Hello (cruel) World

This is the second post in a 2 part series. The first post is available here To continue with our Mirth messaging channel, lets first describe the setup of the web service which will be called by our Mirth channel. This is somewhat of a contrived example will little attention to coding standards, referential integrity or database normalization…but we wont let that stop us! Firstly, I’ve created a second database named demodetailsdb . Ideally these databases would be on disparate servers (otherwise there would be little need for such an elaborate messaging system) but for our purposes I will run both off the same ( localhost ) box. In the demodetailsdb I have created a single user_details table. Loading .... I have created a simple .NET Web Service to which we will pass the information gathered from the database in our previous post, perform some simple lookups in the user_details table based on the input data and return relevant information. The service contains one webmet...

This is the first post in a 2 part series. The second post is here Recently I posted about my positive experience when using Mirth by Webreach as an open source communication layer between one of our in-house applications and a third party and proprietary web service interface. That post received a large amount of attention (relative to my other posts :o) ) so now I will post a quickstart guide to creating a similar setup. In this post I will go over the very basics of using Mirth (please dig in and play around with some more advanced options/configurations), specifically I will demonstrate how to use Mirth to read data from a database, package the data up in a SOAP envelope, send the data to a web service and process the SOAP response. I'll also show you how easy it is to monitor channels once deployed. Once you've installed and opened Mirth for the first time you'll be presented with an empty dashboard - but it wont stay empty for long. This is where you'll s...

  In an interesting turn of events Microsoft's sysinternal tools are now available online ( link ) without needing to be installed...This is about as portable as it gets and makes me wonder what the "alternate distribution mechanism" as mentioned in the Microsoft readme file will be used for in the future. Office in the cloud anyone?   What is this? This is a file share allowing access to all Sysinternals utilities. We have developed this to test an alternate distribution mechanism for our utilities. This will allow you to run these tools from any computer connected to the Internet without having to navigate to a webpage, download and extract the zip file. If you are unfamiliar with Microsoft Windows Sysinternals, it is highly recommended that you visit the website at http://technet.microsoft.com/sysinternals before using these tools. If you have any questions or comments on this file share, please email syssite@microsoft.com Regards, The Microsoft Windows Sysinternals T...

I've spent the greater part of my morning investigating an issue with SQL Server Reporting Services 2008. Specifically, I have created a report which uses colors as physical cues on a timeline. If criterion X is met then the cell is filled in green, if criterion Y then it is filled in blue. A combination of both X and Y will result in an orange field...quite simple.... I have similar reports written in SSRS 2005 that are in production and used on a day-to-day basis. Recently we have adopted SSRS 2008 and the first of its kind that I have published using the newer version. The Problem Everything works as desired and I can export to Excel without issue. The report renders correctly and everything works as desired...until I attempt to copy the worksheet (right-click->move or copy) to another workbook. The worksheet is copied, but the colors change drastically so that the colors (white, orange, green and blue) are completely different in the newer version. In my report I...

If you've delved into WPF since its inception a couple of years ago you will undoubtedly have run into...hmm, lets say...idiosyncrasies...with the WPF designer. Visual Studio 2008 certainly improved on the VS2005 plugin, but now and again bugs till pop up... What is really frustrating is receiving an error message in the designer despite a project that successfully builds and runs...Today I received the following error message: "could not create an instance of type UserSelect" The designer refused to reload and the design time error pointed to the following lines of code in my MainWindow.xaml file. My 'usr' namespace was defined and correctly referenced but no amount of rebuilding fixed my problem. 1: < Canvas Name = "UserCanvas" Height = "38" VerticalAlignment = "Top" HorizontalAlignment = "Left" Width = "150" > 2: < pat :User Select x : Name = "myUserSelec...