Erik Oppedijk

CCR and DSS Toolkit released

2008-10-29T14:45:00Z

Microsoft released a separate toolkit for using the CCR and DSS framework inside your own applications, enabling Concurrent programming inside your regular C# (or VB.NET) application. And managing a directory of services with the DSS framework. So there is no need anymore for using Robotics Studio for these environments.

http://www.microsoft.com/ccrdss/

Get the whitepaper here:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/6/b/56b49917-65e8-494a-bb8c-3d49850daac1/Microsoft%20CCR%20and%20DSS%20Toolkit%202008%20Standard%20Edition%20Datasheet%20EN.pdf

Also read the stories from Siemens and Tyco, Siemens uses the CCR to scan mail (not email) and OCR the results and Tyco using the CCR for a security system. Both with great numbers of messages.

"hosted" BizTalk Workflow Services

2008-07-16T10:40:00Z

The BizTalk Labs have delivered a new part, a hosted Workflow Service, now it is possible to create a workflow and host it in the "cloud". we can use the ISB (Internet Service Bus, instead of Enterprise) to send messages across the internet. Combine this with authentication and authorization and we have a powerfull orchestrator.

Get the BizTalk Services SDK, it will contain a "watchdog" sample workflow, this workflow will ping a website, and will report the status to a chat client (MultiCastSample). To create this, there are some new Activities to use from the Toolbox, e.g. a CloudDelay, a CloudIfElse, etc.

From the workflow.biztalk.net site (after creating some InfoCards for authentication) we can create our own Workflow (by copying the XOML and rules from Visual Studio) into the site. This is our workflowtype, and in the UI from the BizTalk Labs, we can create an instance of our workflow, and we can start the instance. Now the workflow is checking the site every 30 seconds, and sending messages to the Chat client

Finally we can start the client.

So this sample allows us to subscribe to (chat) messages coming from the "cloud" and we've started a WF process, which sends messages to our cloud. So the whole proces of Orchestrating service calls, authentication and authorization, connecting through firewalls are all done by the BizTalk Services SDK.

Don't forget to suspend the workflow, it will keep on running...

ASP.NET and Concurrency

2008-06-13T11:39:00Z

Paul Roberts wrote a nice article [1] about using the CCR (Concurrency and Coordination Runtime) together with ASP.NET, to start multiple task concurrently. The CCR will handle the thread pool for us.

The CCR is now still a part of Robotics Studio, but there are some rumors this will be part of the .Net Framework. After implementing some helper CCR functions in our base class, we can start using the async model by spawning some tasks:

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    ...
    int count = 10;
    for (int i = 0; i < count; i++)
    {
        SpawnIterator("http://wwww.microsoft.com", resultPort, DownloadUrl);
    }
    ....
}

IEnumerator<ITask> DownloadUrl(string url, SuccessFailurePort resultPort)
{
// Async processing to download from url.
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(2000);

resultPort.Post(new SuccessResult());
yield break;
}

The CCR will take care of all the async responses (using Ports). So to speed this up, we can control the amount of threads in the CCR thread pool in our global.asax:

protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Initialize(4);
}

Read the complete article for all the helper classes we need to get this working.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/pollrobots/archive/2008/06/09/using-ccr-with-asp-net.aspx

DevDays 2008 - Robotics Geek Night

2008-05-23T09:32:00Z

Yesterday we (Raimond, Marcel and me) gave a presentation during the DevDays Geek Night. The room was packed with about 200 enthusiastic geeks! We talked about Robotics in general, the new Robotics Studio 2.0 beta, the RoboChamps robotic competition and also on the design of our robot "Woody". Finally a real life demonstration of Woody driving around on the podium and grabbing some colored balls.

Get the Woody PPTX file, and also check out these links with video's we've used during our talk:

the AMAZED RoboChamps web site
Robochallenge 2007 video impression
NAO Robocup 2008 Soccer robot

BizTalk 2006 R3 announced

2008-04-23T09:01:00Z

Microsoft announced a new release for BizTalk, and it's an R3 release.

Major investments for this release will be Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 support, alongside with a new service registry based on UDDI, updated support for SWIFT, EDI, RFID. and a bunch of SOA best practices. So consider this as a minor update.

The proposed release date of H1 CY09 means that the new BizTalk Oslo features/version will still take a long time to reach us, so we'll have to wait for integrated WF support.

Also a new Host Integration Server 8 is announced, together with the "BizTalk Adapter Pack 2". Sign up for the TAP on the microsoft connect site.

BizTalk 2006 R2 Deep Dive - 19th may

2008-04-18T08:01:00Z

We'll be delivering the Quicklearn BizTalk 2006 R2 Developer Deep Dive from may 19 till may 23 in our location in Utrecht.

So, are you an experienced BizTalk developer, and are you interested in all the details of BizTalk 2006 R2 then this is the course for you!

Topics included:

Advanced Pipeline development
BizTalk RFID
Schema Extensions
Detailed Business Rule Engine (BRE)
The new R2 EDI features
plus much more

For the full description, have a look at our website

RoboChallenge 2008 Kickoff

2007-11-09T09:23:00Z

Next week, on friday the 16th of november at 15:00, we'll be hosting the kickoff for the annual RoboChallenge contest at our location in Veenendaal.

The RoboChallenge is a nice contest open to everyone, the purpose is to build a robot, and program it to drive around and collect colored objects. Take a look at the RoboChallenge site.

If you are interested in Robotics and this competition, drop me an email and join us at the kickoff next week, it would be nice to see more competitors from commercial companies!

Another BizTalk User Group meeting

2007-10-25T11:42:00Z

On Friday November the 9th there will be a new BTUG meeting. Main topic is BizTalk 2006 R2, with a session from Sudir Hasbe, the Microsoft Corp Product Manager for BizTalk. He will be presenting on the integration between BizTalk 2006 R2 and the RFID functionality.

Take a look at the BTUG site for more information and the registration page.

Ensim 3.2 SDK Training

2007-08-28T15:31:00Z

Last week I followed an Ensim 3.2 SDK Training, together with Edward, Vincent and some of my Belgian Colleagues.

(for those who don't know Ensim, they have a product for provisioning Hosted Exchange, IIS, SQL and WSS, which we happen to use for our hosting services)

We had a nice time, learning a lot on the SDK, and now it's up to my Belgian colleagues to build a Service Manager for MS CRM 3.0 as a plugin for the Ensim product.

Overall I was quite impressed with the SDK, a lot of extensions are possible when you write your own Service, including upgrades, hotfixes and internationalization. Also the framework to create the user interfaces is very nice, they've made some very nice controls to create a consistent UI and some advanced grids.

Robochallenge 2007, the result

2007-06-11T08:24:00Z

Well, the 2007 RoboChallenge is over, and we ended up in 3rd place, between all the (expensive) robots from the Noordelijke Hogeschool Leeuwarden(NHL).

Our robot Woody did a great job, we past the qualification in 1 pass, and during most of the mission's there was no problem with the software. Only during the last mission we had a case of "split brain" during which our robot kept looking at 2 balls nearby. This costs us about a minute of time.

Here's an action picture of Woody during testing. The crustcrawler arm did a great job this year, grabbing almost all the balls.

And a list of the main parts we've used for our robot:

Laptop Dell D420
FSC approved wood
Crustcrawler SG5-UT arm
Lynxmotion SSC-32 Servo Controller
Imaging Source FireWire Camera with special lens
2 batteries
Some neoprene wheels and motors (50:1 gear reduction) and motor controller
2 IR distance sensors
1 emergency button
And a lot of wires, tie-wraps, rubber band, velcro, screws and glue ;)

Now it is time to get started for the 2008 edition of the RoboChallenge!

Preparing for Robochallenge 2007

2007-06-05T12:45:00Z

Just a few days left for the next edition of the dutch Robochallenge, next friday and saturday we'll be competing again with our new robot: WOODY.

This year all the software was written in C# with WCF. Also check out the nice poster: Edwin van Wijk made for us.

So, what's the status so far: Woody is driving around and finding and grabbing the colored balls, but we still need some obstacle detection and the strategy module for Missions 2 and 3 and a lot of fine tuning is still needed. But we have some more days left...

Robotics Studio 1.5 CTP

2007-04-07T15:18:00Z

Well, the Microsoft Robotics Studio Team is busy again with a new CTP [1] of the 1.5 version of MSRS. In this new release[2], there is support for running the CCR on Windows CE, a preview of the Sumo and Soccer Simulation environments and a faster loading Visual Programming Language (VPL).

Let's see if the team will deliver a new CTP each month again, and let's hope they find some time to upgrade the documentation with more explanation.

Also check out the new Forums[3], they are the replacement for the newsgroups.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/robotics/getstarted/v1_5Preview/default.aspx
[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/robotics/downloads/default.aspx
[3] http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/default.aspx?ForumGroupID=383&SiteID=1

BizTalk 2006 R2 Public beta

2007-04-05T08:15:00Z

The first public beta of BizTalk 2006 R2 is available at connect.microsoft.com, check out [1].

This version contains the WCF adapters, the BizTalk RFID Server and extra EDI support. The upgrade of one of my VPC's went smooth, after the upgrade (and running setup again to add the new components) everything works ok. The new parts appear in the Adapters and Add Generated Items. Generating a WCF webservice is now a breeze, use the new WCF publishing wizard.

Nothing new in the User Interface or other tooling as fas as I can see. There are some changes under the hood, for example we don't need tracking anymore to determine in which step an orchestration was dehydrated [2]

Also, Richard [3] has some nice new postings about calling .NET components, Web references generation and a script for creating a project solution structure.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalk_server_team_blog/archive/2007/04/05/biztalk-2006-r2-beta-download-instructions.aspx
[2] http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalk_core_engine/archive/2007/03/31/hidden-gem-in-biztalk-2006-r2.aspx
[3] http://seroter.wordpress.com/

New BizTalk User Group (BTUG) meeting

2007-03-07T13:15:00Z

There will be a new dutch BTUG meeting at March 29th 2007. (www.btug.nl)

This is the opportunity to learn more on BizTalk and meet and discuss with peers. The BTUG is for new and experienced BizTalk users, ranging from architects to developers/infrastructure people.

Stay tuned for more information, registration and the agenda, the event will be held at our location in Veenendaal from 3pm to 8pm.

RTM time, Virtual PC 2007 and SQL 2005 SP2

2007-02-19T19:17:00Z

To keep up my link blogging, here some new goodies hot off the press:

Virtual PC 2007 [1]

Sql Server 2005 SP2 [2]

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=04D26402-3199-48A3-AFA2-2DC0B40A73B6&displaylang=en
[2] http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/servicepacks/sp2.mspx