Brian H. Prince

Microsoft is putting on clinic's to support the release of BizTalk through the county. As part of the VTS program, I will be delivering the clinic in Columbus, Ohio on March 7th, and in Nashville, TN on March 14th. You can sign up for this free event at www.biztalkclinic.com . The morning sessions will focus on deployment and management. The afternoon sessions will focus on development and integration. The content is mostly level 200, so prior experience is defintely not needed. Just a general grasp of development and/or server administration. Great way to see the product, and get a feeling how it can help you in your organization. Please let me know if you have any questions. -bhp

This is in response to my buddy's post about his struggles with CSS. You should read Dave's post first. Some might call me a zealot. And yes, I am screaming. The benefit to css layouts is that you can seperate your content and document structure and behavior. Not doing that is like putting all of your business and data code in your asp.net code behind; because you can do that quicker than defining some interfaces, seperate assemblies, and architecting your code. Don't be so lazy. :) The hardest part is getting over the thought pattern that tables put you in, and start thinking in a rules way. If you try to implement a table layout with CSS directly, you will struggle. Embrace the CSS way, and it will become so much faster to develop, easier to maintain, and trivial to debug. To me it is like the curve that most people struggle with when they first try TDD. It takes some hard work and coaching to stop doing things that bad way. Some think it's a waste (before they trans...

I have been working on some demos that use the WSS adapter. The demo was to monitor a document library for any new documents, and based on some content, change their status to either approved or denied, and then resubmit them into the same library. I was able to add a custom field to the library in Sharepoint, and then leverage that in the send port subscriptions. Be careful though. Not all fields that show up in the filter fields are actually promoted from the WSS adapter. Some are in there and aren't actually promoted. The adapter worked very well, and I plan on exploring it even more. -bhp

The Atlas team has pushed a refresh of the December Atlas bits. The version is called the M1 refresh. Never heard the M1 moniker before. Go get them at atlas.asp.net . There is mostly bug fixes, and some minor enhancements to the update panel and script manager. Now I have to go upgrade all of my demos and slide decks. The drag and drop behavior still leaves something to leave desired, but I am sure it will rock before the final bits are released. Some people on my team at the shop are overhauling our 'open positions check out' page to make it 100% callback based. So far it looks neat. The scriptaculous stuff clashes with the Atlas script manager though, so it isn't using Atlas yet. We will have to upgrade it this summer. Anyway, fresh bits, get them while they are hot! -bhp

What a fast start to the year. It's Feburary already! Started off the year with a presentation at the Cinci/Dayton Code Camp. That went pretty well. Jim and James did a great job putting it together. I did a session on BizTalk 101. Very entry level stuff. I just thought a session like that was needed since most of the questions I got at the launch event were of the 'What is BizTalk?' variety. It wasn't the most fascinating topic, but I think it helped alot of people figure it out. It was also the first presentation I have ever done with the Takahashi(sp?) method. I read about that on Guy's blog. Few words, big font, little actual content on the slide. Although this matches how I like to speak, I wasn't sure it would work for a training session. I think it went well though. I did add some visuals, like a graph of how basic message flow works in BTS. The code camp was on a Saturday. The following Wednesday I presented HOAP at the Dayton .NET users group. HOAP is t...