 1
Thread account name: k2server\DEVsvcWssAppPool
Is impersonating: False
Stack trace: at Client.Throw(String s, Exception e)
at Client.InternalCall(UInt32 sock, ArchiveX ar, Int32 hdr)
at SourceCode.K2ROM.Connection.CreateProcessInstance(String ProcName, Int32 Version)
at SourceCode.K2ROM.Connection.CreateProcessInstance(String ProcName)
at IRWorkflow.IREnterNew.Submit(Object sender, EventArgs e) in ...\Website\MyWebsite\MyPage.aspx.cs:line 40
at System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.OnClick(EventArgs e)
at System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.RaisePostBackEvent(String eventArgument)
at System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.System.Web.UI.IPostBackEventHandler.RaisePostBackEvent(String eventArgument)
at System.Web.UI.Page.RaisePostBackEvent(IPostBackEventHandler sourceControl, String eventArgument)
at System.Web.UI.Page.RaisePostBackEvent(NameValueCollection postData)
at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint)

Custom event details:

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

At first I thought that I had some sort of security/permission issue. After checking all the security/permission configuration I decided to start the K2.Net Console Server and try again. As the K2.Net Server started I noticed the following line in the console:

"K2.net Evaluation Version has expired on 20 Oct 06"

After contacting K2 and getting an extension on the evaluation version the error was resolved.

K2.Net Service Pack 4 Release

noreply@blogger.com (Sergio Del Piccolo) — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 23:52:00 +0000

SourceCode released service pack 4 for their K2.Net 2003 workflow product around October 10th 2006. I spent some time looking for the list of enhancements and found them contained in the Bill of Materials (BOM) PDF file downloaded with the service pack. The following enhancements were made:

K2.net Server

An extensive Logging Framework that records and stores every K2.net Server event has been added. The log is stored in the [Drive]\Program Files\K2.net 2003\Bin directory. Log settings are kept in the Logger.config configuration file.
The Exception Messaging fomat has been altered to include the error number. Be aware that this can affect existing applications when installing the new service pack.
Server Performance Monitoring has been added to assist system administrators manage server infrastructure and to detect bottle necks. The following counters were added:

K2.net Processes
K2.net Worklist Items
K2.net Worklists
Process Memory Usage
Process Modules Loaded
Process Thread Counts
TCP Information

Process migration tools allowing for the migration of processes accross servers.

K2.net Studio

Various bug fixes to the Code Editor and improvements including intellisense upgrades.
Code access to write to the Logging Framework log file mentioned above, e.g. K2.ProcessInstance.Logger.LogDebugMessage("Event Name", "Message");

.Net Framework 2.0 Support

An enhancement to the support provided by Service Pack 3. There are some Knowledge Base articles available to assist in setting up a .Net Framework 2.0 project:

Support for Visual Studio 2005.

K2.net 2003 Tasklist WebPart

Enhancements regarding the reference to the K2.net 2003 Server from Microsoft Share Point:

Multiple K2.net 2003 Servers can be referenced - enter the server names with semi-colon delimeters.
When referencing the server include the server name and port (default of 5252 will be used if a port has not been entered).

E.g. k2server1:1234;k2server2:4567;k2server3:5252

Look out for my next K2 post on using the Logging Framework.

Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference - Day 4

noreply@blogger.com (Sergio Del Piccolo) — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 04:41:00 +0000

Day 4 at the conference and there are some bleary eyed attendees. While the conference has been great so far, I think people are tired and ready to go home. Today's presentations were all good in my opinion:

Aaron Skonnard, Cofounder, Pluralsight
Gruia Pitigoi-Aron, Microsoft
BizTalk Web Services: The Next Generation

Aaron pointed out that Service Orientation defines an architectural paradigm for software federation, with federation being the unification of self-governing entities.

SOA is focused on unifying autonomous services, providing architectural governance, reducing dependencies and minimizing assumptions.
SOA tenets help achieve loose coupling.
Benefits of SOA are :

Cost reductions, increased agility
Business & software alignment
Technology freedom
Independent evolution
Longer-term reuse

Web Services provide a way to implement the SO design principles:

XML reduces format complexities
WS-* reduces transport complexities

Web Services is not a silver bullet

Not everything can use XML, SOAP, WS-*
Can't throw away existing investments
Many web service stacks only support HTTP

SOA must plan for disagreement on the following fronts

Transport/application adapters
Message format translators
Message schema transformations

Combining BizTalk Server 2006 with web services provides the complete solution:

BTS fills various messaging integration gaps
BTS embraces we technologies

BTS 2006 R2 ship with WCF adapters

New adapters for each mainstream binding
A WCF-Custom adapter for extensibility
WCF Adapters use cases

Transaction message send/receive
Using WS-* headers for routing/processing
Using custom bindings (binding elements)
Numerous security scenarios
In-proc hosting of non-HTTP endpoints

Gruia then demonstrated using the WCF adapters to enable transactions and showed some security features using BizTalk Server, including single sign-on capability.

Aaron's final point was that BTS 2006 R2 will provide full WS-* support, custom bindings, flexible hosting & communications.

Aaron Skonnard, Cofounder, Pluralsight
Gruia Pitigoi-Aron, Microsoft
BizTalk WCF Adapters: In-Depth

In this session Aaron and Gruia continued showing demos of the new WCF Adapters. There were no slides only the a dive into some real code (I found this refreshing).

The first demonstration showed a client sending a message to BTS through a web service with option to select separate XML versions for the message structure. BizTalk then routed the message to separate versions of the backend application. Version 1 used transport security (which resulted in a smaller message) and version 2 used message security. The BizTalk receive location was a WCF-NetTcp adapter using a custom pipeline to add a custom header to the message header that contains the version (it can also look for differences in actions, namespace, etc). The pipeline promotes the value (needs a property schema), the send port filters on the custom operation and then routes it to the service depending on the version number. It provided a model for versioning using web services.

The second demonstration showed how to build a custom WCF adapter. The binding tab on the adapter allows to pick different binding types (you can install other bindings or even create a custom binding element).

Don Smith, Product Manager, Patterns & Practices, Microsoft
Web Services Software Factory

Don started by speaking about how software factories help you build a specific kind of application (smart client, service, etc). He then went on to speak about the Software Factory that can be downloaded from the Patterns and Practices website. He mentioned that the software factory incorporates a variety of guidance content types and form factors:

Architecture & design guidance, patterns, and how-to's (readable/printable)
Reference implementations (executable) - sample applications
Application blocks (reusable)
Guidance packages (actionable)

Guidance packages provided are:

Open - documentation describes manual and automated tasks, the result of the automation is exposed
Configurable - key configuration settings can be captured within Visual Studios, automated guidance is defined using XML
Extensible - guidance can be tailored to meet specific requirements
Verifiable - generated code can be verified for compliance within a standard

Don demonstrated the Software Factory by setting up a wine rating service for a winery.

The benefits of using the factory are:

Increased quality
Better consistency of projects/services
Better performance of developer

According to Don the next version of the Software Factory with WCF support is set to be released in December 2006. It will include:

Versioning
ASMX/WCF Interop
WF
Message validation
Security

Links:
Blog: Don Smith
Patterns & Practices
Web Service Software Factory
Service Factory Community Workspace
The LINQ Project

Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference - Day 3

noreply@blogger.com (Sergio Del Piccolo) — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 18:34:00 +0000

It's day 3 at the conference and the presentations were good, especially the one by Chandramouli Venkatesh on the Biztalk Server 2006 R2 Adapter Framework. It provided some interesting insight into the upcoming release slated for the 1^st quarter of 2007. It was mentioned that beta 1 should be out by the end of the year.

Paul Andrew, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft
Windows Workflow Foundation: Creating Custom Activities for Workflows

The level of the presentation was at an introductory level, covering topics from “What is workflow” to speaking about workflow runtime, and the Base Activity Library (BAL). I’ve listed some points that Paul mentioned:

A workflow is a software implementation of business process or business logic.
Workflows are transparent, flexible and extensible.
WF is not for end users or business people but for developers. It does not have any administration tools or a reporting interface and provides no direct business value without development.
WF is a framework for building workflow-enabled applications.
Workflows are modeled as a tree of activities.
Custom application logic should be modeled using activities
Activities are all of the steps within a workflow or reusable components for composing workflows. He had a good analogy where he compared workflows to UI forms and controls, where Workflows are like Forms and Activities like Controls.
Build custom activities when they are composite activities (multiple basic activities merged into one activity), it is anticipated that they will be reused or there is a high level of business logic within one

The demo was a simple console workflow that showed how to build custom activities. Paul added a Validator and a Designer to the activity. What I had not seen before was the effect of the designer which changed the way that the workflow was presented in the Visual Studio workflow designer. It is a great way to develop a set of activities that are going to be used by your organization and providing a different look for them. In fact you can go as far as categorizing activities by their function and giving a different look to each one, similar to the way that functoids are colour coded in BizTalk. Different information can be added to the activity as well.

Blog: Paul Andrew

Eilene Hao, Program Manager, Office Shared Services, Microsoft
Windows Workflow Foundation: Developing Office 2007 Workflows in Visual Studio 2005

Eilene’s presentation was mostly a walkthrough demonstration of how to build a workflow for SharePoint using Visual Studio and InfoPath 2007.

Recommended downloads for developing workflows:

The five steps used to build these workflows are:

Model workflow in Visual Studio
Design InfoPath forms
Bind form data & code logic
Deploy the workflow
Debug on running server

Her development recommendation was that to develop on the server, either virtual machine environment or on an actual server box.

Steve Swartz, Architect, Connected Systems Division, Microsoft
Clemens Vasters, Program Manager, Connected Systems Division, Microsoft
Presentation

This was the least beneficial presentation that I have attended so far. This is by no means a reference on the presentation or the presenters; in fact they managed to keep me interested even though I am in not interested in presentation much. That being said, my notes are frugal at best. They spoke mostly about design patterns for rich clients, and covered the following patterns in more detail:

There main objectives for the presentation were:

Connected client technologies open opportunities
Have more options that you probably take advantage of
Choose the right option for each task

Chandramouli Venkatesh, Group Manager, Connected Systems Division, Microsoft
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Adapter Framework - Walkthrough

This was, in my opinion, the best presentation yet. Chandramouli provided a walkthrough of the Adapter Framework (AF). The main points were that there is no unified adapter development framework for .Net and that adapters today are built to be specific to each of the consuming hosts like BTS, MIIS.

The goal of the AF is to enable easy development of high quality, metadata driven, host-agnostic, custom adpapters to LOBs. The idea is for them to extend WCF and to make the adapters consumption exactly same as other WCF adapters.

The benefits will be that it will:

Enable reaching multiple programming models e.g. ADO.net, WCF channel, etc.
Enable exposing a web service face to the system being adapted automatically (via adapter host)
WCF channel architecture extensibility points enable easy customization of adapter behaviors
Development tools

Chandramouli went on to demonstrate using the SAP adapter from Visual Studio 2005 and from a BizTalk Orchestration. He also demonstrated using the “.Net 3.0 Adapter Development Wizard” to develop a custom adapter. Note: he mentioned that the wizard name may still change prior to release.

Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference - Day 2

noreply@blogger.com (Sergio Del Piccolo) — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 00:24:00 +0000

Today is day 2 of the conference, which turned out to be better than yesterday. The presentations were great from my point of view. I attended the following four presentations:

Craig McMurty, Technical Evangelist, Developer & Platform Evangelism, Microsoft
Windows Communication Foundation: Extensibility in the WCF Service Oriented Development Platform

Craig's presentation was the best of the day in my opinion. He made the point that WCF is a Software Factory for Communication. He went on to explain the WCF messaging process listing the following activities which can be customized:

WSDL exporter
Parameter Inspector
Message Formatter
Message Inspector
Encoders
Channels
Dispatcher
Message Inspector
Operation Selector
Message Formater
Parameter Inspector
Operation Invoker

He went to demonstrate developing a custom Message Formatter and Channel.

Steve Swartz, Architect, Connected Systems Division, Microsoft
Clemens Vasters, Program Manager, Connected Systems Division, Microsoft
Connected Systems on Windows: An Introduction

This presentation was a historic look of the evolution of the application server products starting in 1996 with the release of the following products: Windows NT, Microsoft Transaction Server 1.0, ASP 1.0, InterDev 1.0, Visual C++ 5.0, Visual J++ 1.0, Visual Basic 5.0, IIS 3.0, SNA Server 3.0, ADO 1.0, VBScript.

Clemens did a short demonstration of MTS & IIS 3.0.

The presentation went on to address the following topics:

The Client/Server Wave, followed by the N-Tier Wave to the current Federated Systems Wave (SOA).
Application Services Evolution (MTS, COM+, Enterprise Services and WCF)
Communication Technologies Evolution
Security & Identity Services Evolution (Workgroup, Enterprise, Customers & Partners)

This was followed by brief introductions of Windows CardSpace and WF.

Lee Graber, Developer Lead, BizTalk Core Engine, Microsoft
Advanced Routing & Correlation with BizTalk Orchestrations

Lee gave a 400 level presentation on the covering:

BizTalk Server Messages and their
Data Storage Model
Activating Subscriptions vs Correlating Subscriptions
Correlation choices
Convoys

After demonstrating a Resequencer Pattern he went on to discuss Zombies (suspended non-resumable instances with reasons "Completed with discarded messages") and how they are usually generated.

Lee provided the following links as BizTalk resources:

Steve Swartz, Architect, Connected Systems Division, Microsoft
Clemens Vasters, Program Manager, Connected Systems Division, Microsoft
Connected Systems On Windows - Logic, Rules, and Workflows

The main topic of the presentation was interconnected architectural patterns that can be used to develop application solutions:

Direct connection pattern or also know as N-Tier which is has direct method calls and is highly coupled.
Indirect connection pattern which has firm decoupling and can have reliable messaging through thread transaction, and example being queues.
One to many/end to end/subscription pattern which is flexible about number of entities that respond to an event and is the least coupled.

Steve went on to mention that the strategy is to have WCF support all types of patterns and that they there can be a composition of all patterns within applications if needed.
The example mentioned being Outlook:

Contacts, Notes (n-tier)
Outbox, Task (queue)
Inbox, Reminders (pub/sub)

The other main topic discussed was the move from imperative code to declarative code. The main reason being abstraction and moving logic into configurable metadata makes systems more agile and easier to adjust to changing needs.

There'll be more to come tomorrow...

Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference - Day 1

noreply@blogger.com (Sergio Del Piccolo) — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 23:12:00 +0000

I'm down in Redmond at the Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference. Today was day 1 for most attendees including myself. Yesterday had various partner and panels meeting regarding various topics related to the conference and tools.

I attended the following sessions and listed below is a high level summary of the presentations:

SOA, BPM & Microsoft: A Pragmatic View
David Chappell - David Chappell & Associates

David spoke about vision as being required in the SOA but pragmatism being essential. He outlined the three pragmatic goals which will benefit every organization:
1. Standardizing on SO communication
2. Creating the necessary SO infrastructure
3. Using BPM technologies effectively.

Real World SOA
John deVadoss – Director, Architecture Strategy, Microsoft

John spoke about the real world SOA ROI crisis and being concerned when the “hype cycle” of SOA followed by a backlash against SOA. He’s emphasizing that “the good not be thrown out with the bad.” He made the point of SOA being a style of architecture. He went on to speak about the Expose/Compose/Consume model of SOA.

The Architecture of SOA
John Evdmon – Architect, Architecture Strategy, Microsoft

John spoke about current confusion in the industry of SOA and implementation of SOA, especially using web services. John went on to speak about the myths and facts of SOA as shown below:

Myths	Facts
SOA is a technology	SOA is designed philosophically independent from any product, technology, or industry trend
SOAs require Web Services	May be realized via web services but using web services won't necessarily result in a SOA
SOA is new and revolutionary	EDI, CORBA and DCOM were conceptual examples of SO
SOA ensures alignment of it and business	SOA is not a methodology
A SOA reference architecture reduces implementation of risk	SOAs are like snowflakes - no two are alike
SOA requires a complete technology and business process overhaul	SOA should be incremental and built on your current investments
SOA requires and army of consultants	Tools, not consultants
We need to build a SOA	SOA is a means, not an end
SOAs result in reuse	If reuse happens great - should not be the principle objective

John went on to describe the different perspectives on the Expose/Compose/Consume model of SOA for the following recurring architectural capabilities:

User interaction
Workflows & process
Data
Identity & Access
Messaging & Services

In his conclusion John went on to say that SOA should be a means to an end and that the main objective should be to deliver a solution, not an SOA.
Technical Solution Spaces for BizTalk Server
Oliver Sharp, General Manager BizTalk Server, Connected Systems Division, Microsoft

Oliver spoke about the product roadmap for 2006, 2007 and beyond. He touched briefly on the BizTalk 2006 R2 and how it was addressing needs under the following categories:

People-ready Processes
End-to-end Processes – B2B
End-to-end Processes – RFID

He went on to outline the next version of BizTalk which is currently in a planning stage. Oliver spoke about Model Driven Development and the current themes used to develop the next version. The purpose of a theme is to:

Provide “Magnetic North” to the team
Identify ACID tests for success
Drive the development process

The current themes being:

Mission-critical enterprise
People-ready process
Rich connected application

Oliver also went to speak about the Microsoft approach which includes:

A unified application platform
Spans devices, clients and servers
Delivers as a framework, servers, services, tools and operating systems.

That's pretty much it for today, tomorrow there'll be more. The following links were provided for more information:

Migrating a BizTalk 2004 Solution to 2006

noreply@blogger.com (Sergio Del Piccolo) — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 16:48:00 +0000

We have been developing a large enterprise workflow solution using K2.Net, BizTalk 2004, SQL Server 2000 on a Microsoft.Net 1.1 platform for the last few months. Our development strategy uses Virtual PCs to recreate the customer's environment minimizing deployment risks associated with developing large scale solutions. Our customer recently asked us to upgrade the solution to use BizTalk 2006 with SQL Server 2005 on a Microsoft.Net 2.0 platform. While most migrations require the upgrading of the BizTalk server for which there is quite a bit of documentation (see links below), we decided to create a new Virtual PC with a fresh installation of BizTalk 2006.

After starting up the new VPC and load the solution from source control I checked out the solution (I recommend you label your version of the solution in your source control system to make it easy to roll back should any issues arrise). From here the steps simple enough:

Visual Studio Conversion Wizard

Step one requires running the Visual Studio Conversion Wizard. Open the solution with Visual Studio 2005.
The Visual Studio Conversion Wizard starts up with a "Welcome" screen (click Next)
A "Ready to Convert" screen (click Finish)
I received a couple of warning messages, the first asking if I'd like my database project which uses an OLEDB provider for SQL Server upgraded to use the .Net Managed Provider for SQL Server. I chose Yes.
The second warning message related to Web projects being converted to the new Web Site format. It removed all source control bindings.
The "Conversion Complete" screen with the option to show the conversion report checked (click Close).
The Conversion Report loaded within Visual Studio giving the results of the conversion process.

External Components

Step 2 requires installing the new versions of external components, e.g. Enterprise Library for .Net Framework 2.0 and NUnit 2.2. Update the references in the solution projects and any obsolete method calls.

GAC Build Events

Step 3 involved changing all build events used in project properties to add assemblies to the Global Assembly Cache (GAC). These are used in C# projects that are referenced from BizTalk and as such need to be added to the GAC. This requires a change in syntax as listed below:

Visual Studio 2003:
i. Pre-build: "%VS71COMNTOOLS%vsvars32.bat" && gacutil /u $(TargetName) ii. Post-build: "%VS71COMNTOOLS%vsvars32.bat" && gacutil /i $(TargetPath)

Visual Studio 2005:
i. Pre-build: call "%VS80COMNTOOLS%vsvars32.bat" && gacutil /u $(TargetName)
ii. Post-build: call "%VS80COMNTOOLS%vsvars32.bat" && gacutil /i $(TargetPath)

External Strong Name Keys

Step four required making Visual Studio 2005 use external strong name keys for signing the assemblies (to add assemblies to the GAC they need to be signed with a strong name key). The reason that I wanted to do this was two fold:
- When trying to build the project in VS2005 the following compiler warning appears
  Use command line option '/keyfile' or appropriate project settings instead of 'AssemblyKeyFile'.
- If you use the properties page to sign the assembly by selecting the strong name key it copies the key to your project file. This becomes a maintenance issue if you have multiple projects signed by the same key. You have all of the keys copied to mulitple project folders and duplicated in source control.
Thanks to David Kean's blog on How to make Visual Studio 2005 use external strong name keys that managed to solve these issues. I've listed the steps here on how to do this with one extra step that I was required to take to get my projects to build.
- Open the project file (.csproj) in a text editor.
- In the tag under the tag, enter either an absolute or relative path to the key file, e.g. ..\..\Common\MyKey.snk.
- Save the file and reload the project file in VS2005.
- Right click on the project and select Properties. Select the "Signing" tab and check the "Sign the assembly" checkbox. The dropdown list below should show the path to the file e.g. ..\..\Common\MyKey.snk.
For BizTalk projects, Right click on the project and select Properties. The Property Pages dialog box should appear. Navigate to Assembly under Common Properties and enter the path next to the "Assembly Key File" property. See the diagram below:

Finally

Lastly, change any recommended warning issues that may arise. E.g. when using values from the tab in a configuration file the coding change required is as follows:

Visual Studio 2003
ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["mySetting"]

Visual Studio 2005
Configuration.ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["mySetting"]
Note: You need to add a reference to the System.Configuration.dll.

BizTalk Migration Links

Workflow: WF, MOSS & K2.Net

noreply@blogger.com (Sergio Del Piccolo) — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 06:58:00 +0000

After recently attending a course at the SourceCode head offices in Redmond, I started wondering about the affect that the release of Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) would have on their workflow solution product, K2.Net 2003 and their upcoming release code named "Black Pearl". When would you use K2.Net as opposed to WF and vice versa? Having worked on a couple of workflow solutions in the last few months, one implementing a K2.Net solution, and another a WF solution using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) - which is still in beta version, I have had an opportunity to see both tools in action.

The Tools

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF):
WF is the programming model, engine and tools for quickly building workflow enabled applications. It’s a part of Microsoft .Net 3.0 (previously WinFX). Developers need to design, code and run business process workflows applications using Visual Studio.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS):
MOSS serves as an enterprise collaboration system, allowing for managing content and business processes. It implements WF to facilitate basic content and document approval and provides the host application for WF to run workflows.

K2.Net 2003 & "Black Pearl":
K2.Net is an enterprise workflow platform able to host workflow solutions built on Mircrosoft.Net. It comes with the following tools:
K2.Net 2003 Studio – used to develop the workflow.
K2.Net Workspace – with reporting, task redirection,
K2.Net 2003 Service Manager – with server properties, error handling, user and group permission settings, task redirection, and security settings.

K2.Net “Black Pearl” will be built on .Net 3.0 (including WF) with the development studio being able to plug into the Visual Studio. My understanding is that their development team has been collaborating with the Windows Workflow Foundation and Office 2007 team for a couple of years and it will integrate with SQL Server 2005 and Office 2007. “Black Pearl” will also serve as the host application for WF providing an enterprise workflow solution platform. It’s slated to be released sometime in 2007.

How they fit together

While anything can be built from the ground up, WF provides a foundation for creating workflows. MOSS leverages WF to provide simple workflow scenarios that can be used through its collaboration environment. K2.Net provides a platform of ready made activities and events allowing for rapid workflow development. It has pre-built reporting, management and user workspace modules.

Ultimately the answer comes down to the complexity of the workflow and whether you want to spend time coding the infrastructure or use a ready made enterprise environment and build the workflow.

Blogetiket

noreply@blogger.com (Sergio Del Piccolo) — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 04:56:00 +0000

Hello, uhhh...is anyone out there?

Well, trusting that there is, my aim for this blog will be to post some information that is hopefully worthy of reading by someone - somewhere - sometime.

My first post is about blogging and etiquette, or as I like to call it, Blogetiket! This is something I've thought about quite a bit before starting to blog. There are some interesting posts about blogging etiquette, viz. Etiquette-for-the-Blogging-Nation and Blog Etiquette Introduction. These articles provide a great introduction to proper blog etiquette. With that being said, my five main blogetiket points are:

Don't steal or plagarize, you will only be caught out and it will harm your blogging reputation. There'll be no coming back from that.
When mentioning another blogger's post, make sure to place a link to their blog - they earned the right.
By all means comment on someone's post, have people comment on yours - bloggers want the feedback. If they didn't, they wouldn't have comments available on their posts. Criticize too if you feel it justified, but keep it constructive. That way your comments will have a positive effect and a meaningful dialog can ensue.
There's nothing you can't blog about - to me one of the best things about the web is the freedom from censorship. However, use it wisely, make your point count.
Be honest - be yourself, that's why blogging is around. It's a medium to share your thoughts, knowledge and opinion.

What it comes down to is - treat other bloggers like you want to be treated - be polite and courteous; unless of course, you don't want to be treated that way.

Until next time,
cya!