Archive for September, 2008
Creating your own BizTalk 2006 Project Item Templates
From time to time I have the need to create file types within my BizTalk projects that you would think are pretty obvious, like an plain old vanilla XML file for example. Pretty obvious requirement I would have thought? The number of standard out of the box templates for BTS is not that complete so I decided to address that issue and create a few for myself : here’s how.
Locate the BizTalkProjectItems folder on your development machine, which should be often than not located under your program file folder here:
\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\Developer Tools\BizTalkProjectItems
Create your template file (in my case a plain old XML and Text File (the text file for creating flat file inputs).
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″ ?> <Root></Root>
And the Flat File Template is simply a matter of creating a blank .txt file as a template. Copy the files (in my case BTSXmlFile.xml and BTSFlatFile.txt) to the directory named earlier in this post.
That’s it your done! Now you have two new templates for BizTalk projects in VS.Net.
As you can see the BTSXmlFile and BTSFlatFile are now available in my add new item dialog window.
Will ORM mass adoption kill SQL Skills
Will OR/M products succeed in delivering a Generation of developers with no or little understanding of SQL and does it matter? Recently I decided to take a close look at another OR/M (Active Record) and it got me thinking……..
After some initial suspicion, I eventually became a HUGE fan of using OR/M technology. I also appreciate my many years of having to write intricate T/SQL, however I don’t like having to write masses of data access code any more, it’s tedious and I have come to the point where I don’t ever want to have to revisit an anaemic domain model either. I want to continue using POCO’s and couldn’t be happier that REAL object oriented thinking is slowly coming back into vogue with DotNet developers (as a community) and shows up in how we model our domain objects. There is more to say on this, but ultimately it moves me farther from my question, actually its more a nightmare scenario.
The Scenario
Lets assume that in five years from now, most data access code is being managed 
by OR/M’s whether it be LINQ To SQL, NHibernate, Entity Framework, IBatis.Net, etc. A fraction of the SQL / TSQL & stored procedures we used to write is now deemed unnecessary, in fact it’s become almost entirely negligible. Universities are now (it’s 2013 remember) spending a bare minimum amount of time teaching database technology in preference to teaching OR/M technologies and almost no developers are seeking to sit 3rd party database development exams or take up an Oracle or Microsoft database certifications. Finding a burgeoning DBA in the making is like the search for new fossil fuel. Microsoft Developers are now whipping out Entity Framework 4.0 to quickly dial up an ad-hoc query cause they are not sure about how to write the SQL.
I know I have presented an extreme view and implicitly retired a lot of us SQL dinosaurs off, but is this scenario possible to some degree? What do you think? Will demand for the DBA increase as developers become less skilled with SQL.
