CCF

BizTalk as a collection of tools OUTSIDE of integration

Customer Care Framework 2008 RTM

Read all at about it at Yves Pitsch's blog

Highlights:

Microsoft is pushing open source

Before I begin let me clarify a few points so you are aware of the context of this post.
1) I currently work for a Microsoft Gold Partner, been contracted to Microsoft (through my employer) and spoken at TechEd.
2) Before that I worked for company which used almost solely open source software and developed software for that. I also did work with the Shuttleworth foundation at the linux days event.
So I have been on both sides of the fence, now on to the content...

Best news since sliced bread

Ok, maybe not the absolute best news but it is a long time coming and needed. Finally there are CCF virtual labs available. This should help break the massive barrier of entry to this power house technology.
The labs available are:
Win32 automation
Web Automation
Winform automation
SSO

Reflector

You cannot call yourself a CCF developer until you have fired up Reflector a few times to understand the internal workings of the system. So it is with great joy I can say that version 5.0 is out for reflector. All the details available on the new version are available on Scott Hanselmans blog

The other panel

Last week I posted about the floating panels option, well there is another option for panels, that being: hiddenPanel

This setting causes the application not to show at all. Interesting ideas around this...

CCF with floating windows

CCF comes in pretty much any design you like, thanks to having the source code for the agent desktop available. One of the properties of the applications you add is a "Display Group" property which allows you to set where you want the application to go. If you leave it blank, then it defaults to the first CCF panel it finds. If you fill it in and it matches the name of an existing panel it will go on that panel (have a look at the out of box examples for Workflow, Current Session and Session Explorer).

CCF Wikipedia Entry

There is an entry in Wikipedia for CCF :) It is unfortunately very light in content.

What does spur me to post about it is not the article itself, but the comments in the history:
"(cur) (last) 21:07, 25 September 2006 Jmcnamera (Talk | contribs) (This reads like an ad plus I can not find anything notable on the web about this except some vague marketing material at MS web site. I'm an MS booster but this doesn't look real.)"