We use Google apps for all our domain management, so far we trusted it's spam filter logic heavily. We never checked it. We give our contact email address every where, we don't normally tend to manipulate our email address like contact at biztalk360.com. It's purely because we thought the spam filters are much matured now and we are ok.

But this morning we had a shock and disaster situation. We are dealing with one of the biggest customer, and a senior person in the company emailed us yesterday asking for more information and a demo. But Google for some reason treated that as spam and dumped it straight into the spam folder. Luckily someone else who know my personal email address within the organisation emailed me about the situation, which triggered me to check the spam folder.

To my sock, I noticed at least 7 emails in the past 30 days that were genuine in the spam folder. As a start-up we tend to reply back to the emails within 20 minutes. We really can't afford to lose interested customers. This is a a disaster for us. For those who emailed us at contact at biztalk360.com and haven't received a reply, we sincerely apologies for the mistake.

Now it's in our process to check the spam folder twice a day.

Nandri!

Saravana Kumar

This is neat! while downloading some large content this morning I've noticed the following scene in my taskbar : Download status showing directly on the taskbar button.

I think its important the blog authors subscribe to their own blog to see how it looks inside a blog reader. If your blog looks like this inside a reader, then you are most likely throwing away some of your readers.

Having a "read more" link at the end and only giving snippet of source in your feed is well and good for high volume feeds like bbc news, msdn articles, google news, etc where its more likely you'll get tons of articles every few hours. But for a personal blog, with maximum 1 or 2 content per day I don't think its a good idea. Personally I'm experiencing few difficulties due to this.

1. At work (working for a financial institution) majority of the sites like wordpress, blogger, geekswithblogs etc are blocked. But we are allowed to use few well known blog readers like BlogLines, FeedReader etc.  That means, its not an issue reading a blog post via BlogLines even though the original content is from a word press url. At times we may not be able to see some images, but majority of the time we'll get the content.

2. Personally I don't think people will be interested in clicking the title and visiting an external link to read the content, especially these days we watch way over minimum 100 blogs.

What's your thought?

Nandri!

Saravana

Today I took the plunge and installed Windows 7 beta on my main laptop (its a MacBook by the way). Previously it was running windows Vista 32 bit via boot camp.

The upgrade was very smooth without any manual intervention. After starting the install selecting the country and keyboard layout there was no human intervention.

After the installation, there were few alerts telling McAfee is not compatible with Windows 7 and there are some known issues. Apart from that everything seems fine.

I tried to activate windows first, it didn't work. It resulted with the error code "Error 0x80072EE2",  I tried running windows update that didn't work either (resulted in similar error but with different error code). But it gave me some clue, saying the connection is timing out.

I couldn't find any useful articles on the web for the issue, simply turning off the McAfee personal firewall did the trick.

There is currently a beta program going on for McAfee, I just installed it http://www.microsoft.com/windows/antivirus-partners/windows-7.aspx there are couple of issues. Virus Scanning is not working properly in McAfee security suite.

I enabled windows firewall and defender for time being.

Update: Reinstalling McAfee security centre beta from the web site fixed the issue. Now McAfee Security Centre beta is up and running without any issues.

The first impression of Windows 7 is great, as few people mentioned this is how Vista should have looked couple of years ago.

Nandri!

Saravana

As an MVP I've been involved in series of web conferences and SDR (Software design reviews) related to "Dublin". As Darren mentioned here, the news came bit earlier than expected. It is more exciting time for people involved in Connected system development (Windows Communication[WCF] and Windows Workflow[WF]). I believe release of Dublin will take us to the next step, much closer to building enterprise scale applications using WCF/WF. Even though WCF got a rich hosting model, due to the lack of proper application server to host, enterprises always tend to use IIS as their hosting server. It's fine, there is nothing wrong with it, but at end of the day IIS is designed for a different purpose to serve web pages, not services. With the introduction of Dublin, things will change drastically. People coming from BizTalk background will see more similarities in Dublin, we (biztalkers) been enjoying the power and richness of the hosting platform provided by BizTalk for years now.

At my current client, recently I had been involved with series of discussion with our "Enterprise Architecture" group to discuss the usage of our "Business Services" by our web UI channel. Our "Business Services" are set of composite services sitting on top of application services, build using BizTalk Orchestrations. Our current production setup is tuned for high throughput(volume), with Web Channel coming into the picture, we need to tune the same services for low-latency.  To some extend we need to bend BizTalk to address some of the low latency scenarios (example: using inline send from orchestration while calling application services to avoid MessageBox hops). As part of the discussion, its been brought on board to evaluate "IBM WebSphere Message Broker 6.1" to address the low latency scenario.

I been tasked with evaluating the IBM WMB product. In WMB there is no concept of persistence, everything happens in-memory. In certain cases you can use WebSphere MQ as persistence store. It got a rich hosting platform (concept of broker, execution group, Configuration Manager - Similar to Host/Host Instances in BizTalk). You can design message flow (equivalent to Orchestration)  with nodes (equivalent to Adapters). You can consume web services and expose message flows as web services. etc, etc. Most of the WMB concepts will have similarities with Windows WorkFlow (WF), but work flow was lagging a a rich hosting environment. Customers need to write their own, which in most cases will be too expensive to bring it to enterprise scale. With the announcement of "Dublin" that's going to change.

NOTE: WMB is full featured broker (middleware) product, WF and WMB are similar but not like for like.

Exciting times ahead!!

Nandri

Saravana

Below table summarizes the undergone changes. The objective is NOT to cause any disruption to blog readers(subscribers), try to preserve the search engine ranking and migrate the URL to new home safely.  Its not a trivial task, so I took some time to put this article, so that it can help few people out there. Even though this article is focused from blogger.com to blogengine.net, majority of the concepts will apply to any blog migration.

Task	From	To
Engine	http://www.Blogger.com	BlogEngine.NET 1.4
URL	www.digitaldeposit.net/blog	blogs.digitaldeposit.net/saravana/
ISP	1and1.co.uk	Will take some time to mention them
UI

I started blogging in March 2005, its slightly over 3 years now. Even though I'm not a prolific blogger I've blogged quite a bit mainly on BizTalk server and my target audience is always people around BizTalk, SOA, BPM space and occasionally about .NET / ASP. I used Google's blogger.com and their ability to FTP the files to remote server functionality for my blogging needs. This helped me to keep the blog posting at my own domain http://www.digitaldeposit.net/blog/. Blogger's FTP functionality didn't give the same level of functionality you'll get by using their own allocated url (ex: http://digitaldeposit.blogspot.com) and their own hosting. When it comes to blogger and FTP, theme support is really cumbersome, doesn't support archiving properly, doesn't support categories (labels) properly etc, etc. Also, when it comes to comments, it will take you to bloggers own page, which I guess undoubtedly put some users off. Apart from all these issues, my blog missed lot of basic requirements of a blog site, things like search, tag cloud, archive,  etc and it was not easy to browse through the blog content. Unless otherwise a search engine finds my article, its very unlikely you'll be able to get to it. I'll explain here the whole migration process:

Blog Engine Selection:

The first choice I had to make is selecting the right blog engine for me, this time I want to host my own engine (ASP .NET 2.0 based, really don't have a choice here) and cut down all the inter dependencies. I reviewed few of the available ones in the market like Community Server, DasBlog, Graffiti CMS, and ended up using BlogEngine.NET 1.4 a open source one, just because of its simplicity.

Setting up BlogEngine.NET:

Setting up BlogEngine.NET is so simple, it hardly took me 2 minutes. Create a virtual directory to the folder, right click on "App_Data" folder and give write access (within IIS on properties page), open windows explorer, right-click on "App_Data" folder and give IIS_WPG group write access (Windows 2003 machine). Now you are ready to go, its that simple.

You login using the username/password "admin/admin", create a new user, give admin rights, set your preferred password and delete the original admin account.

Migration from Blogger.com:

The next big step is, I need to make sure I can port all the content from Blogger.Com to the new engine. BlogEngine.NET had the option to Import/Export. It supported BlogML/RSS format for import and BlogML format for export. BlogML is an open source format aimed at migrating blogs from one provider to another. New Blogger.com site (http://draft.blogger.com) got the option to export your blog, but the only option available is to export it in ATOM format. I found a useful PowerShell script to do the conversion, but it didn't work out straight away due to some namespace issues. Due to my lack of PowerShell experience I ported the script to C# . During the conversion I can see the elegance of PowerShell while working with Xml structure. In lot of places a 1 line PowerShell script will translate to 4 lines in C#.

Tools:

In order to migrate my blog I created 3 small utilities:

1. BlogML Generator : This one is basically used to generate the BlogML xml file reading the data from my blogger.com account using Google gdata API. It retrieves all the blog posts with comments (labels-categories are not handled) to generate the BlogML xml file. 

2. SiteMap Generator: This tool will create the sitemap file from the file system (structure created by blogger.com on your FTP location). The tool can only work with physical file system, so you should download the full blog content using a FTP client to your local machine and run it.

3. ISAPI_REWITE Generator: This tool will generate the ISAPI_REWRITE rules with the help of the original (the one created in previous step) and new site map files (BlogEngine .NET provides one out of the box). This is the key piece responsible for redirecting my old url's to new ones.

Note: These utilities are not bullet proof, it just did the job for me, hopefully it will do it for you as well.

Once the BlogML file is generated, then the import process is piece of cake! On the bottom of the setting tab (after you login) you'll see the options to import/export. Click on the import button and provide all the details asked (there are validation button to check the data you've entered) and click Import. Its fairly quick.

DOWNLOAD THE TOOLS HERE (TBD)

URL Change:

I decided to move my blog to a brand new URL http://blogs.digitaldeposit.net/saravana/ for various personal reasons. I thought this is the best time to do it since, the blog engine migration is going to change all the URL's any way. So, it doesn't matter that much whether the domain name remains the same or not.

URL Redirection:

This is the key (Scary!!) piece, took me longer time than I anticipated to get it correct (hopefully!!).  For some keywords like "biztalk soap adapter" fortunately the no 1. result in Google points to my blog and obviously I don't want to loose it. 

In order to tackle this issue, I decided to redirect every single URL from my old blog to new one. URLRewriter is a big topic on ASP .NET world. This article from Scott Guthrie's  will give you an idea. I analysed few solutions their pros and cons and decided to use the free version of ISAPI_REWRITE from HeliconTech, it seems reliable, free version of a commercial product and its been referred by people like Scott Hanselman and Jeff Atwood .

The first thing I'm interested to sort out is the entry points to my blog, I want only one single entry to my personal online presence. Once you sit with a pen and paper you'll me amazed with the number of entry points you'll have to your blog. The below figures gives you an idea of what I mean by single entry point.

More the number of entry points you have, you are diluting the search engine traffic. For search engines every URL is different, and they work on the basis of page rank. If every single person referring to my blog is pointed to one single URL, that's obviously going to create more votes for my blog and hence the chance of getting higher page rank.

Here are my rules.

#RewriteLogLevel 9
#LogLevel debug

#Rule 1
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Host} ^(digitaldeposit.net|www.digitaldeposit.net)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/blog(/)?(default.htm)?$ [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://blogs.digitaldeposit.net/saravana/ [R=301,L]

#Rule 2
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Host} ^(digitaldeposit.net|www.digitaldeposit.net)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(/)?(default.htm|default.aspx|index.htm)?$ [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://blogs.digitaldeposit.net/saravana/ [R=301,L]

#Rule 3
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Host} ^(blogs.digitaldeposit.net)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(/)?(default.aspx|default.htm|index.htm)?$ [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://blogs.digitaldeposit.net/saravana/ [R=301,L]

#Rule 4
RewriteRule ^/saravana/(default.aspx|default.htm|index.htm)?$ http://blogs.digitaldeposit.net/saravana/ [R=301,L]

RewriteRule ^/blog/2008/06/read-this-before-using-btscleanupmsgbox.html$ http://blogs.digitaldeposit.net/saravana/post/2008/06/04/Read-this-before-using-bts_CleanupMsgBox-stored-procedure.aspx [R=302, NC, L]
RewriteRule ^/blog/2008/07/how-can-i-find-installed-hotfixes-on.html$ http://blogs.digitaldeposit.net/saravana/post/2008/07/18/How-can-I-find-the-installed-hotfixes-on-the-serverworkstation.aspx [R=302, NC, L]
RewriteRule ^/blog/2008/07/mvp-year-2.html$ http://blogs.digitaldeposit.net/saravana/post/2008/07/04/MVP-Year-2.aspx [R=302, NC, L]

Note:

R=302 means permanent redirect (you can try 301 to say its temporary redirect), "L" means its the last rule, don't execute anything after this, "NC" means ignore case. Rule 5 is auto generated by my utility using the sitemap files and will have entry for each and every single URL (blog post)

Selecting/Modifying a theme:

There a quite a lot of themes to choose from, you can also download community ones from the following link. Customize it if required.

Configured Windows Live Writer:

BlogEngine.NET supports MetaWebLog API, so you can use tools like MS Word 2007, Live Writer etc. I configured Live Writer and posted a test post with an image, to make sure everything is working correctly.

Don't forget to change these settings:

Some of these settings are cosmetic, but some are crucial.

1. Update Feed Burner URL: If in case you've outsourced your feeds to Feed Burner, make sure you change the settings to point to your feed burner feed. You need to change it in two different places. (a) In BlogEngine.NET settings, and (b) Login to Feedburner and point your feed to the BlogEngine.NET one.

2. Robot.txt: You need to update the URL to your blog sitemap.axd file inside the Robot.txt file and un-comment the path (Instructions inside the file). This is crucial, else search engines will struggle.

3. Google Analytics code: If you've signed up for Google Analytics, make sure you place the <script> code and update settings.

Setup Backup procedures directly:

It's important to setup a backup strategy. We normally don't plan for backup's until we hit our first disaster. Decide on the backup method that best suits you. Check the options with your hosting provider, some charge reasonable amount for backup storage, or you can use products like WS_FTP pro, which got support for scheduled transfer.

Results: 3 weeks after the migration:

I purposely didn't blog about it or let anyone know about my migration. I left it running for nearly 3 weeks now, and you can see from the below picture the new search result is pointing to the new URL hurray!!

Nandri!

Saravana

I became a full time user of MacBook running Windows Vista using BootCamp (Version 2.0) for a while now. One of the issue I came across recently is trying to find out the equivalent of "print screen" Key, I don't need to emphasis on the importance of this. According to the document, its just F11 for print screen and "Option-F11" for active window.

There are couple of issues:

1. F11 is a volume control key by default and you need to press Fn + F11 to make it work,

2. Even pressing Fn + F11 won't capture the screen you need to press "Fn + Shift + F11" to make it work.

Nandri!

Saravana

Last night we had our first UK SOA/BPM user group meeting held at Microsoft office in London Victoria. Thanks goes to Jonathan Woodward, Michael Stephenson , Andy James for organising this. It was a good turn around for the first meeting, around 30 people. It's good to get in touch with some of the folks you have only known in the online world.  I think its very healthy knowledgeable crowd, with fellow MVP's (Yossi Dahan, Santosh Benjamin, Robert Hogg), few people from Connect Systems Advisory board, Microsoft and  Microsoft/Business Process Alliance.  I didn't get the chance to speak to every single person, we only had 3 hours to network with each other, hopefully after few meetings we'll get to know who's who better.

Nandri!

Saravana

Hi All,

In the past few months I been hit with so many technical problems running biztalk 24 * 7.com. I'm currently with 1and1 for my hosting, I been with them for past few years now. Everything is well and good until you hit a problem, but once you got some you are in real trouble.

In my past few months experience I never got a single issue solved by their technical team (this is just my experience).

At last I decided to take the plunge and move to a different hosting company. That's the only way I can come with next version of biztalk 24 * 7 confidently. Now I need your help on making my decision, here are my criteria's

1. Preferably in UK, since it will help me solve the issue during UK office hours. With 1and1, even though I'm a UK customer their server department is in US and most of the time I simply need to wait until US wakes up.

2. Windows Server 2003 virtual or dedicated sever hosting.

3. Support for ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server

I'm sure lot of you out there reading my blog will have experience in this area. Please feel free to drop your comments.

Nandri!

Saravana

I'm going to Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference running between Oct 29th to Nov 2nd. To make most out of my trip (going to spend 13hrs each way in flight) I decided to attend the 2 days pre-conference session by PluralSight presented by Matt Milner, Jon Flanders and Aaron Skonnard.

On the second day of the conference I'm hosting a round table session at "Ask the Expert (ATE)" reception, to cover the topic  "BizTalk Overview".

Hope to see some of you there. Please ping me if you are going to be there.

Nandri!

Saravana