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First Brain-Computer Interface

If you have ever wondered of unimaginable things come to life, here is one that may amaze you with shock and awe. The researchers in the Brain-Computer Interface have come out of the cave and introduced the First Brain-Computer Interface for Mainstream Consumers. This device that looks like a headphone can sense your brain signals off of your scalp and control the movement of a cursor on a screen. This deus ex machina was recently introduced to the market by Emotiv Systems and the device is called EPOC Headset. The headset will be priced $299 once it starts its production and mainly be focused on gaming industry for now.

An introduction of such device makes me believe that someday Matrix will be live. How soon? That is for you to find out. Learn more @ Think Artificial

Twine – hot or not?

Twine? A site completely based on the Semantic Web technology implemented by Radar Networks (in San Francisco). It is a new way of organizing your personal information that enables you with an easy access and navigation. From the demo, it represented itself as a content bookmark where you can organize, share and discover any type of information you find in the Web to be parsed and logged into Twine. Unlike Facebook where the network is only limited to people, Twine can be of anything. Powered by semantic understanding, Twine automatically organizes information, learns about your interests and makes connections and recommendations. The more you use Twine, the better it understands your interests and the more useful it becomes.

So is Twine hot or not? I say it is recherché.

Check it out @ http://www.twine.com

Must read for all CS majors

http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/CrossTalk/2008/01/0801DewarSchonberg.html

BIZTALK HOTROD

If you are at the edge of learning BizTalk Server, check out the issues that come out of this elegant resource – they call it BIZTALK HOTROD. Their 3rd issue is out recently and they had their 1st and 2nd issues released in the past.

Cool stuff – find it here.

Failed Message Routing vs. Failed Orchestration Routing

When I was implementing the Failed Message Routing feature in BizTalk Server 2006, I got caught up into the notion that Failed Orchestration Routing may execute the same way as Failed Message Routing. Turned out that they don’t – Failed Message Routing and Failed Orchestration Routing are two different notions. BTS 2006 can only handle Failed Message Routing by enabling the flag “Enable routing for failed messages” on either a Send or a Receive port. If you ever need to handle Failed Orchestration routing, then you will need to implement the exception logic in the orchestraiton and fill in the ErrorReport promoted properties for the Error Report Orchestration to subscribe the Failed Message from an Orchestration.

Here is a good blog by Matt Meleski around this notion: http://objectsharp.com/cs/blogs/matt/archive/2006/11/01/4110.aspx

gacutil /l [Assembly Name]

Quick tip on how to find the full Assembly name in .Net. This comes handy when you are trying to use the full Assembly name in scenarios like Dynamic Transforms in BizTalk where you will need to give the full Assembly name as a parameter.

You can use command “gacutil /l [Assembly Name]” in the Visual Studio .NET command prompt and get the full assembly name which outputs the name in this format:

BT.Schemas, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=edbffc61eb1e7821, processorArchitecture=MSIL

Then, you can mark the section in the command prompt and copy-paste. Hope this may come handy for you at some point.

"Oslo" was the big news!

It has been about good two weeks that I am back from Microsoft SOA & BPM Conference and finally have a chance to throw something in my blog. And the big news is “Oslo”!

What is “Oslo”? Oslo is a Microsoft’s Next Generation SOA based on multitude of technologies combined to create this visionary platform which includes .NET Framework, Visual Studio, BizTalk Server and System Center as a whole. The vision is fairly wide and open and even Microsoft doesn’t seem to have laid out the blueprint of “Oslo” yet. Expect to see several rounds of this technoglogy over a period of another year or two.

The big bang idea behind “Oslo” is a Model Driven Development (MDD) where models are the abstraction implemented directly over the underlying code. Models are just one third of the “Oslo” story and if you would like to read more about it, visit Charles Young’s blog or Microsoft SOA.

Presenting at Silicon Valley Code Camp 2007

http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com

If you are interested in hearing me present at the Silicon Valley Code Camp this Saturday at 5:15 p.m., then please sign up on the link above and come on down. The event is free and open to all who are interested in Microsoft and Other technologies. There is already a plethora of topics you may choose to hear from and a free lunch is provided on both days. What more can we ask?

The topic I will be presenting on is BizTalk Server 2006 – Tips and Tricks. Find the link here !

If you do show up, say hello.

YAHOO! Pipes

This looks like an inception of the Semantic Web. It allows webpages to read data feeds from multiple sources located at any URI and adds flexibility to recombine them as a customized output.

An example that I played around with was ‘Apartment near Something’ where data from Craigslist.org could be recombined with YAHOO Local to find apartments in a given area. Really cool.

If you have not seen YAHOO Pipes yet, you may check it out here.