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BizTalk in Microsoft IT

Microsoft Integration and Connected Systems User Group (MICSUG) - April 27th

Microsoft Integration and Connected Systems User Group (MICSUG) - April 27th

Connected Systems User Group

The new Microsoft Integration and Connected Systems User Group (MICSUG) meets for the first time this week.

This user group provides information on connected systems, workflow, and business process integration on the Microsoft platform. The technology focus is on Microsoft BizTalk Server, BizTalk adapters and accelerators, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, the Web Services Architecture, and XML technologies. Members are invited from Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia.

The group meets every second month on the fourth Thursday of the month at 7:00 PM in Microsoft's Reston, Virginia facility. At our next meeting, Brian Noyes of iDesign will speak about Connecting Smart Client Applications with Windows Communication Foundation. This will be on February 23rd 2006 at 7:00 PM in Microsoft's Reston facility. Directions are here: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/info/usaoffices/midatlantic/mtc_reston.mspx

List of Local Bloggers

Lehigh Valley .NET has a new URL

BizTalk Web Resources

1. The product site: http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/default.mspx
2. The developer center: http://msdn.microsoft.com/biztalk/
3. The tech center: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/biztalk/default.mspx
4. BizTalk 2004 White Papers: http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/techinfo/whitepapers/2004/default.mspx
5. BizTalk 2006 White Papers: http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/2006/prodinfo/whitepapers.mspx
6. Application Integration and Web Services Patterns and Practices: http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices/apptype/appinteg/default.aspx
7. Integration Patterns: http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices/apptype/appinteg/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnpag/html/intpatt.asp
8. Architecture for BizTalk Server 2004: http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/techinfo/whitepapers/2004/architecture.mspx
9. SOA in the Enterprise: http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/techinfo/whitepapers/2004/infopath.mspx
10. Download for BizTalk 2004 trial software: http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/evaluation/trial/default.mspx
11. Download for BizTalk 2006 Beta 2: http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/evaluation/bts2006beta.mspx
12. What’s New in BizTalk 2006: http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/2006/prodinfo/whatsnew.mspx
13. The Blogger’s Guide to BizTalk (lot’s of articles from BizTalk blogs, good article on how to learn BizTalk): http://www.gotdotnet.com/workspaces/workspace.aspx?id=0dfb4f4e-d241-4bc8-8418-2c385d8e3eaa
14. Virtual Labs for BizTalk: http://msdn.microsoft.com/virtuallabs/biztalk/
15. GotDotNet: http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/wsserver
16. BizTalk 2004 Power Toys: http://blogs.msdn.com/luke/articles/365678.aspx
17. BizTalk Performance Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalkperformance/
18. BizTalk Core Engine Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/Biztalk%5FCore%5FEngine/
19. BizTalk Customer Response Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/BPIDCustomerResponseTeam/
20. Scott Woodgate’s blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/scottwoo/
21. Kris Horrocks’ blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/krisho/
22. Jon Flanders’ blog: http://masteringbiztalk.com/blogs/jon/default.aspx
23. Luke Nyswonger’s blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/luke/default.aspx
24. Eldar Musayev’s blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/eldarm/
25. Owen Allen’s blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/oallen/
26. Marty Wasznicky’s blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/martywaz/
27. Kevin Smith’s blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/kevinsmi/

Resource List for Today's Webcast

I'm doing a webcast today at Noon Eastern, 9:00 AM Pacific on the controls that ship in Visual Studio 2005 for displaying reports in Windows Forms and ASP.NET applications. (http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032284444&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US)

This is a list of supporting resources:

Reporting Services Web Site: www.microsoft.com/sql/reporting

SQL Server 2005 Web Site: www.microsoft.com/sql/2005

SQL Server Developer Center: http://msdn.microsoft.com/sql

Report Controls Forum: http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=75

Upcoming User Group Meetings

Here's a list of upcoming .NET user group meetings in my territory: PA, DE, MD, DC, VA and WV.

Maryland

Tuesday, November 1, Baltimore, MD
Central Maryland Association of .NET Professionals
Clyde Barretto presents Building Custom Data Bound Windows Forms Controls using VS .Net 2005/2003
http://www.cmap-online.org/DesktopDefault.aspx

Thursday, November 3, Baltimore, MD
Baltimore SQL Server User Group
Jeremy Kadlec of Edgewood Solutions presents Get Up To Speed with SQL Server 2005
http://www.itresourcepartners.com/bssug/

Thursday, November 10, Millersville, MD
Maryland Access/Visual Basic users group
Steve Rosenbach of SM Consulting presents SQL Server Reporting Services for Access Developers
http://www.mavbug.org/

Tuesday, November 15, Salisbury, MD
DelMarVa .NET
INETA Community Launch Event for Visual Studio 2005
http://www.delmarvadotnet.org/Default.aspx

Tuesday, December 6, Baltimore, MD
Central Maryland Association of .NET Professionals
Sam Gentile presents Hardcore .NET CLR Internals
http://www.cmap-online.org/DesktopDefault.aspx

Mondays Each Week, Rockville, MD
Certification Study Group
Study Session for The .NET Architecture MCSD Exam
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DCMCSD/

Pennsylvania

Tuesday, November 8, Pittsburgh, PA
PGH .NET
Jonathan Cogley of Thycotic Software presents Test Driven Development with NUnitASP
http://www.pghdotnet.org/Events/default.aspx

Wednesday, November 9, Mount Laurel, NJ
Philadelphia SQL Server User Group
Jeremy Kadlec of Edgewood Solutions presents Project Management for DBAs
http://www.pssug.org/Default.aspx?tabid=520

Monday, November 21, Bethlehem, PA
Lehigh Valley .NET
INETA Community Launch Event for Visual Studio 2005
http://groups.msn.com/LehighValley-NET/

Thursday, December 1, Pittsburgh, PA
Pittsburgh Geek Night
http://www.pghgeeks.org/

Wednesday, December 14, Malvern PA
Philly .NET
Visual Studio 2005
http://www.phillydotnet.org/Default.aspx?tabid=336

Thursday, December 15, Pittsburgh, PA
PGH .NET
INETA Community Launch Event for Visual Studio 2005 and Holiday Party
http://www.pghdotnet.org/Events/default.aspx

Virginia

Thursday, November 3, Roanoke, VA
Roanoke Valley .NET User Group
Ed Hild, Technology Architect, Microsoft Corporation presents Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server
http://www.rvnug.org/

Thursday, November 3, Reston, VA
Defense Users Group
http://www.defenseclub.com/sites/mdug/default.aspx

Thursday, November 3, Vienna, VA
Potomac Area FoxPro Users Group
http://www.pafox.org/pafoxwcapp/home.fox

Tuesday, November 8, Newport News, VA
WeProgram.NET
Building Custom Controls for Smart Clients using Visual Studio 2005
http://www.weprogram.net/

Monday, November 14, Springfield, VA
Capital PC User Group
Dr. Kent Norman, Associate Professor, University of Maryland presents Computer Rage
http://www.cpcug.org/

Wednesday, November 16, Virginia Beach, VA
Hampton Roads SQL Server User Group
Rob Howard, ASP.NET Guru
http://www.hrssug.org/

Monday, November 28, Tyson's Corner, VA
Northern Virginia SQL Server Users Group
Speaker from Imperva presents Defending Against Web Application and Database Attacks
http://www.novasql.com/index.htm

Thursday, December 1, Richmond, VA
Richmond .NET User Group
Miguel Castro presents Custom WebControls Demystified
http://www.richmonddotnet.com/meetings.aspx

Thursday, December 1, Roanoke, VA
Roanoke Valley .NET User Group
Andrew Duthie of Microsoft Corporation
http://www.rvnug.org/events.aspx

Tuesday, December 13, Tyson's Corner, VA
CapArea.NET
Jesper Johansson presents Build Secure and Safe Applications
http://www.caparea.net/Meetings+and+Events/default.aspx

Creating Report Headers

I'm still answering questions from my recent webcast series. I got a question by e-mail from someone who is converting from Access and wants to add headers and footers to a report. Actually, there are several different places you can work with headers and footers.

Report Header and Footer. You might think that there should be a report property that is a header for the entire report. Actually, that's not needed. You can put as many data items on a report as you find  useful. If you want a header that occurs once at the start of a report, just shove your data items downwards a little in the report designer to make some space, and then drop a textbox/image/whatever you want onto the designer. These items will print exactly once at the start of the report. In the textbox, you can either put literal text, or you can use arbitrary expressions. Items like execution time, report name, user ID, or the number of pages in a report are all available as globals, or you can call .NET code, so you can easily build any dynamic header you need. For a report footer, just put the footer after the last repeating item in the report.

Page Header and Footer. There is a special facility for these. In Report Designer, click the Report menu and then select either Page Header or Page Footer. This will create special areas in your report for the page header, page footer, or both. Just like a report header, you can put arbitrary text boxes, images, or any other item that you want into each of these areas. How about putting a little chart onto every page of a report that summarizes the data in the report? If you use text in the page header and footer, that can also contain any arbitrary expression that appeals to you. The Report Properties dialog box contains check boxes that allow you to decide whether the page headers and footers are printed on the first or last page of a report.

Table Header and Footer. If you're building a table, the table has its own header and footer. Click on the table until a set of gray boxes appear around the outside of the table. Right click on the little box with three gray bars at the left hand end of the table details row. The context menu will allow you to turn on or turn off the table header and footer. If you need multiple header rows, use the context menu to create the first header row, and then right click on the header icon that appears at the left hand end of the header row, and select either Insert Row Below or Insert Row Above. The Table Properties dialog box contains check boxes that allow you to repeat header rows on each page, repeat footer rows on each page, or keep the header visible while scrolling.

Virtual Labs

Folks who attended my webcast series and want some hands-on experience might want to check out one of the virtual labs for Reporting Services. These allow you to play with the product without having to install it on your machine.

There are a couple of versions of the lab:

• The virtual lab for SQL Server 2000 reporting services is at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/virtuallab/default.mspx.
• The virtual lab for SQL Server 2005 reporting services is at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/tryit/hosted/sql/reportingservices/.

If you’re watching my recent series, the second of these is probably more relevant.

Introduction to Reporting Services Webcast Series On Demand

My webcast series on SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services is now available on demand. The ideal attendee for this series is someone who needs to develop reports, but hasn't used SQL Server Reporting Services before. In the series I assume that you've done some development in .NET, and won't freak out if I show you a SQL SELECT or some VB code, but you don't have to know anything about reporting. It might also be useful to folks who have used other reporting solutions, like Microsoft Access or Crystal Reports, and would like to know about a better solution for building reports.

One of my goals was to show some of the ways that developers can interact with the product. I'm a huge fan of the architecture of Reporting Services, which is really well thought out. (I don't work for the product group, so I had nothing to do with designing the product.) If you're a developer, there are loads of places that you can dive into the product and extend it to meet your needs. As an example, if you need to access a custom data source, you can do so by calling a web service or by writing a .NET DLL that provides the data to Reporting Services. If you want to export reports to some file format that the product doesn't support, you can build a custom rendering extension. If you need to see reports in the Microsoft Bob Word Processor, no problem, build a custom renderer.

Six hours of presentations is just a survey of the product, but there are tons of demos, so I think developers will enjoy it. All the webcasts were rated either four stars out of five, or four and a half stars out of five, so someone must have liked them. Either that, or my strategy of hacking the survey site so only my mother could rate the webcast is looking pretty good.

Session One: Introduction. This webcast gives a flavor of the entire report lifecycle: report design, report management, and report delivery.

Session Two: Delivering reports. This webcast is about ways to get reports to users. I showed an ASP.NET application that integrates with a report by linking to a report URL, a Windows Forms application that called the web service to browse available reports and then displays the report in a browser, building standard and data-driven report subscriptions, and uaing the Windows Forms control from Visual Studio 2005.

Session Three: Report Builder. Everything you always wanted to know but were afraid to ask about ad hoc reports. How does a user create an ad hoc report? What does a developer have to do to make the database available to end users?

Session Four: Report Design. I build reports with tables. I build reports with matrices. I build reports with lists. I build reports with charts. I build reports that link to other reports.

Session Five: Extensibility. Our intrepid hero calls custom code from a report. He gets data from a web service. He does a directory of the file system using a custom data source. He even uses a third-party charting control for Reporting Services.

Session Six: Management and Security. We learn about SQL Server Management Studio, and see the security model for reporting services. We also see diagrams of a scale-out architecture for a high-capacity, fault tolerant, enterprise grade reporting solution.

I'll be back in November with two more webcasts on reporting services. On November 2nd, I'll cover the controls that ship in Visual Studio 2005 for displaying reports in Windows Forms and ASP.NET applications. On November 16th, I'll be doing a session on charting in depth.

Update: There's also a list of my SQL Server 2000 webcasts here.

Book Chapter

RDL Will be Updated for SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services

Simple Walk Through of SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services XML Data Source

A cool new feature of SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services is that you can report on XML data. These are the steps in the demo I did today:

• Create a new web service.
• Add a public class called product to the web service:

  Public Class Product
   Public pname As String
   Public pcat As String
   Public psubcat As String
   Public psales As Decimal
  End Class

• Create a method that returns an array of these product items. In my case, I was reading total sales from Adventure Works grouped by Product Category, Product Subcategory, and Product Name. Updated: Code for the method is here.
• Run the web service to check that it works.
• At this point during the development process, I spent three hours debugging a security issue that prevented me from logging on to the database. I changed my permissions about a million times, switched from Windows authentication to SQL authentication and back again, tried logging on as SA, then restarted SQL Server, IIS, the entire machine, every other machine in my office, and my cell phone. Three hours later I determined that the Adventure Works database is actually called AdventureWorks, with no space between the words. After much swearing, I had a running web service.
• In another project, create a new report. In my case, I opened up a second copy of Visual Studio 2005 to keep things clean.
• Add a new data source. The data type is XML. The connection string is the URL for the web service. In my case, that was http://localhost/ProdService/Service.asmx
• Using the generic query designer, enter a query in the XML syntax described in Books Online. In my case, the query was <Query><SoapAction>http://www.geoffsnowman.net/mytestsvc/GetProducts</SoapAction></Query>. The contents of the SoapAction element is the SoapAction associated with the method you want to call on the web service. In my case, I just grabbed it directly from the WSDL of the web service which is at http://localhost/ProdService/Service.asmx?WSDL
• Next I executed the query in the query designer, just to check I had some data.
• Finally, I switched to the Layout tab, dropped a table onto the report and dragged over each field, and the previewed the finished report. Voila!

The other samples I used in my webcast today were:

• Adding green bar to a report using this expression for background color: =IIf(RowNumber(nothing) mod 2, "yellow", "lightgreen")
• Adding code to a report using the code tab:

• A custom data source: The file system information sample data source that ships with both SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005.
• Finally, the Dundas Chart for Reporting Services beta.

This webcast should be available on demand shortly. The final webcast in the current series will be on Friday.