Do you like to laugh?  Do you go to work?  Do you ride a unicycle?

Then Mondays is for you. 

From the folks who brought us Dot Net Rocks comes what promises to be a fantastic weekly radio talk show.  If you listen to dot net rocks, then you’re already sold.  If not, DNR is a talk radio show about .net programming.  It is a streaming radio show with a mix of technical content, and fun.  The DNR crew decided it was time to break the once 2 hour show into a couple shows. 

DNR will continue to be a technical broadcast once a week, while the rest of the fun, and some new fun, is pulled into Mondays, along with interviews that are not as technical in nature as what you will expect to see on DNR. 

Here Carl gives us a little teaser of what Mondays will have in store for us.  Be sure to check back Monday and get the full show, and tell all your friends!

Nothing like a new toy to beef up posts on the blog.

Just noticed after you install biztalk, it's new xsd editor takes over as the default xsd editor.  That's great and all, but I want the normal editor when I am working on datasets, and the special one when working in biztalk.  The biztalk editor is not as friendly when looking at a dataset.

I doubt this is built into the IDE, but it would be nice to have context sensitive default editors.  Now I have a feeling I will be changing back and forth quite a bit as my biztalk workload grows.  Ugh.

Is it just me or after each time I update anything with biztalk my vs.net plug-in's have problems?

After I installed biztalk, after I installed the doc update, and after I installed the rollup, my plugins failed to load.  Once I turn them back on again, and restart the IDE, everything is fine again, but the first load afterwards fails.

Anyone else seeing this?

Well it's official, I will be taking on a bit of a Biztalk 2004 role here at work.  I'm pretty excited as I have wanted to learn Biztalk for quite a while, but it's not really the kind of thing I could see myself just doing for kicks. 

So you can expect to see more about biztalk as I go down this road. 

With absolutely no Biztalk experience, I figured I would start by reading the documentation (seems logical).  Our resident Biztalk expert (who has no blog) reminded me to do the documentation update, so thats where I started.  Not to rant, but why the hell do I need to have the original biztalk CD to install the documentation upgrade?  Of course I don't carry around our msdn binders (for fear of the IT folk cutting off my hands), so I was SOL.  I think it's kind of ridiculous to require the original CD for a documentation upgrade, but whatever.  Thats out.

So I started to read the bloggers guide to biztalk.  After making it through just a couple of the essays in here, I can say this is going to be a huge resource for me.  There is just a ton of content here, and at least what I saw was good content.  Real good.  I also appreciate that it is off the cuff, so it seems very honest. 

By the way, the biztalk install went pretty smoothly.  Our IT crew provided me with the staging doc that was used for the production build, and with a couple alterations I was up and going.  One word of warning, though.  When you install Biztalk make sure you have a path to your domain controller.  I run my domain at home, so my laptop is actually a member of my personal domain, not the corporate one.  This meant that I couldn't finish the config wizard until I was at home.  I hope this is an isolated requirement since I really dont want to promote my laptop to a DC. 

Ah some other links I found that I want to save. 

Aaron Skonnard on Biztalk and SOA
Jame's Blog with some interesting biztalk posts a while back I need to read (subscribed)
Jan Tielen with some biztalk 2004 downloads (subscribed)
Some biztalk articles refered to by James (above) by Canonical

 [Edit] Added biztalk category.

Saw think link over on Scoble's link blog, and wanted to post about it so I can at least find it later.  Biztalk is something I have been wanting to jump into for a while, but of course never have the time.  When and if that time comes, it looks like this chm might be a terrific starting point.

Check it out here

[UPDATE]
GDN seems to be having issues.  Here is a direct link to the blog of the person who is aggregating this great info.

Check it out here

 [Edit] Added biztalk category.