Heroku Connect Retrospective

The Problem Salesforce sells itself, in fact prides itself, on being a developer-less solution for many organization’s needs. I don’t have a view into all organizations and what they are doing with Salesforce, perhaps there are plenty of organizations that are content to have Salesforce and just use Salesforce to access that data. However, from my experience any organization with more than one system will eventually need to move data into or out of Salesforce.

February 14, 2020 Read
Heroku Connect Is Eventually Consistent

I’ve had to spend sometime in the last couple of days deep diving into Heroku connect. If you don’t know Heroku connect is a service that will sync selected data between Salesforce and a Heroku hosted Postgress database, and has a lot of very easy to use features to map specific fields, and will update schemes automatically as you update fields that you select. However and I’ve learned a few things about Heroku connect because of some issues we have been observing.

November 1, 2018 Read
New Homepage

After a number of years, I’ve updated my website. The old one was dated, and I think I had initially created the site in 2013, and I had not updated the content since 2014. Instead of being developed in ASP.net and hosted on an Azure app service, it is now built with Node.js express, with Pug/Jade templating. The deployment is continuous with check-ins to github triggering the build. The whole thing is hosted in a Heroku dynamo.

October 21, 2018 Read
Generate idoc schemas in BizTalk for SAP

A quick tutorial shows you how to connect to and generate idoc schemas and artifacts for use in BizTalk for SAP.

November 30, 2017 Read
BizTalk - Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))

If you ever get this error when attempting to deploy a BizTalk solution into BTS admin from Visual Studio, it means that you are not running Visual Studio as an admin. You need to restart Visual Studio as an administrator, and try to deploy again. You will get past this error.

January 1, 2016 Read
BizTalk - you must specify at least one already-initialized correlation set

If you get the following error in BizTalk “you must specify at least one already-initialized correlation set for a non-activation receive that is on a non-selfcorrelating port” This video shows you how to fix it.

January 1, 2016 Read
BizTalk Orchestration Basics

What BizTalk orchestration is why you might use it, and how to get up and running from zero knowledge to a working deployed orchestration into Microsoft BizTalk server.

December 31, 2015 Read
Create a Comma Delineated Flat File Schema in BizTalk 2013

You might have a file that could have been generated by any number of systems, need to parse this in such a way that BizTalk understands and can work with it. In all cases that is going to be XML. Your flat file schema is essentially instructions on how BizTalk and is going to parse and then convert this flat file into XML, as well as serve as a formal definition of how this XML should be structured.

January 7, 2015 Read
Create Relative Position Flat File Schema in BizTalk 2013

You might have a file that could have been generated by any number of systems, need to parse this in such a way that BizTalk understands and can work with it. In all cases that is going to be XML. Your flat file schema is essentially instructions on how BizTalk and is going to parse and then convert this flat file into XML, as well as serve as a formal definition of how this XML should be structured.

January 7, 2015 Read
Bitcoin Phishing Attack

I received this email about an hour ago: Hello David… I just did what you advised me to do but the problem remains the same : importing the private key is not working…. drives me nuts! Last time I checked blockchain.info ( https://blockchain.info/address/(redacted) ) there was still 30.28020001BTC ! But no way my bitcoinqt client loads the key so I am stuck with those BTCs. Thanks for offering your help with this.

January 7, 2014 Read
Using Google Alerts, IFTTT, and Boxcar to Protect Your Information

Google alerts is a service from Google that will send you an email or update a RSS feed when it’s crawler hits new data from your search term(s). IFTTT is a service that lets you set up actions in response to triggers. BoxCar is a service that let you send custom notifications to your phone. I’ve combined all three of these services to help protect my personal information online.

April 27, 2013 Read
Blown away by how good Azure has become

I had looked into Microsoft’s Azure (then called AppFabric) maybe two years ago, and built some hello world type of things on there, and even hosted our wedding website there. At that time I was not very impressed by what was being offered. You had to program to a very specific API, which might not be a problem if you were creating a new application, however shoehorning an existing application to Azure (then) would have proved extremely difficult, and for what benefit?

December 8, 2012 Read