Spikes – Connected Systems

Windows 7 is officially out, so let’s get our apps up to speed: if you want jump lists, tabbed thumbnails, Sensor APIs, and other geeky stuff like that in your app too, get the Windows Windows® API Code Pack for the Microsoft® .NET Framework.

And yes, I know. Microsoft will never ever be good at naming things…

I often get asked what the major reasons would be for upgrading a BizTalk 2006 R2 environment to BizTalk Server 2009.

First of all, the upgrade process is reasonably straightforward (here is a quick walkthrough by Nick Heppleston, and here you can download the official Microsoft documentation), but the main answer to the question is of course one of value. BizTalk 2009 offers significant improvements that add additional value:

Increased developer team productivity

BizTalk Server 2009 is capable of using the latest versions of all of the foundations it is built upon. That means that all of the benefits of these foundations are now also available to BizTalk developers:

• Supports Visual Studio 2008, so developers no longer need to maintain a Visual Studio 2005 environment on their machines just for BizTalk development
• Support for .NET Framework 3.5
• Can use SQL Server 2008 as it’s underlying database server
• Fully integrates with Team Foundation Server
• Property pages for BizTalk artifacts are integrated into Project Designer tabs.
• Migrating projects created for previous versions of BizTalk Server is handled by the Visual Studio project update wizard.
• Support for the Microsoft Build Engine (MSBUILD).
• Support for both release and debug builds

Better operational flexibility

BizTalk Server 2009 has better support for the current capabilities of the Windows Server system:

• It can run on Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2
• Running BizTalk in a Hyper-V environment is fully supported
• Support for SQL Server 2008 may mean that you can finally get rid of your last SQL Server 2005 or even SQL Server 2000 machines (or that you at least have the option of doing so when you’re ready)

More functionality

And of course, BizTalk Server 2009 functionality has been expanded on a number of levels. Without attempting to be complete, here is a list of some of the most significant changes and new features:

• EDI Enhancements
  • Dynamic EDI Envelope generation
  • AS2 Enhancements, like Drummond certification for Multiple Attachments (MA) and Filename Preservations (FN) (link may require registration), and automatic message re-send if MDN not received.
• Enhanced support for SWIFT.
• Support for intelligent RFID devices.
• New set of Adapters in the BizTalk LOB Adapter Pack 2.0
• Enhanced functionality in the BizTalk Adapters for Host Systems

Microsoft has released SP1 Beta for BizTalk Server 2006 R2. Next to a lot of fixes, there’s also some new functionality.

Microsoft has released a BizTalk adapter for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.

The adapter enables you to use Dynamics CRM as a send adapter, and discover and use action and entity schemas for your Microsoft Dynamics CRM organizations.

You can use it with BizTalk 2006, 2006R2, and 2009, and both 32 and 64-bit versions are available.

Get the adapter and the documentation here.

A couple of days ago, I got my SQL Azure invitation in the mail.

After logging on to https://sql.azure.com and entering the invitation Code, I was directed to the Projects screen:

The project listed was already created. There appears to be no way to add or delete projects (for now, I guess?). Anyway, clicking on the Manage link of the SDS-only CTP Project, I got to this screen:

Clicking the Connection Strings button, you get a simple list of ADO.NET, ODBC, and OLE DB connection Strings, which you can copy to the clipboard and use in your code.

First of all, let’s create a new database:

And sure enough:

OK, so now let’s try to connect to this database, create a table, and insert some data. I’m going to use good old SQLCMD to show you the connection syntax. You can use SQL Management Studio too, but that requires you to skip the connect screen.

The Username (-U) is composed as “username@servername”, where servername is the short server name that is shown in the Server Administration screen above. For the database server name you have to of course use the FQDN of the server. That can be found in the connection strings and looks something like servername.ctp.database.windows.net.

OK, so that works (or what did you expect).

I’m going to play with it some more now. Expect more news later!