Hello folks,

     Recently I got involved in a project for building a demo application for one of our customers with Kinect for Windows. Yes, something similar what Tom Cruise did in the movie Minority Report. Waving arms, moving stuff around, swipes, speech recognition, manipulating computer screens without even touching it. Pretty cool!!! The idea in the movie showed us how technology would be after 50 years from that day.

     Well, that 50 years of time frame got squeezed and recently on Feb 1st 2012, Microsoft released the official Kinect for Windows SDK. That’s just 10 years from the movie release. Although, the product is in it early stages but with developer creativity and continuously improving hardware, those features shown in the movie are not very far away from becoming a reality. Soon after releasing the SDK, Microsoft again announced in March the release of its new Kinect for Windows SDK version 1.5 which is coming out in sometime May. More history about Kinect.

Anyways, so for a newbie with Kinect, where would you start. Here is what I would suggest you can do.

• Watch the Kinect for Windows Quick start Series by Den Fernandez.
• Download the Kinect for Windows SDK and start playing around with the demos in it. It also comes with some basic Kinect documentation.
• Coding4Fun Kinect Projects | Lot many more videos and open sources projects information.
• Kinect for Windows Session at Techdays NL demo by Jesus Rodriguez.
• Book: Beginning Kinect Programming with the Microsoft Kinect SDK.  | I did go through few of the chapters in this book and based on that, it does talk deeply about core Kinect concepts and also in very easy way to understand. I would definitely suggest this book for any Kinect developers. I liked the way it explained the Gestures recognition in Chapter 6.
• Buy your Kinect device from either Amazon or NewEgg. You will get it cheaper then buying it from Microsoft Store. Personally, I love Newegg.com as I never had any order related or shipping issues with them.

I always hate developing UI application but well, you would need to get your hands dirty with WPF too in order to work with Kinect. So get started with WPF concepts too.

I will keep adding stuff to the list once I come across them but so far the above list would definitely get you started building your first Kinect apps.

Till then Happy Kinecting…!!!!!

Thanks,

Vishal Mody 

In this post we will see few of the initial steps for developing BizTalk Solutions for integrating with PeopleSoft Enterprise Systems using PeopleSoft Adapter. In order to proceed further, you must have Installed and Configured PeopleSoft Adapter properly, both on BizTalk side and PeopleSoft System side. This particular post is based on PeopleSoft HRMS 9.0 system. But the steps shown below should be same for any PeopleSoft Enterprise System.

The steps will be same to connect to any Component Interface of PeopleSoft System. Here we will be connecting to the Employee Personal Data component interface.

Environment:

BizTalk Server 2010

Visual Studio 2010

SQL Server 2008 with SP2

PeopleSoft HRMS 9.0 with PeopleTools 8.52

Steps:

• Open Visual Studio 2010 and create a new BizTalk Solution. In this case we named it as PSDemo.

• Open BizTalk Server Administration Console and you can use any Application or you can create a new Application. Here we are using the BizTalk.EnterpriseApplication.

• Go to Send Ports for this application and right click and create a new Static Solicit Response Send Port.

• Name the send port appropriately and select PeopleSoft as the Transport Type and XML Transmit and XML Receive as the pipelines as shown in the screenshot.

• Click Configure for the PeopleSoft Adapter and fill in the appropriate values for the PeopleSoft adapter properties. You can keep other values as default ones apart from the Application Server Path, Java_Home, Password, PeopleSoftJarFile and Username.

• Click Apply –> Ok. Restart the BizTalk Host Instance and then Stat this particular Send Port. Check the event log if you have any errors after starting the Send Port.

• Go back the the Visual Studio solution. Right click the project and click Add Generated Items.

• Click Add Adapter Metadata.

• From the list of registered adapters, select PeopleSoft Adapter and wait for a second and you will see the list of Send Ports registered with PeopleSoft Adapter. Select the one which we created above and click Next.

• Wait for few seconds and you will see all the Component Interfaces for the PeopleSoft System. If you don’t see any CI then there might be some issue in your PeopleSoft Adapter configuration on the send port side. Check the Event Log for any error. For any JVM related errors, check out this blog post to fix them. It also discusses other error fixes.

• Select the component interface from the list for which you want to generate the metadata for. Here we will be using CI_Personal_Data which is a component interface for PeopleSoft HRMS Employee Personal Data.

• Once selected click Finish and after few seconds you will see the schemas and orchestration added for this CI.

Commonly when you try to connect the Enterprise Applciatons with BizTalk Adapters you might get errors like :

E-PSFT0029: JVM was not started

OR

Unable to find JAVA_HOME.

As the error says, it is unable to locate the JVM.dll and unable to start it.

Resolution:

• Make sure the folder having JVM is present as a value in PATH variable of environment variables. Say for PeopleSoft Applications, the JVM can be found with the app called JRockit so make sure the folder path of JRockit containing the JVM is properly present in the environment variable value.

• Apart from PATH variable, make sure you also have a variable named CLASSPATH with the Jar file location in it. The mentioned below is a psjoa.jar file needed for PeopleSoft Adapter. 

• Download this exe and provide the path of the JVM.dll and check if its able to start it successfully. If yes then you can use this Folder path in the BizTalk Server Adapter configurations on the BizTalk Receive or Send Ports. If the JVM is unable to start with this tester then you know the problem is with this JVM.dll. May be some kind of security settings or access issues. Get the JVM.dll working.

Success:

Failure:

• Make sure you have all the necessary access to the user which will be connecting to the Enterprise Application. Also for the user on which the BizTalk Host Instance, BizTalk Adapters, BizTalk Send Handlers, BizTalk Receive Handlers etc are running. For eg, for PeopleSoft Applications, you will have to configure the PeopleSoft System as shown in this post so that BizTalk Adapter can connect to it.
• Lastly, make sure you have all the values in the BizTalk Send/Receive Port Adapter configurations properly with all the usernames, passwords, case sensitive values correctly.

Hope these helps.

Thanks,

Vishal Mody