I just got back from two trips to Las Vegas last week.
The first trip was work related. On Wednesday, John Shewchuk & I presented an overview of the BizTalk Services effort. It was a great opportunity to talk about two new BizTalk Connectivity Service features which we just launched.
The first new feature is multicast messaging. In this case, multicast is the ability to have multiple applications listen and send to a name. You can think of a name as a place where applications can exchange data. For ease of use, we chose URIs to be the names. sb://connect.biztalk.net/services/dennispi/chat/ is an example of a name.
Naturally, we build a sample in our SDK that demonstrates how to use multicast. It took us about 20 seconds to come up with the idea… a very simple chat application. A chat application is a straightforward example of having multiple applications exchanging data (in this case, chat messages) at a specific name (the chat room). You can find it in \BizTalk Services SDK\Samples\Connectivity\Multicast\.
The second feature we’ve released is support for a direct connection between clients and services. Now, after establishing a relayed connection, if possible, the connection will switch automatically to a direct connection. Further, we’ve added settings to allow developers to specify connection setting required for their application.
The feedback we’ve been getting from developers has been fantastic, its good to see a lot of people like what we’re building and your feedback definitely helps us prioritize our features for you. Expect to see a refresh of the SDK soon… it’ll include an updated readme (I was working with Steve on the readme through email I messed up the links!) and some additional technical docs.
Now, my second trip to Vegas was for personal reasons. Specifically, my bachelor party. 18 of my friends made the trip from Vancouver, Seattle and California. At the time we planned the party, I wasn’t aware that I’d be traveling for business only the day before. We coordinated our plans so most of the guys were on the same plane, so I couldn’t possibly skip out. Instead, I flew back to Seattle on Thursday, and back down on Friday.
I was trying to figure out how to describe how I was feeling today after an extremely exhausting weekend. The best way to describe it is as jet lag. Even though Las Vegas is in the same time zone as Seattle, it turns out that your waking hours are very very different… and as a result, when you return, you feel as if you’re suffering from jet lag.
That said, the trip was amazing. But as the saying goes… what happens in Vegas..