All posts by : Hugo Rodger-Brown

1 of 52 | Concurrent connections when consuming web services - Think I may have mentioned this before - but check out this post from Darren Jefford re. the low-level throttling of web requests when consuming web services from BizTalk....

2 of 52 | Connected Systems Competition - I would be tempted to enter this contest, but my day-job seems to be taking up too much time :-S. I think that a SOAP receive adapter, for polling web services, would be a good bet for category #14?On the subject of the day-job, I obviously haven't posted for a while, and that's largely 'cos I'm so busy. I've spent the last month working at the commercial end of the business, spending 8 hours a day in meetings, and very little time at the sharp-end. I will, however, endeavour to resume posting when (/if) things calm down, as we're working with some pretty cool stuff, and the CSF is part of our roadmap....

3 of 52 | Hacking files in BizTalk - The previous post on Sql debatching mentioned 'hacking' auto-generated files, something that may alarm some people (though not many, if my experience of developers is anything to go by.)Another example of this is the extraction of primitive values from auto-generated schemas, specifically (in my case) consumed web service responses. As an example, say that you consume a web service that returns a single value (acknowledgement id, boolean flag indicating that an update went through, you know the sort of thing.) Because these values are contained within the auto-generated reference.xsd files they are neither promoted (in fact they couldn't be promoted, as only passthru pipelines are supported......

4 of 52 | MSFT -= vapourware - Interesting quote from Rich Turner's blog today:"Microsoft explicitly does not claim to have a SOA. We do not subscribe to the notions of SOA and do not refer to any of our products as SOA. We do strongly subscribe to the notions of SO as abstract guidance and goals for building distributed systems. We have a broad range of powerful products, technologies and services which can be used to construct sophisticated, powerful, efficient solutions ... but we don't have a SOA because we don't believe such a thing exists, and if it is, its too poorly defined for us to adopt."...

5 of 52 | Services and Indigo blog - Just discovered Rich Turner's blog on all things Indigo, including an excellent discussion on the ESB, SOA, ... landscape. Well worth reading....

6 of 52 | Unit testing and data access - Something that has come up in conversation recently wrt unit testing is the subject of how to unit test complex code fragments that use data persistence code, without having to interfere with source databases / reset data etc. It would be great to be able to test the code with 'static' data that is known to be correct (or incorrect if testing exceptions) that passes through the DAL, but does not require 'real' data access (e.g. you might want to unit test a business component method that internally calls the GetMyObject() method).My current DAL technique of choice turns out to have a nice side effect in making this possible. I tend to start development by creating an abstract data layer wit......

7 of 52 | Welcome back - First post in nine months, and very little to report. BizTalk has gone from 2004 to 2006, Windows Workflow Foundation is nearly upon us, and everyone's talking about Web 2.0, whatever that may be. All of which has passed me by, as I've spent most of the last nine months in meetings, fighting fires, and generally trying to keep on top of my undiminishing workload.I'm hoping to restart posting over the next few weeks so hopefully something more useful will be appearing here soon....

8 of 52 | Which tool for the job? - BizTalk, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation (Indigo), Connected Services Framework... enough already. We've got the message that software systems are now all about knitting together web services and managing workflow, but how many different frameworks and tools do we need to do all this stuff?...

9 of 52 | XML Explicit and SQL receive adapter - Following on from my theme of 'hacking' around the limitations of the various wizards / auto-generated artefacts in BizTalk, here's an excellent posting on how to consume xml produced from SQL Server using XML EXPLICIT rather than XML AUTO.10:22 AM 3/31/2005...

10 of 52 | Concurrent connections when consuming web services - Think I may have mentioned this before - but check out this post from Darren Jefford re. the low-level throttling of web requests when consuming web services from BizTalk....

11 of 52 | Connected Systems Competition - I would be tempted to enter this contest, but my day-job seems to be taking up too much time :-S. I think that a SOAP receive adapter, for polling web services, would be a good bet for category #14? On the subject of the day-job, I obviously haven't posted for a while, and that's largely 'cos I'm so busy. I've spent the last month working at the commercial end of the business, spending 8 hours a...

12 of 52 | Debatching Sql receive adapter resultsets - I spent Friday with a client advising them on some basic design principles, specifically around the use of the Sql receive adapter. It was a fairly simple scenario - extracting data from a SQL Server database, then processing the output messages with some very simple orchestrations. It seemed fairly obvious to me that the easiest way to process the data was to split the output from the receive ...

13 of 52 | Hacking files in BizTalk - The previous post on Sql debatching mentioned 'hacking' auto-generated files, something that may alarm some people (though not many, if my experience of developers is anything to go by.) Another example of this is the extraction of primitive values from auto-generated schemas, specifically (in my case) consumed web service responses. As an example, say that you consume a web service that returns...

14 of 52 | MSFT -= vapourware - Interesting quote from Rich Turner's blog today: "Microsoft explicitly does not claim to have a SOA. We do not subscribe to the notions of SOA and do not refer to any of our products as SOA. We do strongly subscribe to the notions of SO as abstract guidance and goals for building distributed systems. We have a broad range of powerful products, technologies and services which can be used to ...

15 of 52 | One more thing - When using the Sql adapter to receive batches of data, a couple of handy hints: 1. Use a stored procedure. It allows you more control and security, and abstracts the underlying table structure. 2. Always add a parameter that allows you to restrict the size of the output (using SET ROWCOUNT). This allows you to control the flow of input messages - if there's a chance that your sproc is going to ...

16 of 52 | Services and Indigo blog - Just discovered Rich Turner's blog on all things Indigo, including an excellent discussion on the ESB, SOA, ... landscape. Well worth reading....

17 of 52 | Welcome back - First post in nine months, and very little to report. BizTalk has gone from 2004 to 2006, Windows Workflow Foundation is nearly upon us, and everyone's talking about Web 2.0, whatever that may be. All of which has passed me by, as I've spent most of the last nine months in meetings, fighting fires, and generally trying to keep on top of my undiminishing workload. I'm hoping to restart posting ...

18 of 52 | Which tool for the job? - BizTalk, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation (Indigo), Connected Services Framework... enough already. We've got the message that software systems are now all about knitting together web services and managing workflow, but how many different frameworks and tools do we need to do all this stuff?...

19 of 52 | XML Explicit and SQL receive adapter - Following on from my theme of 'hacking' around the limitations of the various wizards / auto-generated artefacts in BizTalk, here's an excellent posting on how to consume xml produced from SQL Server using XML EXPLICIT rather than XML AUTO.10:22 AM 3/31/2005...

20 of 52 | Concurrent connections when consuming web services - Think I may have mentioned this before - but check out this post from Darren Jefford re. the low-level throttling of web requests when consuming web services from BizTalk....

21 of 52 | Debatching Sql receive adapter resultsets - I spent Friday with a client advising them on some basic design principles, specifically around the use of the Sql receive adapter. It was a fairly simple scenario - extracting data from a SQL Server database, then processing the output messages with some very simple orchestrations. It seemed fairly obvious to me that the easiest way to process the data was to split the output from the receive ...

22 of 52 | Hacking files in BizTalk - The previous post on Sql debatching mentioned 'hacking' auto-generated files, something that may alarm some people (though not many, if my experience of developers is anything to go by.) Another example of this is the extraction of primitive values from auto-generated schemas, specifically (in my case) consumed web service responses. As an example, say that you consume a web service that returns...

23 of 52 | One more thing - When using the Sql adapter to receive batches of data, a couple of handy hints: 1. Use a stored procedure. It allows you more control and security, and abstracts the underlying table structure. 2. Always add a parameter that allows you to restrict the size of the output (using SET ROWCOUNT). This allows you to control the flow of input messages - if there's a chance that your sproc is going to ...

24 of 52 | XML Explicit and SQL receive adapter - Following on from my theme of 'hacking' around the limitations of the various wizards / auto-generated artefacts in BizTalk, here's an excellent posting on how to consume xml produced from SQL Server using XML EXPLICIT rather than XML AUTO.10:22 AM 3/31/2005...

25 of 52 | Concurrent connections when consuming web services - Think I may have mentioned this before - but check out this post from Darren Jefford re. the low-level throttling of web requests when consuming web services from BizTalk....

26 of 52 | Connected Systems Competition - I would be tempted to enter this contest, but my day-job seems to be taking up too much time :-S. I think that a SOAP receive adapter, for polling web services, would be a good bet for category #14? On the subject of the day-job, I obviously haven't posted for a while, and that's largely 'cos I'm so busy. I've spent the last month working at the commercial end of the business, spending 8 hours a...

27 of 52 | Debatching Sql receive adapter resultsets - I spent Friday with a client advising them on some basic design principles, specifically around the use of the Sql receive adapter. It was a fairly simple scenario - extracting data from a SQL Server database, then processing the output messages with some very simple orchestrations. It seemed fairly obvious to me that the easiest way to process the data was to split the output from the receive ...

28 of 52 | Hacking files in BizTalk - The previous post on Sql debatching mentioned 'hacking' auto-generated files, something that may alarm some people (though not many, if my experience of developers is anything to go by.) Another example of this is the extraction of primitive values from auto-generated schemas, specifically (in my case) consumed web service responses. As an example, say that you consume a web service that returns...

29 of 52 | MSFT -= vapourware - Interesting quote from Rich Turner's blog today: "Microsoft explicitly does not claim to have a SOA. We do not subscribe to the notions of SOA and do not refer to any of our products as SOA. We do strongly subscribe to the notions of SO as abstract guidance and goals for building distributed systems. We have a broad range of powerful products, technologies and services which can be used to ...

30 of 52 | One more thing - When using the Sql adapter to receive batches of data, a couple of handy hints: 1. Use a stored procedure. It allows you more control and security, and abstracts the underlying table structure. 2. Always add a parameter that allows you to restrict the size of the output (using SET ROWCOUNT). This allows you to control the flow of input messages - if there's a chance that your sproc is going to ...

31 of 52 | Services and Indigo blog - Just discovered Rich Turner's blog on all things Indigo, including an excellent discussion on the ESB, SOA, ... landscape. Well worth reading....

32 of 52 | Welcome back - First post in nine months, and very little to report. BizTalk has gone from 2004 to 2006, Windows Workflow Foundation is nearly upon us, and everyone's talking about Web 2.0, whatever that may be. All of which has passed me by, as I've spent most of the last nine months in meetings, fighting fires, and generally trying to keep on top of my undiminishing workload. I'm hoping to restart posting ...

33 of 52 | Which tool for the job? - BizTalk, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation (Indigo), Connected Services Framework... enough already. We've got the message that software systems are now all about knitting together web services and managing workflow, but how many different frameworks and tools do we need to do all this stuff?...

34 of 52 | XML Explicit and SQL receive adapter - Following on from my theme of 'hacking' around the limitations of the various wizards / auto-generated artefacts in BizTalk, here's an excellent posting on how to consume xml produced from SQL Server using XML EXPLICIT rather than XML AUTO.10:22 AM 3/31/2005...

35 of 52 | Concurrent connections when consuming web services - Think I may have mentioned this before - but check out this post from Darren Jefford re. the low-level throttling of web requests when consuming web services from BizTalk....

36 of 52 | Connected Systems Competition - I would be tempted to enter this contest, but my day-job seems to be taking up too much time :-S. I think that a SOAP receive adapter, for polling web services, would be a good bet for category #14? On the subject of the day-job, I obviously haven't posted for a while, and that's largely 'cos I'm so busy. I've spent the last month working at the commercial end of the business, spending 8 hours a...

37 of 52 | Debatching Sql receive adapter resultsets - I spent Friday with a client advising them on some basic design principles, specifically around the use of the Sql receive adapter. It was a fairly simple scenario - extracting data from a SQL Server database, then processing the output messages with some very simple orchestrations. It seemed fairly obvious to me that the easiest way to process the data was to split the output from the receive ...

38 of 52 | Hacking files in BizTalk - The previous post on Sql debatching mentioned 'hacking' auto-generated files, something that may alarm some people (though not many, if my experience of developers is anything to go by.) Another example of this is the extraction of primitive values from auto-generated schemas, specifically (in my case) consumed web service responses. As an example, say that you consume a web service that returns...

39 of 52 | MSFT -= vapourware - Interesting quote from Rich Turner's blog today: "Microsoft explicitly does not claim to have a SOA. We do not subscribe to the notions of SOA and do not refer to any of our products as SOA. We do strongly subscribe to the notions of SO as abstract guidance and goals for building distributed systems. We have a broad range of powerful products, technologies and services which can be used to ...

40 of 52 | One more thing - When using the Sql adapter to receive batches of data, a couple of handy hints: 1. Use a stored procedure. It allows you more control and security, and abstracts the underlying table structure. 2. Always add a parameter that allows you to restrict the size of the output (using SET ROWCOUNT). This allows you to control the flow of input messages - if there's a chance that your sproc is going to ...

41 of 52 | Services and Indigo blog - Just discovered Rich Turner's blog on all things Indigo, including an excellent discussion on the ESB, SOA, ... landscape. Well worth reading....

42 of 52 | Welcome back - First post in nine months, and very little to report. BizTalk has gone from 2004 to 2006, Windows Workflow Foundation is nearly upon us, and everyone's talking about Web 2.0, whatever that may be. All of which has passed me by, as I've spent most of the last nine months in meetings, fighting fires, and generally trying to keep on top of my undiminishing workload. I'm hoping to restart posting ...

43 of 52 | Which tool for the job? - BizTalk, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation (Indigo), Connected Services Framework... enough already. We've got the message that software systems are now all about knitting together web services and managing workflow, but how many different frameworks and tools do we need to do all this stuff?...

44 of 52 | XML Explicit and SQL receive adapter - Following on from my theme of 'hacking' around the limitations of the various wizards / auto-generated artefacts in BizTalk, here's an excellent posting on how to consume xml produced from SQL Server using XML EXPLICIT rather than XML AUTO.10:22 AM 3/31/2005...

45 of 52 | Which tool for the job? - BizTalk, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation (Indigo), Connected Services Framework... enough already. We've got the message that software systems are now all about knitting together web services and managing workflow, but how many different frameworks and tools do we need to do all this stuff?...

46 of 52 | Welcome back - First post in nine months, and very little to report. BizTalk has gone from 2004 to 2006, Windows Workflow Foundation is nearly upon us, and everyone's talking about Web 2.0, whatever that may be. All of which has passed me by, as I've spent most of the last nine months in meetings, fighting fires, and generally trying to keep on top of my undiminishing workload. I'm hoping to restart posting...

47 of 52 | Connected Systems Competition - I would be tempted to enter this contest, but my day-job seems to be taking up too much time :-S. I think that a SOAP receive adapter, for polling web services, would be a good bet for category #14?On the subject of the day-job, I obviously haven`t posted for a while, and that`s largely `cos I`m so busy. I`ve spent the last month working at the commercial end of the business, spending 8 hours a day in meetings, and very little time at the sharp-end. I will, however, endeavour to resume posting when (/if) things calm down, as we`re working with some pretty cool stuff, and the CSF is part of our roadmap....

48 of 52 | MSFT -= vapourware - Interesting quote from Rich Turner`s blog today:"Microsoft explicitly does not claim to have a SOA. We do not subscribe to the notions of SOA and do not refer to any of our products as SOA. We do strongly subscribe to the notions of SO as abstract guidance and goals for building distributed systems. We have a broad range of powerful products, technologies and services which can be used to construct sophisticated, powerful, efficient solutions ... but we don`t have a SOA because we don`t believe such a thing exists, and if it is, its too poorly defined for us to adopt."...

49 of 52 | Services and Indigo blog - Just discovered Rich Turner`s blog on all things Indigo, including an excellent discussion on the ESB, SOA, ... landscape. Well worth reading....

50 of 52 | Connected Systems Competition - I would be tempted to enter this contest, but my day-job seems to be taking up too much time :-S. I think that a SOAP receive adapter, for polling web services, would be a good bet for category #14On the subject of the day-job, I obviously haven`t posted for a while, and that`s largely `cos I`m so busy. I`ve spent the last month working at the commercial end of the business, spending 8 hours a day in meetings, and very little time at the sharp-end. I will, however, endeavour to resume posting when (/if) things calm down, as we`re working with some pretty cool stuff, and the CSF is part of our roadmap....