As the saying goes, there’s always a first time, and this blog entry is a first for me.
My name is Thiago Almeida, I work for one of New Zealand’s largest IT companies as one of their senior integration specialists using Microsoft technologies. I work most of the time with Microsoft BizTalk Server (Mainly 2006 and now 2006 R2). My interest in systems integration goes back to the year 2000 with SQL Server DTS packages… And I’ve been involved with integrations ever since.
Anyways, on to the interesting stuff. I’ve just finished creating a virtual machine with BizTalk 2006 R2 and RFID (120 days evaluation version). The installation couldn’t have gone any easier. The BizTalk R2 installation hasn’t changed much since BizTalk 2006, and the installation guide is very easy to follow. Just make sure you follow it… Little things like “Your computer name should not exceed 15 characters for the BizTalk Server configuration to work properly” are very important. If you want to use the WCF adapters you need .NET 3.0 but you knew that right?
A prototype a colleague and I are proposing internally is to use BizTalk RFID to track the books in our internal library. We are thinking of using the famous Phidgets kit from Trossen Robotics to experiment. It’s cheap and it’s been tested before. We also want to integrate it with BAM so we can generate reports and graphs, and also with MOSS so employees have access to the status of the books. It should make for a great case study, I will keep you posted of our progress and any interesting details or gotchas I run into.
At the end of the posts I will every now and then have one of my pictures from flickr. Here’s one of the latest, of the moon.
