Big Week of Releases: My Book and StreamInsight v1.2

This week, Packt Publishing released the book BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I contributed three chapters to this book covering integration with Dynamics CRM 2011, Windows Azure AppFabric and Salesforce.com.  The lead author, Kent Weare wrote a blog post announcing the release, and you can also find it on Amazon.com now.  I hope you feel inclined to pick it up and find it useful.

In other “neat stuff being released” news, the Microsoft StreamInsight team released version 1.2 of the software.  They’ve already updated the product samples on CodePlex and the driver for LINQPad.  I tried both the download, the samples and the LINQPad update this week and can attest to the fact that it installs and works just fine.  What’s cool and new?

• Nested event types.  You can now do more than just define “flat” event payloads.  The SI team already put a blog post up on this.  You can also read about it in the Product Documentation.
• LINQ improvements.  You can join multiple streams in a single LINQ statement, group by anonymous types, and more.
• New performance counters.  PerMon counters can be used to watch memory being used, how many queries are running, average latency and more.
• Resiliency. The most important improvement.  Now you can introduce checkpoints and provide some protection against event and state loss during outages.

Also, I might as well make it known that I’m building a full StreamInsight course for Pluralsight based on version 1.2.  I’ll be covering all aspects of StreamInsight and even tossing in some version 1.2 and “Austin” tidbits.  Look for this to hit your Pluralsight subscription within the next two months.