Bryant Likes

There is another Get Ready for SQL Server 2005 Roadshow going on:

The Get Ready for SQL Server 2005 Roadshow was a huge success last
spring, so we're extending the tour to 15 more cities this summer and
fall, starting in Portland on July 26. Once again, we invite you as our
guest to attend any venue of the roadshow tour, which kicks off in
Portland on July 26.

This event will follow a similar format as the first show: technical
content in three tracks -- administration, development, and business
intelligence -- presented in this round by our roadshow training
partners Hitachi Consulting, Scalability Experts, and Solid Quality
Learning. Keynoters for selected cities will include Bill Baker. As our
guest at the roadshow, you'll receive a special attendee bag, a "Get
Ready" logo shirt, and the SQL Server 2005 Upgrade Handbook.

Also, if you have a blog or an email communication that you send out,
we'd appreciate a mention of this terrific opportunity for SQL Server
professionals!

For more information about the show, visit the event Web site at
http://www.windowsitpro.com/roadshows/sqlserverusa/. Cities and dates
for the tour are as follows. We hope that one or more of these locations
will be convenient for you.

Portland, July 26, Hilton Portland & Executive Tower
Seattle, July 28, Sheraton Seattle Hotel & Towers
Kansas City, August 9, Sheraton Overland Park Hotel (at the Convention
Center)
St. Louis, August 11, Sheraton Westport Chalet Hotel St. Louis
Minneapolis, August 16, Hyatt Regency Minneapolis
Washington, DC, August 18, Wardman Park Marriott Hotel
Phoenix, August 23, Arizona Biltmore Resort & Spa
Denver, August 25, Denver Marriott Tech Center
Atlanta, August 30, Cobb Galleria
Tampa, September 1, Grand Hyatt Tampa Bay
Los Angeles, September 8, Los Angeles Marriott Downtown
Detroit, September 13, Hyatt Regency Dearborn
Philadelphia, September 15, Hilton Philadelphia City Center
Cincinnati, September 20, NKU/METS Center for Corporate Learning
Columbus, September 22, Greater Columbus Convention Center

Update: I'm hoping to attend the Los Angeles event. See you there!

Just finished writing some test code for some shared utilities on my current project. The project is a BizTalk project so the utilities can be hit from multiple threads and from multiple boxes (with a shared database box). So I needed to test for these scenarios. The multiple threads was pretty easy, but I found this page to be very useful and thought I would pass it along.

I also attempted to simulate the multiple box scenario by creating multiple AppDomains (one domain per thread) and then hitting the utility from the separate domains. In figuring out how to do this I made use of this article by Eric Gunnerson. The tests all pass, which is good, but I'm not totally convinced that I'm really simulating things correctly.

Anyhow, both those links are good reads that I want to remember... 

Saw this on my morning commute:

From Scott Hanselman:

The back story is this. I've been trying to find the Holy Grail, or even the 40% Grail of Automated Web UI Testing for at least the last 5 years. We use NUnit for everything, so it'd be cool if whatever we chose could fail NUnit tests.
...
And the one I'm currently enamored with is Watir
...
Watir is an open source functional testing library for automated tests to be developed and run against a web browser. Cool?

He goes on to show how easy (and intuitive) it is to run unit tests using this tool which automates IE. If you're doing unit testing and developing for the web give his post a read, it is worth it.

Hmm... looks like I might need to look into learning Ruby.

As Christof notes here:

If you ever need to have access to the context of a message, outside of the BizTalk Server orchestration environment, you may do so by passing the message as a parameter of type Microsoft.XLANGs.BaseTypes.XLANGMessage to a method in an expression shape.

However, once you have an XLANGMessage object it isn't obvious (at least it wasn't to me) how to use it. I needed to grab some context properties but the GetPropertyValue method was looking for a type and not a property name. However, it is really very simple, all you need to do is get the type of the property you're looking for.

So, for instance, if you were looking for the MessageID (or more precisely, BTS.MessageID), then you would use:

msg.GetPropertyValue(typeof(BTS.MessageID));

In order to use the above you will need to add a reference to Microsoft.BizTalk.GlobalPropertySchemas.dll in your project. If you want to get your own custom context types then you would use typeof on the type you define in your property schema (and you would need to add a reference to your property schema project or DLL).