Category: Readings

General, LINQ, Readings, SOA

Snow and LINQ

thejohanhedberg

For those of you wondering where I’ve been – I’ve been on vacation for the last 10 days, skiing and snowboarding. Although slightly of topic for this blog I just have to share one of the pictures we took with you, to give you an idea of the wonderful snow and weather we had. And yes, that’s me in the midst of that snow. And no, I’m not about to fall, we just had alot of snow.



For those who know me, you know I like to bring some litterature along on my vacations to catch up on some topic of interest. This time that topic was LINQ and the reading was the free ebook from Microsoft press: Introducing Microsoft LINQ. Go here for details about the book and the free ebook offer. I’ve listened in on presentation about LINQ before, but not lately, and they have never gone deeper than to show the grace of the syntax, and talk about why LINQ was developed and what you can do with it. The ebook also talks about the language syntax and background, but goes into more detail about the .NET language features that enables LINQ, and their history and evolution. Good stuff.


Of the different aspects I’ve learned about LINQ I most like the idea of LINQ as a SOA enabler, rather than a simple data access language. Being able to do join, where, etc. on data returned from different Services being called in parallell, all wrapped up in a simple functional statement. That’s where LINQ really becomes useful. 

BizTalk, Readings

BizTalk Server Operations Guide

thejohanhedberg

A valuable resource for anyone involved in the implementation and administration of a BizTalk solution, particularly IT professionals. The guide provides detailed information for planning a BizTalk Server environment, as well as recommendations and best practices for configuring, testing, maintaining, monitoring, and optimizing this environment.

 

After browsing through it I find some things kind of “blah”, simply selected parts of the help file put together in a new format, while other parts really does provide guidance that goes outside the contents of the help file, certainly worthy the term valuable resource. The contributors list includes names such as Ahmed Metwally (Pro BizTalk 2006) and Darren Jefford (Professional BizTalk Server 2006) to name a few. The BizTalk Server Operations Guide also has alot more content then the earlier released Developers Guide to Troubleshooting (Note: I’m not comparing them, they are aimed at different groups of people for different situations, but it’s the last thing released as a complement to the core documentation named to be a guide). Weighing in at a healthy 627 pages I wouldn’t recommend you to read it straight through, but I’m definatly going to read selected parts. Another great addition to the already competent BizTalk Server documentation.