Brian H. Prince

I have been asked by some friends at the user group to post the slide deck for the agile talk. I put them up at my new site on officelive. www.brianhprince.com . Lower right hand side. The editing tools for office live aren't even close to what SharePoint can do, and I am starting to see some of the limitations. Anyway, enjor the deck. I also included all of the hand outs, etc. Let me know if you have questions. -bhp

There will finally be HOAP in Columbus. I will be doing Hands on Agile Practices this Thursday (5/25/2006) at CONDG.org. It is at the Microsoft building in the Polaris area. There have been plenty of great talks on Agile/xp, and what it means. They explain the why really well. The beliefs, etc. After those though I have always wondered about the how. This talk will focus on those things that WE do. HOAPfully this will help you adapt your practices. Then, as usual, it's hoggy's afterward. -bhp

I have the pleasure of presenting my BizTalk 101 talk to the Findlay, Oh area .NET users group on 5/24/2006. I really like driving up there and working with them. They always have great questions. If you are in the area, you should drop by and say hi. I will cover what this thing does, and how you can use it in your enterprise, your application, and how it can make your life better. :) -bhp

‘Where do I put my business rules and logic? Where does validation fit in?’ I don’t know how often I hear this from clients. It is always asked in one or another during most coaching or development engagements. Sometimes it is because of BizTalk, and other times it is because of Atlas (or some other front end framework). Our first rule of validation: ‘All validation is done on the server side.’ The business layer is responsible for validating its input. We never trust input coming from outside the business layer. This is a fundamental guideline for application security. Any validation on the web client is purely to support a great user experience. It should definitely be there, but it is just for the user’s needs, not for the system’s needs. So, where do you put your business rules? As with many things with BizTalk, it depends. The first aspect to consider is how you are using BizTalk in your system. If you are using it as middleware to integrate several different systems (sort of an E...

I have setup a site for myself at www.brianhprince.com . I am keeping my blog here. I setup the site with MS Office Live. I wanted to get the domain name for free, and have an easy place to host files or stuff that I reference in my blog. I also wanted to try out the new service. It isn't bad for a beta. There are some significant features missing though. I can't get rid of the lame border around linked images, nor can I use custom HTML/CSS to place my own content. Even the content web part for Sharepoint can do that. -bhp

I am getting very excited about going to TechEd 2006. Not only do I get to go, but I get to present. This will be great. I will be attending the second half of the MVP Engagement Event Sunday afternoon, and the influencer's party on Wednesday. Keith and I were just told that our session has been booked for that Thursday (6/15) at 8:00am! So, it looks like I won't be partying too much at the Influencer's Ball. Our session is : CON329 - BizTalk Server Solution Lifecycle: Planning and Design (Part 1) Level: 300 Part one of a three-part series of sessions covering the design, implementation and management of a BizTalk Server solution. The first session covers the common scenarios where BizTalk is an appropriate solution and what questions you should be asking to develop appropriate timelines, resource plans and deliverables. This session provides experienced IT project managers, who may not have previously worked with BizTalk Server, the background needed to successful launch a...

I am a big fan of simplicity, which is an unusual trait for us architects. But sometimes, it can waste some of your time. In BizTalk 2004, while using VS2003, if you wanted to push up your solution to the server to test it, you had to (chant with me now) RE-build, RE-GAC, RE-start [the host]. This can be a huge hassle, and slows down your momentum during development. To the point that you almost avoid it as long as you can. This always caused problems for me, since I would be tempted to break the 'change one thing at a time rule.' This just led to more frustration on my part. With the new BizTalk 2006 developer tools that plug into VS2005 they made this so much more simpler. You now right click the project, and choose 'deploy.' And that's it. It's all handled for you under the covers. VS will rebuild (if needed), upload, regac, etc. to get you new code running. Very cool. It made huge increases in my productivity, and has made it easier for new BizTalk developer...