“You are making my point!”

Here is a good article covering the subject of creating and configuring a two-node W2K3 cluster on Virtual Server. Due to the limitation of no SCSI support on Virtual PC, this would not work on VPC.

Oh, one other thing. If you are using IE8, make sure you turn on the “Compatibility View” setting when accessing the Virtual Server admin page. Otherwise you will get all kinds of JavaScript errors that virtually renders the admin page useless.

I did a little experiment today with the GlobalTrackingOption switch on BizTalk. If you don’t know what the GlobalTrackingOption is, where to find it, or how to turn it on or off, please read the documentation here.

In any case, I turn off the GlobalTrackingOption on my BizTalk VPC, and observe that my Orchestration Debugger and HAT stop collecting tracking data. Using SQL Profiler with filter set on BizTalkDTADb database as well as BAMPrimaryImport database, I can clearly see that turning on or off GlobaTrackingOption in the BizTalkMgmtDb database, adm_group table, has no impact on the operations on the BAMPrimaryImport database where BAM data is collected. When the option is turned off, for each milestone the timestamps are still being written to the database through BAM stored procedures. On the contrary, in the BizTalkDTADb database, the stored procedures are very busy being executed when the option is turned on, but they completely go silent when the bit is turned off. As consequence, there is no data you can retrieve through HAT or Orchestration Debugger.

The other interesting fact is that the performance counter BizTalk:TDDS is also completely unaffected by the GlobalTrackingOption. Evidently TDDS (Tracking Data Decode Service), aka BAM Event Bus Service does NOT take tracking database operations into consideration. It only concerns with the BAM events.

Dynamics GP (Great Plains) comes with a component called eConnect. It includes BizTalk adapters, schemas, samples and documentations. Check out Wade Wegner’s blog entry.

This is a bit dated, but still very useful. In case you didn’t know, BizTalk can process non-XML data format with no problem. Here is a post from Jon Flanders on how to process binary data inside of orchestration. Instead of using some Pipeline component magic like everyone else would’ve done, he introduced the custom formatter approach that takes your binary serialized object right into orchestration execution, and skips the costly XML serialization of .NET object. It is pretty cool. Check it out!

If you want to expose SAP data to your SharePoint portal, here is a new tool that you should consider adding to your weaponry: BizTalk Server WCF-based SAP Adapter. Check out my MSDN article on this subject. BizTalk Adapter Pack: Connecting LOB Systems (SAP) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.

The following command will move all PDF files in a directory and its sub-directories to a different location:

PS C:\Temp1\gci . –recurse –include *.pdf | move-item –dest c:\Temp2

I just received my new toy yesterday, a brand new ThinkPad 300. I have not been so excited by a new laptop for a long time. The last time I was so anxious getting a new laptop was the Acer Travelmate 100, one the earliest beta Tablet PCs. And let me tell you, a beta it was…

Anyways, in case you didn’t know, ThinkPad X300 is one of the very few laptops in the market today with SSD (Solid State Drive). If you are tired of waiting for the spinning disks or watching the hour glasses, you’d know why I am so happy about this technology finally making its way to the consumer laptop market. I have loaded Vista 64 bit Enterprise on this new baby and it was flying. No more heat wave generated by the fans, no more cluttering noised made by the magnetic disks drives. And most importantly, Vista feels like running on turbo drive. This is how computing experience is supposed to be. I have never experienced such a boost in hardware performance.

The only downside? The drive is only 64 GB and it costs a fortune. I just noticed today that Lenovo starts to offer the 128 GB options on the new X301 model. If the pricing movement of the storage devices in the past 18 months is any indication, larger and more affordable SSD drives will appear in the near future, and become standard configuration on laptops.

LINQ to SQL and ADO.NET are both powerful data access mechanism now available in Visual Studio 2008. If you are confused by the these two methodologies and want to choose one over the other for the project you are working on, here is an excellent blog post to clarify the differences and similarities.

After months of fight with my ISP, I finally got my blog back. For the few lonely souls who read my blog, well, the wait is over……

I came across this article about MinWin. It is a 25MB-foot-print, 100-file Windows kernel. Also check out the lecture video.