Thursday, August 30, 2007

Halo 3 Ring Tone for Windows Mobile

I thought I would share the Halo 3 ringtone I discovered on Microsoft's web site today.

You can download this ringtone from here. Enjoy!

VS "Orcas" beta 2

Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 has recently been made available for download here.

You can download the Team System versions as a Virtual PC image but the others are fully blown products.

This build includes beta 2 of the .NET Compact Framework 3.5.

Saturday, August 11, 2007

BizTalk XSLT Mapper Tool

I've been doing a lot of work with BizTalk lately which means I have not been doing much Windows Mobile development ;( This will change over the coming weeks and I will be back to writing "proper" code.

Anyway, if any of you have ever done any BizTalk integration you might find the BizTalk mapper not sufficient and not very efficient so you have no choice but to dive straight into XSLT.
The problem with the BizTalk mapper is it doesn't allow you to divide up your XSLT or VBScript/JavaScript to use common routines and more fundementally, it is too simplistic and not adequate for most solutions.

The problem is all versions of Visual Studio doesn't have any support for XSLT transforming or debugging. This is paramount when testing your maps for BizTalk. The company I work for has been using a tool named Xselerator by Marrowsoft for some years. It is a tool that allows you to run and debug your maps without deploying the solution into BizTalk first.

For the past 4 weeks or so I have become very fond of this tool and recomend it highly for your BizTalk mapping work.

I use Visual Studio to do the editing as I prefer the VS editor, then I use Xselerator to actually run the translation.

You can get Xselerator here: http://www.marrowsoft.co.uk/. It is not free but well worth the money. You can download a demo to try.