My blog

Recently I ran into an unexpected problem with a custom pipeline component which I thought had been working fine. Suddenly it stopped working, but with an unexpected workaround. Today I worked out what the problem is, and although it makes perfect sense it caught me by surprise. I can't find any mention of this gotcha elsewhere on the internet, so I thought I'd write about it here.

Last year I wrote a custom pipeline component (Message Dump component) which optionally dumps the message body and/or the context of the message, and I use it regularly in my pipelines. Because the dumping is optional, and can be quickly controlled at runtime, I place the component in pretty much all of the pipelines that I use. When turned off, the overhead is minimal, but when you want to check what's going through any given stage of a pipeline you can quickly turn it on and get what you need.

This year we decided that one of our pipelines should always dump a copy of the message body and so I created another cut down version of this component (Archive component) that didn't have the optional switch. It has just 1 configuration option which is the path to the file that should be written, and that file path can contain various macros which can be expanded from the message context.

Everything seemed to work in the development and test environments; we went live with it and it was great. After a period of live commissioning I turned off the Message Dump components in the pipeline, and that's when it all went wrong.

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Starting some serious development in Microsoft BizTalk 2013 and I was looking for a way to streamline some of our maps. One common place where we have clutter is in the if..then..else design pattern. Typically you want to map one element if something is true, and if it's not true, you want to map something else instead.

BizTalk doesn't provide functoids that do that neatly, and over the years several people have commented on this; it's a problem that goes right back to at least BizTalk 2006.

In this post I'm going to show you the custom functoids that I created to try to streamline my maps.

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Last week I saw something, a visual effect and I thought "ooh, I must remember that, I could use it in a website design".

But I don't have a particular project to use it in right now.

By the time I do, I'll have forgotten the idea.

So here's my suggestion. Make yourself a sourcebook, a scrapbook if you like. Set aside a directory on your PC, or a junk space on your website. And then when you come across a cool visual idea, or something like that, clip it, or create an example and put it in your scrap book.

In years to come, when you are looking for inspiration for your current project, you can look through your sourcebook for ideas that you would otherwise have forgotten. Probably a lot of it will look dated, but you know, 'what comes around goes around' It'll come back into fashion eventually, and you'll be ready for it when it does.

I've had Google's personal home page product on my home page for quite a while now. It was quite flaky at first, but it has gradually become more stable and more useful. Usually without my noticing.

I tried the MSN page briefly, but as Google and Microsoft worked on updating these products, the advantages and bugs swung back and forth until I got fed up and decided to choose the stick to the path of light and avoid the dark side for ever more.

Last week it occured to me that I could save some of my browsing time, but actually doing something with the homepage. I added a new tab and then I added the RSS feeds for most of the comics that I tend to try to keep up with.

Now instead of trying to remember 10 different urls and to remember to visit each one a couple of times a week, I can simply check the comics tab to see what's new.

It's made life a whole lot easier, but certainly take some element of fun away from it. There used to be a frisson of excitement as I waited for a site to load so that I could see if todays' comic was different from that I saw yesterday. Now all of that excitement is condensed into one single page.

Still, must move with the times.

Not content with giving their console a name that sounds very stupid in some languages, Nintendo's current advertising campaign gives the game away.

After shots of people using the controller to shoot and slash their way through mortal enemies, the voice over tells us...

Only ennui.

You can't make this stuff up.