Notes From The Road: 2012 in review

2012 was an excellent professional and personal year for me, thankfully with lots of work but also extremely funny. I had the chance to meet and become good friends with a few outstanding BizTalk community members and MVPs, some I had the opportunity to meet during the MVP Summit, like Nino Crudele, others I met during the BizTalk Innovation Event “tour”, like Tord G. Nordahl and Lex Hegt, among many others. It would be impossible to describe them all!

In addition to writing regularly on my blog and in the BizTalk Brazil community (in my native language), I’m also:

• In the BiztalkAdminsBlogging community, a blog that is dedicated to BizTalk admins, where I wrote 14 posts. My most visited post was: General network TCP settings that can impact BizTalk Server.
• I started to write articles in the Microsoft TechNet Wiki.
• Joined BizTalkCrew (unofficial name of this group, see speaking engagements section for more information) and started doing events in Europe.
• Doing more public presentations for Portuguese Communities.
• I began to contribute to Microsoft TechNet Gallery and GitHub.
• and even had the privilege to be a technical reviewer of BizTalk Server 2010 Cookbook by Steef-Jan Wiggers;

My blog statistics

Very special thanks to all my reader I really appreciate the 170,000 visits to my blog in the past year. The WordPress made in its annual report, which he created for me, made a comparison that I found extremely funny:

“About 55,000 tourists visit Liechtenstein every year. This blog was viewed about 170,000 times in 2012. If it were Liechtenstein, it would take about 3 years for that many people to see it. Your blog had more visits than a small country in Europe!”

In 2012, there were 99 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 268 posts. The busiest day of the year was November 7th with 912 views. The most popular post that day was BizTalk Server 2013 Beta Released, but the posts that got the most views last year were:

1. “Cannot open database ‘…’ requested by the login. The login failed” or “The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object ‘…’, database ‘…’, schema ‘dbo’” posted in February 2012
2. The source was not found, but some or all event logs could not be searched. Inaccessible logs: Security. posted in February 2012
3. BizTalk 2010 Installation and Configuration – Installing and Configuring BizTalk Server (Part 8) posted on October 2010
4. Visio 2010 Stencil for BizTalk Server Updated posted in June 2011
5. How To import Add Reference from WSDL file posted in June 2009

I’m always curious to see these statistics because they never match with my favorite posts that I enjoyed writing:

• BizTalk Mapper Patterns series (How to Map Hierarchical Schema to a Name Value Pair, How to map values from a repeating node into a single node using conditions, How to Map Name Value Pair to a Hierarchical Schema, Calling an external assembly from Custom XSLT in BizTalk Server 2010, Grouping elements from different messages in BizTalk Maps, How to implement multi-level Muenchian grouping in BizTalk Maps).
• How BizTalk Maps Work – This article aims to explain how maps are processed internally by the engine of the product as we explore the map editor in BizTalk Server.
• Or Installing BizTalk Server 2010 in a Basic Multi-Computer Environment – This article explains how to install Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 on a basic multi-computer (or basic multi-server), i.e., installation of BizTalk Server with a remote SQL Server (1 SQL Server and 1 BizTalk Server).

TechNet Wiki

Last year, I wrote a total of 21 wiki articles for Microsoft TechNet Wiki and edited an enormous number of existing articles. These were my favorites:

• BizTalk: List of Errors and Warnings, Causes and Solutions: This article is intended to be a knowledge base of all Errors and Warnings, Causes and Solutions documented in all stages/components of BizTalk: different stages of development, deployment, adapters, runtime, setup, and configuration…
• BizTalk Server: Basic principles of Maps: In this article, as we explore the BizTalk Mapper Designer, we try to explain its main concepts, covering several themes such as product architecture, BizTalk Schemas, and some of the most widely used standards in the translation of messages.
• Installing BizTalk Server 2010 in a Basic Multi-Computer Environment: This guide describes some of the considerations that apply to the various parts of a BizTalk Server installation in a basic multi-computer environment.
• BizTalk Server: Transform text files (Flat Files) into XML: Transformations are one of the most common components in the integration processes. They act as essential translators in the decoupling between the different systems to connect. This article aims to help you understand the process of transforming a text file (also called Flat Files) into an XML document using BizTalk Server Flat File Schemas. This article intends to be an introductory note for those who are taking the first steps in this technology.

And in the last weeks of the year, during my vacations, I managed to be in TechNet Wiki Top contributors for three consecutive weeks!

Speaking engagements

I never considered myself a speaker, perhaps because there aren’t many people in the BizTalk Portuguese community, or simply due to a lack of opportunities; however, 2012 was the year it all changed, and I started making presentations more often:

• Windows Azure One Day Lab – Oporto, Portugal.
• OVERNET BizTalk Innovation Event – Milan, Italy.
• 5th Meeting of NetPonto Community – Coimbra, Portugal.
• Windows Azure [R]Evolution- Lisbon, Portugal.
• Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event – Stavanger, Norway.

As I said earlier, I have the privilege to be part of a remarkable group, the “BizTalkCrew” (unofficially named of this group) composed by 5 Microsoft Integration MVPs: myself, Tord G. Nordahl, Saravana Kumar, Nino Crudele and Steef-Jan Wiggers, that have been making events and speaking about integration a bit throughout Europe and the good news is that we will continue to do BizTalk Innovation Events throughout this year! (UK, Portugal, Holland, Italy, Norway, …)

BizTalk Open Source Contributions

Last year, I really began to contribute to:

• Microsoft TechNet Gallery with scripts and BizTalk Resources, my favorite one, without a doubt, was: Collection of Visio 2010 Stencil for BizTalk Server, in a total of 13 contributions.
• Microsoft Code Gallery with small projects or code samples in a total of 12 contributions, again, my favorite was: How to implement multi-level Muenchian grouping in BizTalk Maps.
• And with an open source project in CodePlex, like BizTalk Mapper Extensions UtilityPack.

And many other contributions…. Thanks for following me, for reading my blog, and I promise that I will continue to share my knowledge in 2013.