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February 2009 - Posts

Friday, February 27, 2009 3:40 PM

Product Roadmap for Host Integration Server

Published this month at Microsoft Connect : Product Roadmap for Host Integration Server To help you manage existing systems and plan future deployments of Host Integration Server, we provide the following product roadmap. Host Integration Server 2009
Posted by JohnBrea | 0 Comments
Friday, February 27, 2009 2:50 PM

MSMQ Adapters in BizTalk

Browsing around I found Eldar Musayev's " Short history of MSMQ Adapters in BizTalk ". It's a few years old now but I don't think much will change for BizTalk 2009 but I won't know for sure until it releases.
Posted by JohnBrea | 0 Comments
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Friday, February 27, 2009 11:08 AM

What to do if MSMQ has problems loading storage files.

Back in the Windows 2000 era, a common problem was how to recover when MSMQ was allowed to build up over 1.7GB of messages. On startup, MSMQ would try and map into memory all the 4MB files in the System32\MSMQ\Storage directory. The process' virtual memory
Posted by JohnBrea | 3 Comments
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Thursday, February 26, 2009 3:07 PM

Difference between Path name and Format name when accessing MSMQ queues

For beginners to MSMQ development, the fact that there are FIVE ways of addressing an MSMQ queue is a real pitfall. Many hours will be lost trying to work out why a seemingly perfect address keeps returning errors. From MSDN: Referencing a Queue To perform
Posted by JohnBrea | 22 Comments
Thursday, February 26, 2009 11:46 AM

Sweet stuff in Windows 7 and IE 8

Working inside Microsoft means you hear a lot of noise about new products. Sometimes it's like a background roar and you need to block it out so you can focus on your job. To reach people like me (the "yeah, whatever" group), there's compulsory on-line
Posted by JohnBrea | 0 Comments
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Wednesday, February 25, 2009 4:45 PM

How to be an Italian programmer. Lesson #1

Working in Europe, I see a lot of programming code from non-English speakers. One of my Italian colleagues let me in on one of their secrets: "Wherever you see a variable named "pippo", there is an Italian developer." From Wikipedia : Italian In information
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Wednesday, February 25, 2009 2:21 PM

Technical humour

This went round at work and I just had to share: Q: How long is a piece of string? A: string.length
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Tuesday, February 24, 2009 5:11 PM

MSMQ and non-local storage

A number of companies make use of storage devices that are not physically attached to the machine using them, such as storage area networks (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS), as well as more exotic geographically dispersed solutions. The question
Posted by JohnBrea | 6 Comments
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Tuesday, February 24, 2009 3:41 PM

Get the right hardware if you want to virtualise a Windows 2008 Server cluster

Today has been an expensive lesson in the need to keep your hardware up to date - chucking in extra RAM and bigger drives is NOT always enough. The plan was to create a virtualised Windows 2008 Server cluster. I had experience on clustering Windows Server
Posted by JohnBrea | 0 Comments
Thursday, February 19, 2009 3:49 PM

A novel way of forwarding MSMQ messages

On the MSMQ newsgroups , Chris asked: "I'm dropping messages into a queue on a local machine. Is there a way to easily send them to a remote server queue when they get received from the initial queue?" Frank Boyne, our favourite MVP, proposed the following
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Wednesday, February 18, 2009 10:58 AM

Setting up MSMQ with multiple instances of Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC)

The Windows Server Core support team has produced a useful blog post that explains how to understand and implement multiple instances of MSDTC, a feature new to Windows Server 2008. How to Configure Multiple Instances of Distributed Transaction Coordinator
Posted by JohnBrea | 0 Comments
Tuesday, February 17, 2009 11:19 PM

Knowledge Base articles move to TechNet and MSDN

Microsoft is moving its Developer & IT Professional primary support content (also known as Knowledge Base – or KB - articles) from http://support.microsoft.com Web site to MSDN and TechNet, respectively. This move is to ensure that Developers and
Posted by JohnBrea | 0 Comments
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Tuesday, February 17, 2009 7:01 PM

64kb limit on the size of MSMQ Multicast Messages

When Windows 2003 came out, Microsoft introduced the ability to broadcast messages to any machines that were listening back. All you had to do was send out a message on a particular port and IP address and any client that had set up a Multicast queue
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Monday, February 16, 2009 11:34 AM

MSMQ writes data to storage in 4 kilobyte chunks.

Saw a question on the MSMQ newsgroups the other day where someone had noticed that tiny MSMQ messages were causing the same amount of disk activity regardless of size and asked to know why. The reason is that MSMQ messages won't be written to disk in
Posted by JohnBrea | 0 Comments
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Tuesday, February 10, 2009 12:24 PM

Why does MSMQ complain "not located on a valid NTFS drive"?

Yesterday I discussed changing the storage location for MSMQ. While testing out the user interface with Windows Server 2008 today, I found some strange messages that I thought I would share. Here's the normal Storage tab that you expect to see on all
Posted by JohnBrea | 0 Comments
Monday, February 09, 2009 12:03 PM

Changing the MSMQ Storage location

Some people have the situation where they have set up MSMQ using defaults and now find that the storage disk, usually the system drive C:, has insufficient space for the message volume they are seeing. If there are a number of these machines, or maybe
Posted by JohnBrea | 1 Comments
Friday, February 06, 2009 1:55 PM

Optimising performance of MSMQ over HTTP

Here are a couple of registry values you can tweak if you are sending messages over a high latency network like the Internet. The first two are for setting the TCP receive window which is the number of bytes a sender can transmit without receiving an
Posted by JohnBrea | 0 Comments
Thursday, February 05, 2009 2:44 PM

Windows 2003 service pack 1 approaching end of support

Now seems a good time to mention that support for Windows 2003 service pack 1 retires in 68 days on the 14th of April 2009. Everybody already on service pack 2 doesn't need to panic for a few years yet as t here's been no news of Windows 2003 sp3. References:
Posted by JohnBrea | 0 Comments
Thursday, February 05, 2009 11:44 AM

"Will there be a 64-bit version of the DLC protocol included in Host Integration Server?"

Simple answer - "No". There is currently no 64-bit version of the Microsoft DLC network stack and one will not be developed for the forthcoming Host Integration Server 2009 product. You should instead be looking at using IP-DLC as IBM has been moving
Posted by JohnBrea | 0 Comments
Wednesday, February 04, 2009 3:18 PM

The UK TechNet Team are Twittering

Here's a plug for my TechNet colleagues here in the UK who have just launched their ASKTechNetUK Twitter . If you want to ask a question about TechNet or Microsoft, or just fancy a general chin wag , then ask the lovely people in the UK TechNet team .
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Monday, February 02, 2009 11:27 AM

New MSMQ 4.0 functionality that you may not have read about in Windows 2008.

MSMQ 4.0 has been around for a little while now - Windows Vista's 2nd birthday was last week - so the main improvements and additions are well known now : Subqueues Handling Poison Messages Transactional Remote Receive Application-specific dead letter
Posted by JohnBrea | 0 Comments
 
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