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Showing posts from June, 2007

Microsoft ESB Guidance

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I received an email today from Marty Wasznicky , Regional Program Manager BizTalk Server Microsoft. His email announces a community release of Microsoft ESB Guidance. Microsoft ESB was demoed during SOA & BPM Conference in Redmond last year in October (see previous post ). ESB Guidance consisted of the following which enabled Microsoft partners and customers to build large and small-scale ESB solutions: • Sample code built on BizTalk Server 2006 • Architectural guidance, patterns and practices • Reusable BizTalk Server ESB and .NET components: o Dynamic Transformation Service o Dynamic End Point/Configuration Service o Itinerary based Routing & Service Invocation o ESB Portal o Exception Management framework o Namespace Resolution Service o JMS (Java Message Service) pipeline component (IBM JMS over WMQ) Dedicated Microsoft ESB web site: http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/solutions/soa/esb.mspx Dedicated Partner site for delivering the ESB Guidance: http://www.microsoft.com/bizta

BizTalk SIG Experience

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Y esterday I led a Special Interest Group BizTalk Meeting. We discussed some customer scenarios, where we created BizTalk solutions for. It was a very successful exchange of knowledge and experiences. Solutions involved connections to legacy systems like AS/400, LOB like SAP and Oracle eBusiness suite, webservices (WSE) and SQL Server. Solutions were demoed to each other on VPC or through VPN to customer development environment. Experiences during development were discussed and practical matters were exchanged. One example of practical matter discussed was involved with jobs running under SQL Server agent to tidy up the MessageBox database for instance. If the SQL Server agent is not running (discovered later on when BizTalk application is running) one will experience performance degredation, because MessageBox is growing and growing (tables scans will be performed to match subscriptions on messages). To solve this there is a great post on internet, where two scripts are explained

Second Day at DevDays 2007 Amsterdam

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Second day at the DevDays. I had to work in the morning so I missed first two sessions I wanted to attend. I went to three sessions in the afternoon: Realizing SaaS with .Net 3.0 by Adam Magee Windows CardSpace and your digital identity on the web by Erik van de Ven Lego Mindstorm NXT, Visual Studio & Microsoft Robotics by Alex Thissen and Anko Duizer Adam Magee did his session around Software as a service and not so much about .NET 3.0 in my opinion. There was great overview of Saas as concept, its architecture, platform (Microsoft), maturity, multi-tenacy, identity and access (Windows Cardspace, open Id), interfaces, technology (AJAX, Extreme DHTML, AdobeMix, Sliverlight), Governance. For me this session was good, because it gave me a better view on Saas. I have some experience in this field when in the beginning of this year and end of 2006 I had to architect a framework for a customer, who wanted to host applications as a service. Software as a service (SaaS) is a software app

First Day at DevDays 2007 Amsterdam

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Today I went to the first day of DevDays 2007 in Amsterdam. It was a fun day and met a lot of people, old colleagues, people I worked with, speakers, trainers from companies like class-a, Microsoft people like Arie Leeuwensteijn (organizer DevDays). It was just awesome. I started the day with a keynote from Scott Guthrie, who talked about Silverlight . Most of you probably already heard about this new Microsoft Technology. From a SOA perspective it is interesting to note it has an API for connecting to web services, so consuming services for displaying data will be no problem. He also showed a new product of Microsoft called Expression. This product was demoed by Wayne Smith. After this demo a few more followed around Sliverlight with one you can look or try out yourself called bananas. So in a nutshell Silverlight will give you: Broad reach Rich Multimedia .Net Multiple languages (Ruby, Python, Dynamic VB) Express Studio Visual Studio Services Second session I went was SQL Server Inte

Business Process Conference 2007 Netherlands

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Today I went to Microsoft Business Conference 2007 with subjects SOA, BPM and Microsoft. Location was a castle in a town called Putten. Speakers were Dik Bijl (Architect Advisor from Microsoft Netherlands), David Chappell , Chris Dial. I had to pleasure of speaking Dik and David during breaks. Meeting Dik: I asked Dik about his presentation if it can be used to explain SOA to the business. He agreed it can be used and said algorithms of real live like Darwin (Diversity/Selection/Amplify) and Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations) apply for SOA. I will explain this later in this post. Meeting David: For breaking the ice I first introduced myself to David and asked him, why number of David Chappell’s in one his jokes about his name is 2 in Europe and 3 in the States (I saw him before, for instance SOA and BPM Conference October 2006 Redmond last year). He said well nobody knows David Chappelle (slight difference) comedian from the US in Europe. Then other difference with him and David Chappell

Installing and configuring BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Beta2

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I started with a sysprep vpc Windows 2003 SP1. After setting it up through VPC console I started with patching and SP2 (this may take a while, depending on your host system). Next step is installing some prerequisites like IIS 6.0, Office Excel/InfoPath 2003 SP2, Visual Studio 2005, SharePoint Services 2.0, SQL Server 2005 SP1. This needs to be done to use HTTP, SOAP Adapter, WSS Adapter, SSL encryption and for BAS en HWS (last two I am not really interested in, so I left out InfoPath as well, which one needs for BAS configuration and use as BAS client). Doing installing all prerequites is quite a long ride behind a laptop doing it on VPC 2007, it helps having full access to them through an MSDN subscription. Learning aspect here is that one gets a good view what it takes to bring up BizTalk Server 2006 R2. I must say having a good installation guide that the Microsoft people made helps a lot too (especially explanation why some prerequites are necessary together with some background p

Software Developer Event - Software as a Service

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D ay before yesterday I went to a Software Development Event in my hometown Ede. It was organized by the Software Development Network . I went to the following sessions: SOA in high performance, high availability systems Web client software factory: ASP.NET 2.0, Ajax en workflow SOA: Implementation now and later In between there was lunch and I met Paul Gielens an old colleague, buddy I worked with at Interpolis. He was also a speaker for the session An Introduction to Domain-Driven Design. We had a nice chat for over an hour. All sessions I saw, where good ones especially the first one. Speaker Thaddy de Koning, who is an architect, development manager for ALEX a Dutch Online Stockbroker. His talk was about a high performance, high available systems, which one needs if online stock trading is done. He outlined their website and services that are used to provide all sorts of information. His vision of SOA is that services are doing something and it is not about How (like OO), or why