What I Learned Yesterday 1

 – Beware the BizTalk 2006 R2 Trial edition.  Ran into a situation where the trial edition was installed and had expired.  I was unaware that it was the R2 trial edition, since in the the list of adapters none of the WCF adapters where present.  So I thought I would just reinstall the Enterprise version of 2006.  This created lots of problems with WMI and ruined my Virtual Image.  Good thing there was a backup of the image.  So uninstalled it first off the image the second time around and everything looks good so far.

– Installing a custom Biztalk application.  While I really like Scott Colestock’s Deployment Framework for BizTalk, not all of the places I do work at are quick to embrace it.  I think because sometimes it is like killing a fly with a sledgehammer for smaller applications.  So as an alternative I have been spending some time with BTSTask and just creating a batch file to execute which adds my additional resources and binding files.  This in conjunction with the Deploy command in visual studio creates a rather easy way to get a BizTalk application to export a valid .msi file.

–  I was out DevHawk.net the other day and found out about a cool appliation from the MSDN Architecture Center for reading the Architecture Journal, which can be downloaded here.  While I could go into detail here about all of the interesting and handy features it has Richard Seroter has already done this on his blog here.

– Last piece is the about book that I am almost done reading Pro WF by Bruce Bukovics is really well put together in my opinion.  It is not really about building one application so much as it is about disecting all of the pieces that make up WF.  For a BizTalker such as myself I really enjoyed it because I can see how many of the components translate directly to things I deal with every day in BizTalk orchestrations such as compensation, dehydration, tracking, etc.  Now I just have to get my “I owe you lunch application” updated to use it.