Blogging after a long time ...

Many things have happened during these days. First of all working - a lot of work before new year and after. Mostly paperwork, not the most interesting part of the job, but that’s what I am paid for.

Also, during free time I was reading other blogs, looking around MS CRM, ASP.Net 2.0 and helping collegues with BizTalk workflows and other stuff. Too many things at once.

Just recently I was helping one developer to create a BizTalk workflow that works with SQL database, HTTP endpoint and aggregates information from both sources. Once he said: “I am receiving a message from port, but the Visual Studio complains that the message is not assigned”. When I looked at the solution - the first thing fell into my eyes: DECISION, where the message was assigned in one branch, but not in the other. So typical, so many bugs are caused by an overlooked “else”. After short discussion about good/bad programming practices I just added: “Anyway, BizTalk and Visual Studio just have performed simple test and found a bug in Your program. Time to fix it ”.

After a day or two he came back: “My test application reports expected ’text/xml’, but actual result was ‘’ for the process”. May the force be with the all developers of the world, but without looking at the code I knew - it was famous 500: Internal Server Error. Sometimes I think I understand the MS PSS people.

Currently digging around ASP.Net 2.0. There is a lot of nice stuff starting with Wizard control, ending with full blown infrastructure for user profiles, nice configuration tools (admins will be happy with that I hope). After some time I hope I will come with some more information from the battlefield.

One more interesting thing to mention. Recently I had to develop set of .Net components for the existing system running .Net 1.1. I have decided that VS.Net 2005 with all testing infrastructure and other nice features will be much more usefull, then the compilation with VS.Net 2003. The experience was quite good, everything is integrated, much faster to develop and test code and now it runs.