Charles Young

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267 Posts | 523 Comments

Charles Young

Oct 15

Solidsoft Reply needs your talent...

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Solidsoft Reply is in recruiting mode. We are the UK’s leading integration specialists on the Microsoft Platform with a decade and a half experience of hard-core development using BizTalk Server and related technologies. These days, of course, we focus much of our attention on cloud-based integration technologies. However, we have seen a surge of interest ......

Posted On Monday, October 5, 2015 10:16 PM BizTalk Server , Recruitment , Consulting , Development

Jan 15

Integration User Group: Video available for ‘Microservices and the Cloud-Based Future of Integration’

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I presented at Monday evening’s inaugural session of the Integration User Group. This new UG replaces the UK Connected Systems User Group (UKCSUG). The session was well attended with a good 50 minutes of questions afterwards. The video of the presentation (first hour only) has been posted at http://bit.ly/185wgtV. The slides are also available on Slideshare ......

Posted On Thursday, January 22, 2015 1:44 PM

Jan 15

Webinar: Microservices and the Cloud-Based Future of Integration

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I will be presenting at the UK Connected Systems User Group ‘Integration Monday’ webinar on Monday, 19th January at 7:30 pm, GMT: “The software integration market is heating up with dozens of new cloud-based vendors and a sea-change in customer expectations. What does this means for traditional Enterprise Application Integration? What do modern integration ......

Posted On Thursday, January 15, 2015 6:03 PM

Jan 15

Mediation Models for iPaaS and EAI

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This is the third in a series of articles on the emerging world of microservices PaaS and its relevance to Enterprise Application Integration. The other articles are: 1) Integration and Microservices: Describes enterprise application integration and its core abstraction of messages. Lists some widely accepted principles of microservice architecture ......

Posted On Sunday, January 4, 2015 4:15 PM

Dec 14

Hexagonal Architecture–The Great Reconciler?

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This is the second in a series of articles on the emerging world of microservices PaaS and its relevance to Enterprise Application Integration. The other articles are: 1) Integration and Microservices: Describes enterprise application integration and its core abstraction of messages. Lists some widely accepted principles of microservice architecture ......

Posted On Saturday, December 20, 2014 11:34 AM

Dec 14

Integration and Microservices

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This is the first in a series of articles on the emerging world of microservices PaaS and its relevance to Enterprise Application Integration. The other articles are: 2) Hexagonal Architecture – The Great Reconciler?: Describes hexagonal architecture, its correspondence to traditional multi-tier layered architecture, the Enterprise Service Bus and ‘traditional’ ......

Posted On Sunday, December 7, 2014 9:37 PM

Jul 14

All polemicists are mortal...

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What is truly offensive about Richard Dawkins' comments on date rape and paedophilia is his air of intellectual superiority founded on hopeless ignorance of basic logic. He believes the following to be an invalid syllogism: X is Bad Y is Worse Therefore X is not Bad A syllogism can be valid or invalid, but it remains a syllogism. As Aristotle might ......

Posted On Thursday, July 31, 2014 1:10 AM

Jul 14

Who am I?

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From Google, this morning…” Charles, do you know Charles Young?” with a lovely picture of myself.

Nope, never heard of me. Google clearly has no idea who I am either.

Posted On Thursday, July 3, 2014 9:49 AM

Jun 14

Using the BAM Interceptor with Continuation

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I’ve recently been resurrecting some code written several years ago that makes extensive use of the BAM Interceptor provided as part of BizTalk Server’s BAM event observation library. In doing this, I noticed an issue with continuations. Essentially, whenever I tried to configure one or more continuations for an activity, the BAM Interceptor failed ......

Posted On Monday, June 2, 2014 10:05 PM

Dec 13

Solidsoft aquired by Reply S.p.A

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We are now SolidSoft Reply. This morning, the company was acquired by Reply S.p.A. This is great news for us. We will continue to build the business under the SolidSoft name, brand and culture, but as part of a much larger team. Further information at http://www.reply.it/en/inve... ......

Posted On Friday, December 6, 2013 3:21 PM

Apr 13

Does Red Hat Enterprise Linux run on Azure?

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Microsoft does not currently offer RHEL on subscription on the Windows Azure platform, and people have reported problems when trying to create and run their RHEL VMs. So, does RHEL run on Azure? Read on here. http://solidsoft.azurewebsi... ......

Posted On Monday, April 29, 2013 5:58 PM

Jan 13

FAIL VODAFONE (sorry Nokia)

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I can't say I follow things that closely in the Windows Phone world, but I am aware of the upgrade to Windows phone 7.8. I've been looking forward to this for a while. The improvements in the UI look nice, and when I get it, I can try to kid myself that my company phone, a Nokia Lumia 800, is really an 820.It appears that the roll-out of 7.8 started ......

Posted On Wednesday, January 30, 2013 7:39 PM

Jan 13

Poor, confused C# compiler

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The C# compiler is a pretty good thing, but it has limitations. One limitation that has given me a headache this evening is its inability to guard against cycles in structs. As I learn to think and programme in a more functional style, I find that I am beginning to rely more and more on structs to pass data. This is natural when programming in the functional ......

Posted On Tuesday, January 22, 2013 10:06 PM

Nov 12

Forget Sinofski

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Forget about Steven Sinofski's unexpected departure from Microsoft. The real news from Redmond is that, after approximately 72 years of utter stagnation, the latest version of Visio has been upgraded to support UML 2.x! It gets better. It looks like it actually supports the latest version of UML (2.4.1). Unbelievable ......

Posted On Tuesday, November 13, 2012 4:13 PM

Jul 12

Windows 8 for productivity?

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At long last I’ve started using Windows 8. I boot from a VHD on which I have installed Office, Visio, Visual Studio, SQL Server, etc. For a week, now, I’ve been happily writing code and documents and using Visio and PowerPoint. I am, very much, a ‘productivity’ user rather than a content consumer. I spend my days flitting between countless windows and ......

Posted On Sunday, July 8, 2012 11:31 AM

Jun 12

Microsoft Cloud Day - the ups and downs

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The term ‘cloud’ can sometimes obscure the obvious. Today’s Microsoft Cloud Day conference in London provided a good example. Scott Guthrie was halfway through what was an excellent keynote when he lost network connectivity. This proved very disruptive to his presentation which centred on a series of demonstrations of the Azure platform in action. Great ......

Posted On Saturday, June 23, 2012 1:08 AM

Mar 12

Microsoft and the open source community

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For the last decade, I have repeatedly, in my imitable Microsoft fan boy style, offered an alternative view to commonly held beliefs about Microsoft's stance on open source licensing. In earlier times, leading figures in Microsoft were very vocal in resisting the idea that commercial licensing is outmoded or morally reprehensible. Many people interpreted ......

Posted On Wednesday, March 28, 2012 11:27 AM

Feb 12

BizTalk Server 2010: Problems casting XML documents to BizTalk Messages

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While coding a very simple orchestration in BizTalk Server 2010, I ran into the dreaded "cannot implicitly convert type 'System.Xml.XmlDocument' to '<message type>'" issue. I've seen this happen a few times over the years, and it has often mystified me. My orchestration defines a message using a schema type. In a Message Assignment shape, I create ......

Posted On Thursday, February 23, 2012 12:48 PM

Dec 11

Tell Us Once (TUO) goes live

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It's always exciting when a new application you've worked on goes live. The last couple of weeks have seen the 'soft' launch of a new service offered by the UK government called 'Tell Us Once' (TUO). You can probably guess from the name what the service does. Currently, the service allows UK citizens to inform the government (as opposed to Register ......

Posted On Friday, December 16, 2011 11:34 AM

Dec 11

BizTalk Server 2010 R2 Announced

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Yesterday, Microsoft announced the forthcoming release of BizTalk Server 2010 R2 on the BizTalk Server blog site. This is advanced notice, given that this new version will ship six months after the release of Windows 8, expected in the second half of next year. On this basis, we can expect the new version of BizTalk Server to arrive in 2013. Given the ......

Posted On Friday, December 9, 2011 8:37 AM BizTalk Server 2004/2006

Sep 11

Announcing BizTalk Server 2010 Unleashed

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At last, I can announce that ‘BizTalk Server 2010 Unleashed’ has been published and is available through major booksellers in both printed and electronic form. The book is not a new edition of the old ‘BizTalk Server 2004 Unleashed’ book from several years ago, although Brian Loesgen, our fearless team leader, provided continuity with that title. Instead, ......

Posted On Sunday, September 25, 2011 10:30 PM BizTalk Server 2004/2006

Sep 11

Book Review: Microsoft BizTalk 2010 Line of Business Systems Integration

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One benefit of my recent experience on a BA flight was that I got plenty of time to read through “Microsoft BizTalk 2010 Line of Business Systems Integration”. I’d promised the publisher weeks ago that I would take a look and publish some comments, but August has been such a busy month for me, and they have had to be patient. I should point out that, ......

Posted On Monday, September 19, 2011 10:47 PM BizTalk Server 2004/2006

Sep 11

Broken British Airways

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I'm sitting is a nice new hotel in Redmond - the Hotel Sierra is well worth considering if you are staying in the area. I'm sleep-deprived and jet-lagged, and it's raining hard outside, but hey, I just got to play with one of the Samsung tablets they handed out at Build, and was not disappointed. Microsoft is doing something trully remarkable with Win8 ......

Posted On Sunday, September 18, 2011 3:04 PM

Sep 11

Windows 8, Metro and IE10: First impressions

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I've just installed the Windows 8 Developer Preview. These are some first impressions: Installation of the preview was quite smooth and didn't take too long. It took a few minutes to extract the files onto a virtual image, but feature installation then seemed to happen almost instantaneously (according to the feedback on the screen). The installation ......

Posted On Thursday, September 15, 2011 12:56 AM

Sep 11

BizTalk Server 2010: Loading properties in custom pipeline components

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Following the previous post, here is a second bit of wisdom. In the Load method of a custom pipeline component, only assign values retrieved from the property bag to your custom properties if the retrieved value is not null. Do not assign any value to a custom property if the retrieved value is null. This is important because of the way in which pipeline ......

Posted On Wednesday, September 14, 2011 2:48 PM BizTalk Server 2004/2006