Rearguard action

"One in ten IT specialists in Belgium is a cheap Indian," some media recently wrote. They work for minimum wages, ensuring unfair competition, and do not make a fair contribution to our welfare state, since they are not covered by Belgian social security. It was the socialist trade union BBTK who rang the bell. "Belgian employees are losing their jobs and the government is missing out on 26 million euros each year," they complained. Employers in the Belgian IT sector deliberately abuse the employment status of their Indian programmers to find people on the cheap. Ouch, that hurts.

BTS 2016 Feature Pack I - Continuous Deployment Walk-Through

Recently, the product team released a first feature pack for BizTalk Server 2016. Via this way, Microsoft aims to provide more agility into the release model of BizTalk Server. The feature pack contains a lot of new and interesting features, of which the automated deployment from VSTS is probably the most important one. This blog post contains a detailed walk-through.

Logic Apps Batching

This blog post dives into the details of how you can achieve batching with Logic Apps. Batching is still a highly demanded feature for a middle-ware layer. It's mostly introduced to reduce the performance impact on the target system or for functional purposes. Let's have a closer look.

JSON Encoder Type Bug

Since the introduction of BizTalk 2013 R2, Microsoft has supplied an out of the box JSON encoder pipeline component. I’ve used this component many times in the past, but recently ran into an issue while using this component.

Technological chauvinism

"Europe is far too dependent on Microsoft." I thought I accidentally clicked on an old article, perhaps from the end of the last century. At that time, Microsoft was in trouble for abusing its dominant market position to stave off competition. It was the start of a series of legal battles both in the States and in Europe, culminating in the Windows Media Player saga. You know, that thing you may have used to watch video on a pc, if you didn’t skip it entirely because you belong to the YouTube generation. Microsoft was fined a massive sum by Europe in 2004, but continued to resist strongly until 2012. In the end, they subsided. Or that is what we would like to believe.

5 ways to better manage DateTime in IoT solutions

Dates are always important, but in the context of IoT projects they are even more relevant. The reason for this is because IoT clients are mostly human-less terminals, machines with no understanding of time. For example, if a client application shows the end-user a wrong date, the user will sooner or later see the problem and correct it. Machines will never identify a date as being incorrect, so the problem can become endemic to your solution and go without notice for a long time.