NDepend: Manage your .NET Code

Many of will like myself will code once and a while. As a BizTalk professional it is inevitable that you will code for instance a pipeline component, a helper class, functoid, or other custom code to support your solution or test.

There are many tools available to make you more productive and provide you ability to create robust and high quality code. Either you find open source tools through Codeplex, utilities/tools through Microsoft or commercial ones.

One of the tools I got acquinted with is NDepend. It is a Visual Studio tool to manage complex .NET code and achieve high Code Quality. With NDepend, software quality can be measured using Code Metrics, visualized using Graphs and Treemaps, and enforced using standard and custom Rules. I received a copy of this tool through Patrick Smacchia (owner of NDepend) to review.

Installation of the tool is pretty straight forward. Once installed on your machine by unpacking it in a file folder you can start using either NDepend.PowerTools or VisualNDepend.Through VisualNdepend you can install the VS2012 Addin.



When starting VS2012 I find the NDepend Addin in my menu bar.



I will now create my first NDPEND project. I click new and give project a name.



I add assemblies from a project I created recently or in the past from a BizTalk solution. I choose of one of my solutions, which I created for BizTalk Server 2010 Cookbook.



I can then run an analysis of one of more assemblies. A report will be created popping up in my browser.



This report provided me with a lot details about my solution. Within Visual Studio I am provided with more information through NDepend Error list, and so on. This can be down within a few minute giving you a clear picture of your solution.

I have just scratched the surface with what I described in this post, yet this tool shows a lot of potential (see also this review). There are many great features offered through this tool and I recommend you try it out.  I believe my future projects will be even in a better shape using this tool!

Cheers,

Steef-Jan

BizTalk Community Series: Introducing Rob Fox

It’s spring time and the sun is shining. BizTalk Server has been released and a lot of events are organized or are about to take place; launch parties, user group meeting and large events like TechEd’s. The BizTalk community is vibrant. A lot of us MVP’s will be on stage coming weeks at these different events. We are joined by people from the community. One of them is Rob Fox. Today’s story is on him.

Rob, living together in the south of The Netherlands with his lovely girlfriend Marjolein, a dog and two cats. He works as a BizTalk Consultant for QNH and if he has any time left he likes to build apps for the Windows (Phone) environment.

“The last one is just for fun. Making money out of it is pretty difficult if you are not busy with it full time.” 

Besides spending time with Marjolein, walking the dog, building an app or the occasional website, Rob also does (Front-of-House) sound and tour management for one of Holland's bigger metal bands - Carach Angren.

“It's been fun to do, because it's just a different world altogether and it brings you all over the world.”

Like myself Rob is a metalhead and has similar musical taste. He is a catcher in a very un-European sport, baseball and he can be found at the gym a few times a week.

“The gym is in the Snow world building, so sometimes I might end up on a snowboard instead :) During the summer months I also like to ride the mountain bike.”

Rob mainly focusses on architecture and developing, sometimes forced into administration as well, because in most smaller companies you are "the guy who knows BizTalk".

“Although to most developers BizTalk is seen as evil, I like the product. I guess it takes a few years to appreciate the product as you will use more and more aspects of BizTalk. Problem solving skills will increase heavily and you will also fall far less for all of BizTalk's pitfalls. As your solutions start to be more robust, it works like a charm. Often other developers will accuse BizTalk of doing something wrong, but in the end it will always be either another system failing or me. Not having configured everything like I should or even a programming error, of course very very rarely :)”

Rob has a clear vision on integration:

“A new era of integration has started now (not only for Microsoft). We are starting to integrate with the cloud more and more. Therefor bringing BizTalk's features to the cloud will be pretty important. I have been busy with Windows Azure for a while now and I am pretty curious what BizTalk Services will have to offer.”

Rob hasn’t posted something on his own blog in a while and right now it's even down.

“Something to do with an instance and an object... I want to pick it up again soon and will be rebuilding the blog. I also roam around the BizTalk forums and answer questions, if I know the answer that is. Contributing to the community is a pretty important thing. If we hadn't had all those active bloggers and forum-dwellers like Steef-Jan, we would probably still be trying to solve some of the HRESULT issues we had.”

Rob likes presenting and he has done some talks about BizTalk at the Dutch BizTalk User Group, but he can also be found doing a talk on Windows Phone at other conferences. He is not the serious talker though, work is serious enough. Rob likes to mingle around in code (hands-on) and try and trigger the audience to pick it up themselves.

A final word from Rob:

“Steef-Jan, thanks for this opportunity. You contributed a lot to the community and I am pretty thankful for that. Some of my solutions may have been based on some of your posts. And of course always fun chatting at meetings, whether it's about BizTalk or just some kick-ass bands.”

I like to thank Rob for his time and contributions to the community.

Cheers,

Steef-Jan

BizTalk Administration Story Complete

With the latest release of a BizTalk administration white paper by Tord G. Nordahl the story of running and maintaining BizTalk is complete. Through BizTalk360 site you can obtain the white paper: Proactively keep an eye on health of your Microsoft BizTalk Server Environments. This paper will you learn how to pro-actively avoid some of the scenarios like unplanned downtime, data loss or crippled BizTalk environments.

Then there is of course another white paper which you can download from BizTalk360 site called: BizTalk Monitoring Solutions white paper by Kent Weare. With this paper you can learn the differences and similarities between two of best BizTalk monitoring tools available today: System Center Operation Manager and BizTalk360.

That is not all as Jeroen Hendriks owner of BizTalkAdminsblogging has wrote a paper called: How to Properly Administer and Operate a BizTalk Server Infrastructure.

And finally there is a white paper created by myself and released last December: Supportability and operations of Microsoft BizTalk Server. The white paper discusses supportability of BizTalk Server. Something you should be thinking of when setting up a BizTalk environment or when your current environment lacks or needs improvement in that aspect.

With all these papers in hand you should be able to properly setup your BizTalk support process, monitoring and procedures. All of us in a certain way colloborated together on these papers together with experts from the field like Saravana Kumar, Sandro Perreira, Hendrik Roth, Alexander Thue, Erik Thue, and Nino Crudele. Nino also has an excellent paper out through BizTalk360 called: BizTalk Server Assessment and Architecture Review.

To conclude your BizTalk administration story can be made complete if you follow up and apply what has been written in these papers. With the wealth of all the information, hints and tips your BizTalk environment should be healthy 24/7!

Cheers,

Steef-Jan

BizTalk Community Series: Introducing Jérémy Ronk

This month I will be introducing two BizTalk community members from France. Almost two weeks ago I introduced Maxime Labelle and today the story will be on Jérémy Ronk.

Jérémy is a young married man, who lives near Paris. He is an active swimmer and likes to hike in the mountains. In his spare time he does all sorts of things like studying other technologies than BizTalk such as StreamInsight, photography, gardening and woodworking.

Jérémy has been a BizTalk professional for 4 years now and January of this year he got a role as an Integration architect. As for his career he says the following:

“As far as my expertise is concerned, I have been working on each domain. I started
developing some basic artifacts, maps, orchestration... Then, I got some more interesting
issue which required me to develop a custom pipeline, create a correlation, using BAM.... My
knowledge grows up month after month about the BizTalk world. At the same time, I discovered administration tasks and optimizations.”

Jérémy continued to gain experience and became a technical leader for BizTalk development in his company. He got more involved with more design questions and infrastructure. With his latest project he was assigned an architect role and got involved in many aspects from BizTalk Server:

• Defining infrastructure
• Non-functional requirements: performance, security, scalability, availability
• Development
• Deployment
• Administration and monitoring

A final quote from Jérémy:

“To my readers of my blog, I would like to say : thank you very much reading my blog.”

I like to thank Jérémy for his time and contributions to the BizTalk Community.

Cheers,

Steef-Jan

BizTalk Community Series: Introducing Maxime Labelle

I was pretty busy last couple of weeks preparing for my integration session for Lead Architect Program Norway. I will more or less teaching a class full of students about integration with Microsoft Integration stack. My focus will be on Windows Azure Service Bus and BizTalk Server 2013.

The day before I will head over to Norway I would like to share another story with a BizTalk community member. I was in Paris beginning of the month and I will be focusing on France BizTalk Community this month. Today’s story will be on fellow Microsoft Integration MVP Maxime Labelle a software architect and developer, who has been involved in software development on the Microsoft Platform for more than 15 years.

“I'm mostly interested in science and technology and that's why I chose to work in computer science which, I feel, is one of a few areas where it's possible to "create" things starting from a simple idea.”

Maxime lives in Paris, France, with his wife and three children (aged 12, 11 and 8). He enjoys sharing time with them, cooking and playing or teaching music. He is a big fan of Indian curry dishes, which he learned how to cook when he spent a year in London with some of his former colleagues. He also likes to prepare and cook various pastries. This is something I have in common with Maxim as I enjoy curries myself when I am in the UK and learned to prepare them when I worked in Swindon for few months ten years ago.

Maxime love for music has been an inspiration for all his children. All of them practice a musical instrument, oboe for one, piano for the others and he himself practices classical piano. He likes to spend time training his children to improve their skills. When he is not with them, he enjoys his technical hobbies.

“I'm mostly reading a lot of blogs, related to space and computer science.”

Maxime is a puzzle collector - and likes to resolve "twisty" mechanical puzzles - those akin to the famous Rubik's Cube. He has a collection of more than 30 different puzzles of various "cuboid" shapes and sizes and is always on the lookout for new variants.

Maxime is a big fan of Formula 1 racing, and is always trying to watch the Grand-Prix as the season unfolds. He likes the technological aspect of the sport - particularly the endless ability for engineers to try and find clever tricks to improve the performance - as much as the drama underlined by the rivalry between drivers.

“Although I'm not much of an athlete, I have been practicing water-skiing in summer times for more than ten years and, once a year, have the immense privilege to spend a week practicing casual skiing. I'm also a big fan of Motorsport and like to practice go-karts from time to time. But, most of the time, we spend the summer holidays together with my family just trekking around in places with gorgeous landscapes - mountains mostly.”

Finally Maxime also likes to read books that read like you're watching a fast paced movie, particularly from English or American authors, in their native language. His favorite authors are John Grisham, Michael Crichton, and Lee Child. Some of my favorite authors too.

“I think I've read every single one of their books!”

Three years ago, Maxime started to specialize in designing and building EAI/ESB solutions with BizTalk at a large consulting firm. When he had acquired a reasonable experience of BizTalk, he started to create some training courses on BizTalk Server 2009 and 2010 for an external audience.

“That's when I started to be involved in the community and wanted to contribute my knowledge. Being a "problem solver" kind of guy, I thought that creating a blog to share tips, workarounds and clever solutions to various problems I encountered during my projects would be a good way to communicate.”

Maxime also started developing and maintaining a PowerShell Provider for BizTalk Server around that time. Very quickly, he joined forces with Randal, who had independently come up with a similar provider. They merged their code and have been maintaining the project since then.

“Although it's been several long months I haven't contributed to the project, I plan to improve and modernize it for BizTalk Server 2013 sometime this year.”

June 2012 Maxime offered his help to a small company called Moskitos, a startup company where, with the help of his fellow MVP Jérémie, design and build an EAI/ESB Platform on Windows Azure, available as a service for our clients. It has, since then, consumed all his focus and energy, and that's why is he has been a bit quiet on the BizTalk front for a while.

Maxime’s BizTalk expertise is a bit of architecture and a lot of development, particularly custom pipeline components.

“I think BizTalk is a great product and, like all Microsoft products, offers a lot of ways to be extended. I'm very interested in building solutions as lightweight as possible and using as few orchestrations as possible. I think messaging-only solutions are very elegant and I like to build custom pipeline components to overcome basic limitations that other developers or architect would use an orchestration for. Besides, even in scenarios involving orchestrations, message transformations are best done using an in-memory pipeline.”

Final quote from Maxime:

“I like to thank you very much for taking the time to get to know people involved in the community and promote their work and contributions. The community of BizTalk experts is fantastic. They all know that BizTalk is a huge product, difficult to master and yet, they take the time to contribute solutions, side projects, articles and blog posts for sharing their knowledge. I myself have taken advantage of all those resources to help improve my skills and, although I haven't had the chance yet, am looking forward to participating in a future MVP summit to meet members of the community in person.”

I like to thank Maxime for his time and contributions to the BizTalk Community.

Cheers,

Steef-Jan

BizTalk Community Series: Introducing Mitch VanHelden

The BizTalk community is awesome. I get to spend time with many of them during my travels abroad when speaking to them. A week ago I had the opportunity to speak in Porto during the Oporto BizTalk Innovation event. My upcoming next BizTalk events in Italy (June) and Norway (September) are planned and its preparations have already started.

BizTalk Server 2013 will soon be generally available as it is in RTM right now. I believe many BizTalk professionals that have access to MSDN and must have downloaded and installed it already on a VM. Like one of my colleagues, who has already posted a nice article on which possible issues you might run into when installing the 2013 RTM.

The story today for the BizTalk community series will be on Mitch VanHelden, who also recently blogged on the RTM release.

Mitch is 27 years old, married to Anne-Lore and has two lovely kids (a 4-year old boy Lars and a 2-year old daughter Chloë). He lives with his family in a small town called Rotem, in Belgium. It happens to be that Mitch likes Metal like myself. Both he and his wife listen to metal music and try to catch a gig once in a while. Sounds familiar to me :)

Mitch plays the drums, and has also been in a band for a brief moment, but he just did not have enough time for it. He spends the spare time that he has as much as possible with his family, and to play soccer and badminton. To keep a bit in shape in between seasons he tries to play tennis during the summer. All of these sports are practiced with some of the local amateur clubs.

“I also love snowboarding, but as the children are still a bit young I haven’t been on a snowboarding trip for several years now.”

Mitch is also a fan of the Belgian soccer team KRC Genk and enjoys watching the national soccer team of Germany.

Mitch started his career as a general .NET developer back in 2008, but soon came in touch with BizTalk (BizTalk2006 R2 to be more precise). And he just knew that this was the career path he would like to pursue and started specializing in developing BizTalk applications.

Mitch currently works as a consultant for Cnext in Belgium. His role is no longer limited to only BizTalk development. He also has an active administrator role these days and is gaining more and more experience in architecture. One of his goals is to set out a learning path in BizTalk monitoring and best practices with the purpose of gaining more knowledge and experience. One of his current activities in that area is working with BizTalk360.

“Besides my daily working tasks, I’m also the sole contributor and administrator of the Cnext Blog. I also have some blog contributions on BizTalkadminsBlogging and my own blog. Although lately I’m not nearly posting as much as I would like to. Yet I would love to thank all the people reading my blog, and hope many of them have found a solution to their problem or at least helped them getting in the right direction.”

Mitch has the following to say about BizTalk Server:

“There have been quite some rumors about the future of BizTalk. But I’m glad Microsoft comes with the all new release of BizTalk 2013 soon, stating that BizTalk is here to stay. Which is a good thing, as more and more companies are using it. And I think BizTalk Server is just the absolute best to use for integration purposes. It is very powerful, reliable, flexible and comes with all kinds of integration possibilities.”

The final comments from Mitch:

“Thanks Steef-Jan for this great opportunity, and also congrats on your blog. I love reading your blog as it always have the newest technologies in BizTalk explained and tested.”

and

“I like to call out to all to also share your knowledge with the BizTalk community, it certainly helps people out.”

Thanks Mitch for your time and contributions to the BizTalk community.

Cheers,

Steef-Jan

BizTalk Server 2013: It is RTM now!

I will be not the first nor last one that will blog, tweet or share through other social media that BizTalk Server 2013 is RTM. The 8th release in little over twelve years. That is amazing as I do not believe any Server Product has such a release cadence. Impressive as the Microsoft BizTalk Server Product keeps pushing out new features in the product.

There was talk, rumors or loud statements that this product was near its end. Some even pronounced or claimed it was dead. Au contraire is still alive as Microsoft will keep innovating the on-premise version. Besides on-premise you can run BizTalk in a VM i.e. IaaS solution for development/testing purposes. That is not all as BizTalk Services will follow in the Windows Azure Platform. This will be an enhancement of the previous EAI/EDI labs.

Microsoft’s BizTalk strategy will be that there is one BizTalk, on-premise and in the cloud.

The cadence of the Windows Azure BizTalk Services will differ as it will be innovated in a faster pace. I expect that the new on-premise release will follow in two years as we are accustomed to. In the end I believe the product will merge to one service that can be deployed on-premise or leveraged in Windows Azure.

The RTM of BizTalk is available through MSDN now and can be purchased starting in April. I like many fellow BizTalk professionals and Integration MVP’s will download it and install it on a VM.

Cheers,

Steef-Jan