Steve Martin, director of product management for Microsoft's Connected Systems Division (CSD), just announced their plans for the next version of BizTalk Server on his blog. It will be called BizTalk Server 2006 R3.

This new version will be updated to work with Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008. It will also be updated with the following SOA-related features:

• New web service registry capabilities with support for UDDI v3.0
• Enhanced service enablement of applications through new and enhanced adapters
• Enhanced service enablement of “edge” devices through BizTalk RFID Mobile
• Enhanced interoperability and connectivity support for B2B protocols (like SWIFT, EDI, etc)
• SOA patterns and best practices guidance to assist our customer’s implementations

From reading his blog, it doesn't look like they'll be adding official support for hosting WF workflows in this particular release. It looks like we may have to wait for that until Oslo.

I just wrapped up DevWeek 2008, a wonderful developer conference held each year in London. This show brings in some of the best attendees around...I always really enjoy my time here. I'm sitting in my hotel here decompressing before my long journey home. Here are the demos from my sessions: 

• Programming WCF (workshop)
• The ABC's of Programming WCF
• Message-Oriented WCF
• SOAP, REST, POX, & RSS
• Getting Started with BizTalk Server 2006 R2 (workshop)

Thanks again to the attendees for making this a great event once again, for all the thought provoking questions and discussions along the way. Hope to see you again next year!

I'm going to especially miss the Indian food and running along the Thames each morning. I had some Springbok one night while taking a break from India -- quite good actually.

Richard and Carl had me on .NET Rocks today, show #308. Fun stuff.

This showed up in my inbox yesterday and it was one of those love at first sight moments. How is it that Apple always seems to produce things that I can't seem to live without? They're on a roll. However, I'll probably wait until v2 of this bad boy...hopefully the price of the solid state hard drives will come down a bit by then.

Another nice surprise yesterday -- Apple finally added multi-recipient SMS to iPhone 1.1.3! They also shipped a GPS-like feature into Google Maps that triangulates via cell towers. Plus home screen customization.

My last Service Station column on Extending WCF with Custom Behaviors is online (it's actually been online for a little while now but I missed blogging about it with the holiday craze). Here's the abstract:

Windows^® Communication Foundation (WCF) provides numerous extensibility points that allow developers to customize the runtime behavior for service dispatching and client proxy invocation. You can tap into these extensibility points by writing custom behaviors that can be applied declaratively to your services. This month I'll show you how this process works.

It's that wonderful time of the year again. I have four fundamental career goals for 2008:

1. Provide more value to customers through improved training content and products
2. Increase the effectiveness of our website
3. Publish more technical/training content on this blog
4. Follow the Oslo wave and explore new areas of interest

I also have one crazy personal goal for 2008:

1. Run my first marathon

I have a bunch of other personal goals that I won't bore you with but suffice it to say that 2008 is going to be an interesting year in a lot of ways -- a year of huge change (hmm, perhaps I should run for President).

Microsoft just released a new Web site that aggregates a bunch of BizTalk blogs.  However, I should also point out that when they say “BizTalk“ blogs, they are also covering .NET 3.x and other related technologies. Several of us from Pluralsight are included in the list of aggregated blogs.

This short demo illustrates how to take advantage of the message template feature made available by WCF send ports in BizTalk Server 2006 R2.

This short demo illustrates how to configure a WCF send port to invoke multiple WCF operations by configuring an operation name -> action mapping.

WS-MetadataExchange is a wonderful thing. WCF implements this spec and provides support for it over several different transport protocols including HTTP(S), TCP, and named pipes. All you have to do is choose the appropriate MEX binding.

If you're familiar with how bindings work in WCF, this all makes perfect sense. However, if you pull out .NET Reflector and begin looking for the various System.ServiceModel.Channels.Binding-derived classes, you might be surprised when you don't find any.

I was surprised because when you specify MEX endpoints in configuration, there is a separate binding name for each supported MEX transport (mexHttpBinding, mexHttpsBinding,  mexNamedPipeBinding, and mexTcpBinding). The trick is these binding element names don't map to individual classes but rather to a single class named MetadataExchangeBindings, which provides four public static methods: CreateMexHttpBinding, CreateMexHttpsBinding, CreateMexNamedPipeBinding, and CreateMexTcpBinding, as illustrated here:

public static class MetadataExchangeBindings

{

    // Methods

    public static Binding CreateMexHttpBinding();

    public static Binding CreateMexHttpsBinding();

    public static Binding CreateMexNamedPipeBinding();

    public static Binding CreateMexTcpBinding();

    ...

}

If you inspect the implementation of any of these methods, you'll notice they just create one of the built-in bindings, adjusting some of the defaults, and then they override the binding name and namespace as illustrated here:

public static Binding CreateMexHttpBinding()

{

    return CreateHttpBinding();

}

private static WSHttpBinding CreateHttpBinding()

{

    WSHttpBinding binding = new WSHttpBinding(SecurityMode.None, false);

    binding.Name = "MetadataExchangeHttpBinding";

    binding.Namespace = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2005/02/mex/bindings";

    return binding;

}

In the case of CreateMexHttpBinding, they use the WSHttpBinding but set the security mode to SecurityMode.None. Because they're basically just using the other built-in bindings, they probably figured it wouldn't make sense to define completely new binding classes just for the MEX scenarios...they're really just slightly different configurations.

Obviously this also means that you don't have to actually use the MEX binding element names (or MetadataExchangeBinding) when configuring endpoints to use MEX. Instead you can use the corresponding built-in binding directly as long as you configure it properly for the MEX scenario (like in the example above, I have to set the security mode to SecurityMode.None when using WSHttpBinding).

This short demo illustrates how to use a custom WCF binding via the WCF-Custom adapter in BizTalk Server 2006 R2 -- in this case I show you how to call a WCF service using HTTP and the binary message encoding.

If you run Microsoft Virtual PC on Windows Vista (running via Bootcamp) on your MacBook Pro (I know, I know), you've probably been frustrated by the lack of a real Right-ALT key, which is what you'd normally use to switchin in and out of full-screen mode (the full-screen key sequence is Right-ALT + Enter).

Well, I finally stumbled across a little gem that allows you to remap the “host key“ in Microsoft Virtual PC. The host key allows the “host“ to capture control of the mouse and keyboard from a virtual machine -- and by default it's configured to be Right-ALT. You can remap the “host key” as follows:

1. In the Microsoft Virtual PC console window, select File | Options
2. Select Keyboard
3. Then in the right pane, click on the “Current host key“ text box and press the new key you want to map. I pressed the Right-Apple key on my machine.
4. Press OK and you're done

Once you've done this, you can press Right-Apple + Enter to toggle full-screen mode on your MacBook.

This quick demo shows you how to configure a few BizTalk send ports to call a traditional WCF service using the new WCF adapters found in BizTalk Server 2006 R2.

One of the cool new features in Visual Studio 2008 is automated debugging for WCF service libraries. Simply create a new WCF Service Library project (using the new WCF project templates), press F5, and voila!

When you press F5, Visual Studio launches WcfSvcHost.exe, a generic WCF host application that hosts your service library. WCF Service Library projects now come with an App.config file -- this is where WcfSvcHost.exe reads the service/endpoint configuration during initialization. A generic WCF client application (WcfTestClient.exe) is also started, and it communicates with your service via MEX to download metadata. It provides a generic mechanism for filling out the data required by each service operation, invoking the operation, and viewing the results. It even works with complex types unlike the ASMX-generated test forms. Sweet.

You can configure the service library to use a custom client application if you desire. Go to the Debug tab within the project properties and specify your app as a command-line argument ( /client:“YourClient.exe“ ).

Note: for some reason the latest drop of the BizTalk Services SDK (0.9.0324.0) breaks this feature. So if you have the BizTalk Services SDK installed and you try pressing F5, you'll most likely get the following exception:

Unhandled exception has occured in your application. If you click Continue, the application will ignore this error and attempt to continue. If you click Quit, the application will close immediately.

Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

If you uninstall the BizTalk Services SDK, this feature will work normally once again.

One of my sessions at Teched Europe was a completely interactive deep-dive session on the WCF Adapters. There wasn't one slide, only code, for 75 minutes. That's my kind of presentation!

For those that attended, you can download the demo code I walked through here. Anyone else is welcome to it as well, it just probably won't make much sense of out of context.