Dan Rosanova

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 there a great deal information about all these technologies, but that grouping them makes sense because these technologies all work in a similar space and have conceptual continuity across them.   WCF and BizTalk or AppFabric and BizTalk have much in common. They are certainly different tools ... (more)

HPC 2008 R2 - Supercomputing for the Masses

I've been working on Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 for nearly six months now and I've decided it is time to start posting some of my thoughts and discoveries. Today I feel inspired to write about the Windows 7 capabilities of the platform. Motivation I recently modified a BizTalk solution that had been largely functioning as a grid computing platform to start using HPC 2008 R2. The hardware this system ran on is dated at this point, but the solution is CPU intensive (extremely) and even older hardware can still crunch numbers quite well. Moreover part of the move to HPC was becaus... (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)

Going Global – BizTalk in Global Deployments

I was recently approached by a client about what options they had for configuring BizTalk across their global enterprise. They really wanted to avoid idle servers and spread their processing load over their global enterprise as much as possible. They also wanted to have failover capabilities in case they lost their primary datacenter. I thought a lot about this and had some ideas, but it was immediately clear to me that ultimately SQL Server is the critical point of failure in a BizTalk deployment. I've used a few approaches in the past to address this, such as the typical Log S... (more)

Transactions in the WCF SQL Adapter

I was reading today a great blog entry by the immensely knowledgeable Richard Seroter about debatching inbound messages from biztalk wcf-sql adapter and was inspired to write some of my own musings on this great new adapter. Today will be transaction scopes.   The WCF SQL adapter allows you to choose to use the "Ambient" transaction or a different one when communicating with the Message Box. This means the adapter can enlist its communication with the Message Box (i.e. submission to BizTalk) in the same DTC as the read from the SQL database where the receive is happening. The... (more)