I've had alot of people ask when I am teaching WF next - if you are interested in sitting through me talking about WF for four intense days - come to laid-back Australia.  Pluralsight is teaming up with Readify to offer the course.  I'm super excited since this will be my first trip to Australia.  I can't wait.  If you are in the area - or just want an excuse to come to Australia - sign up ;-)

Applied Windows Workflow Foundation in Australia Nov 13-17th  

I just got done with my TechEd session on using WF and WCF - if you attended the session - here is the code: teched2007.zip (474.59 KB).  If you didn't attend my session "This is not the code you are looking for ....." ;-)

Thanks for everyone who came (295 people - wow!). 

BTW - here are the three best and worst thing about teched 2007 according to the people in my session:

BEST
1)HOL (hands on labs)
2)Just the Information
3)BOF (birds of a feather sessions)

Worst
1)Bathrooms (this was the men only of course)
2)Buses(slow/scalable)
3)Session are too short

So today I was lucky enough to be invited on stage during the TechEd 2007 Keynote.

I got the job of carrying a box that was tagged with an RFID tag.  You can watch the video here . I appear at 1:09:11 (not that you shouldn't watch the whole thing ;-))

 

Here I am carrying a box that has an RFID label on it.  Mike Woods is about to scan the RFID tage with an RFID reader.   He annouced me as being "Jon Flanders from Jon Flanders' delivery service" :-)

So why am I up on stage holding a box?  Have I given up dev for package delivery?

The reason I was lucky enough to be on stage with Mike Woods and Bob Muglia - is that I wrote the RFID event handler code that was used in the software for the keynote.  It took the tag read from the device - and then enriched the data with GPS data from a GPS deviced that was attached to the same computer that the RFID reader is attached to.  Pretty cool stuff.

You can read more about Microsoft BizTalk RFID here.  Many thanks to Cathexis - who provided the RFID reader device

I and Pluralsight are excited to announce another new BizTalk Server 2006 R2 course - one specifically geared toward RFID!  Check it out here - http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/AppliedBizTalkRfid.aspx  no public offerings schedule yet - but there should be one RSN.

So I had to fire up my XP laptop today because my new Rode Podcaster microphone (which is otherwise is totally awesome) won't start on Vista despite getting a usbaudio.sys hotfix from MS Support (which was a suprisingly painless experience). 

Anyway - cleaning out my old harddrive I found this picture:

 

This is a picture of the BAM portal.  What I was doing was using BAM to give me some rough performance metrics between two version of an orchestration.  In the "XmlDocument" version of the orchestration I was reading in a 9MB Xml file into BizTalk.  In the orchestration I was passing the document to a .NET component as "XmlDocument" and reading the whole document.  This is the typical example code you'll find for reading BizTalk messages from .NET code.

In the "XmlReader" version of the orchestration - I was passing the message as XLANGMessage.  This is the underlying datatype that the Orchestration compiler uses to represent a message.  Only when you pass it to a .NET component as XmlDocument do they actually convert it to an XmlDocument (even if your message type on your orchestration is System.Xml.XmlDocument btw).  Inside of the method my code looked something like this:

public static XmlDocument FromMsg(XLANGMessage old)
{
    //get at the data
    XmlDocument ret = new XmlDocument();
    XmlReader reader = (XmlReader)old[0].RetrieveAs(typeof(XmlReader));
    //construct new message from old
    //read property
    object msgid = old.GetPropertyValue(typeof(BTS.MessageID));
    return ret;
}

By calling RetrieveAs and passing typeof(XmlReader) I avoid loading the BizTalk message into a DOM - and can read the message using standard XmlReader techniques. 

As you can see from the BAM metrics (which is not an absolutely high performance timing mechanism - but in this case should be close enough) the XmlDocument version took about 3xs as long as the XmlReader version.  So rule of thumb - if you care about performance - use XmlReader with XLANGMessage - not XmlDocument for your .NET methods from an Orchestration.

Unfortunately the XLANGs compiler won't allow us to return XmlReader as the return value - so for constructing we are still stuck with the DOM.

A few people have asked me about what courses I am teaching in the near future.

Coming up in June - I'll be teaching Pluralsight's Applied BizTalk Server 2006 in Dallas - http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/appliedbiztalkserver2006.aspx

In July - I'll be teaching the R2 version of the same course in Los Angeles - http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/appliedbiztalkserver2006.aspx.  Come and we'll have a big party - the course starts on my birthday!

Thanks Irving! - http://blogs.msdn.com/irvingd/pages/biztalk-rfid-device-provider-dspi-for-phidget-devices.aspx

Thanks to my friend and fellow BizTalk MVP Brian Loesgen - I'll be speaking May 22nd at the San Diego .NET User Group on two of my favorite technologies - WF and WCF and how to use them together successfully today - even without Orcas!   Come out if you are in the SD area.

So if you are interesting in how to integrate WCF and WF today (yes all the cool new WCF/WF stuff in Orcas is really cool - but still some number of months away) - please come to my pre-con at TechED US - https://www.msteched.com/public/precons.aspx#PRCN15  I'll be doing it with my good friend Richard Blewett - which should be a good combination of technical learning and fun.

If you've attended my R2 jumpstart training you've seen me use the phidget device.  Irving is the author of the provider - watch his blog as well - but I'll post here when he posts it (which he says will be RSN) - http://blogs.msdn.com/irvingd/