sfeldman.NET

Buy vs. Build dilemma is quite common in software development. Based on degree of customization, decisions are made. But is it just degree of customization? As a developer, the urge to build and will to prove that “we can pull it off” is very strong. What I find often is that another dilemma exists, similar to the mentioned one, but rooted in restrictions related to time and will to go above the “regular known” – Learn vs. Build.

This is an interesting plug-in for VS.NET 2008/2010 to allow remote pair-programming. I’m a big advocate for pair-programming and collaborative work, so this plug-in has its place in the real world. I used to pair-program with a developer that was remote, and we used VNC/RDC, but this one is way better.

I have run into this issue trying to add custom pipeline component to toolbox. The only way (I know about) to add a custom pipeline component to a customized pipeline is using the visual designer. In order to do that you have to have components on toolbox. This was a bit frustrating. Google has brought one result which was exactly what I needed. One of the comments had another link, to the similar issue, but this time with a different title: Hotfix for BizTalk 2009 and Visual Studio 2008. I followed the link, installed hotfix, and it worked. Oh, yes, you have to reboot your machine for hotfix to work completely (this is where I spent some time pulling my hair out and asking why hotfix didn’t work?!). Once this is done, you are good to go.

Time saving project to generate BizTalk Server Pipeline Components.

ESB Toolkit Extensions is an open-source library giving you an extended BRE/BRI provider to read and write promoted properties of a message within business rules engine. I’ve used it to achieve automated process for mapping to canonical schema and then back to destination schema based on receiver ID as a promoted property (will blog on this later). A very useful library!

Here I am shouting again about the fact that we are looking for good developers. Our team has matured, and now definition of a “good developer” is not what we used to think of it before. Don’t misunderstand me, we are looking from smart people, but also rounded people.

A X509 Certificate is required in the model property 'EncryptionCertificate' to encrypt any sensitive property in the designer.

I run into something really annoying this morning with Itinerary DSL in VS.NET designer. The only way to create an itinerary is to create it in a project of a library type. This is confusing, since for a simple application, I should be able to achieve the same with a plain BizTalk project. The ironic part is that within BizTalk project creation of itinerary IS an option, but when selected, add a new (standard) BizTalk item dialog shows up, with no itinerary in it. A bug?