The life of a beta tester...
Ha, this blogging seemed like a great idea at first, but its really hard to maintain. I've got a lot of respect for people like Scott who are pretty busy, and yet still manage to blog so frequently. I've been pretty busy presenting on various topics, and as part of that, I've been playing (don't tell my boss, but its all good fun) with a whole range of beta technologies. Currently, on my desktop I have VSTS Beta 2, SQL Server CTP, WSE 3.0 CTP, and BizTalk Server 2006. Now you'd think with all that beta software, almost nothing would work, but actually, things are going pretty well.
Scott Woodgate talks about Rolling Thunder, when he speaks about various cool features in the new BizTalk 2006, so I thought I'd share some of my own Rolling Thunder for the various technologies I've been checking out over the last 6 weeks, starting with BizTalk 2006.
Rolling Thunder #1 - The BizTalk Configuration Utility
One of the biggest complaints I've had from customers is that while installing BizTalk is pretty simple, the configuration wizard was just too complex. If you made any mistakes, and forgot to install a feature, or wanted to make changes, you often ended up unconfiguring (hopefully you remembered to do that), and then re-running the configuration. Well, the first thing that hit me in the eye was the new configuration wizard. Simplicity itself to run, and you could run and re-run it to install features, and then uninstall features as needed. I was pretty pleased about that, because I tried to install BizTalk onto SQL 2005, so I ended up uninstalling the BAM Events, and generally changing things around several times.
Rolling Thunder #2 - The BizTalk Flatfile Schema Wizard
Scott's already blogged about this, but its such a cool feature, I had to mention it as well. I wish I'd had something like this back in BizTalk 2000 days....
Rolling Thunder #3 - WSE 3 MTOM support
I was giving a talk about WSE and Indigo to our local .NET User Group. I was also pretty intensely using Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite for my development, so I wanted to show both WSE2 and WSE3. Rebecca Dias kindly gave me access to an early version of the WSE3 CTP (which you can get here), so I put together a bunch of samples showing security in WSE2 with Visual Studio 2003 (on a VPC), and then showed MTOM support in WSE3 directly off my laptop. A lot of people have been struggling with sending binary data across web services, with some using WS-Attachments, and some using MIME. Finally, with an implementation of MTOM available, we can all move to a standard way to do this. And it's so simple too.
I've also looked at the security features in WSE3, but more on that in another post. WSE3 is very cool though, and I recommend you check out the CTP.
And before anyone says, I know I should probably put all this beta software into a VPC (and I do for some builds and demos), but it really does work very well together.
