Dan Rosanova

Madhav Abhyankar has created a Visual Studio solution template that implements the exact recommendations from my book Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns.  This is a great way to save a lot of time on a solution and follow what I believe is a great architecture for BizTalk applications. ... (more)

WCF Basic Http and Impersonation

I've been on a pretty serious WCF kick for the past few months and more and more I love it. I like even more how well BizTalk works with WCF. BizTalk is the application server you normally need to provide yourself to make WCF very useful. In Handling Binary Messages in Orchestrations I had mentioned that I used SQL Reporting Services via Web Services to run reports and do something with the output. As I had been experimenting with the solution I tried using both the SOAP Adapter and the WCF Adapter and found the WCF Adapter to be much more to my liking. Using the WCF Http Basic ... (more)

What’s in a Namespace

SOA & WOA Magazine on Ulitzer Although XML has been around for quite some time many developers still don't know too much about it. Not needing to know too much about it is one of XML's strengths, but cursory knowledge is rapidly becoming mandatory for all developers. This post will discuss some of the details of namespaces in XML. In XML a namespace is just that, a space (or area) identified by a name. When we look at a namespace such as http://novaenterprisesystems.com/schemas/purchaseorder we are not actually identifying a location on the web. Granted it does look like a URL an... (more)

AppFabric CAT Blog Launched

The Windows Server AppFabric Customer Advisory Team Blog was recently launched on MSDN and although I did put off looking at it for a week or two I have to say I really like it. Tim Wieman (who also helped me with Going Global – BizTalk in Global Deployments) pointed me to this new blog that consolidates information from several of the teams at Microsoft including App Fabric, BizTalk, WCF, Entity Framework (and more). At first I was not sure of how this all worked but after a short time at the site Windows Server AppFabric Customer Advisory Team it was clear that not only is ther... (more)

Looping in Business Rules

The BRE is one of the least understood parts of BizTalk server and after teaching Effective BizTalk again last week I was again confronted by why this is. When we first look at BRE one of the things that is not clear is what is meant by the forward chaining nature of a policy. This can be a tough one to get around. The policy is really sort of a graph and that graph has its own memory stack. When the rules that will fire are selected they are placed on the agenda and if they change the memory then all the rules in the policy will evaluate again. This is why there isn't looping th... (more)