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Showing posts from July, 2007

Blogging so far

Well almost a year of blogging. Must say it is a very joyful effort to share knowledge, opinions and so on. This will be the last post for now, because I am going on holiday for a couple of weeks to Spain and France. Will be back begin September and start posting again on this blog and a new one in Dutch. Have a nice holiday!

SOA Framework

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My company inter access is working hard on a SOA framework. I mentioned this in one of previous posts . We have found a more or less good defintion for SOA, which is (freely translated): A Service Oriented Architecture is a structural style to establish information needs of a organisation based on services Took a while for us architects to come to this one, but it takes usually a lot of time to get a definition in sync with many different views of people on in this case SOA.We are now focusing on principles and characteristics. These characteristics are in a nutshell loosely coupled services, which have explicit boundaries, are autonomous and meta-data driven. Services are standard based, which are widely adopted like HTTP, XML, SOAP and communicate between themselves and consumers through contracts on basis of schema’s. From characteristics we want to formulate principles of SOA and focus next on identifying functionalities/concepts like for instance Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)

BizTalk and Configuration Files

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In one of my previous post I mentioned Log4Net. Configuration of log4net is done through a registry pointing to a configuration file, where one can determine how configuration of logging inside BizTalk for instance can be done. So using a config file for configuration purposes in BizTalk is also possible in another way. One can create an environmental variable by going to control panel --> system --> advanced. Next one can create an new enviromental variable by clicking enviromental variables and new button under system variables. After creating the variable it can be checked by using the command prompt and type : set enviromental variable . Once this is al done a class library can be added to a BizTalk solution. In class module the following assemblies are necessary: #region Using using System; using System.Xml; using System.Text; using System.Reflection; using System.Configuration; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.IO; #endregion namespace xxx.Components {

LEAP 2008

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This year I and another colleague of my organization (Inter Access) will be participating in LEAP (Lead Enterprise Architect Program). This is a program organized by Microsoft Netherlands and initiated by Dik Bijl for Lead enterprise Architects. The program starts in the Netherlands with four afternoon sessions of presentations, discussions and cases and ends with one week in Redmond (January 2008) with presentations of the architect leaders of Microsoft and some off-topic entertainment in de evenings. I am looking forward to this to get acquainted with fellow architects from Holland. Kick off will be September this year. I will post my experiences later on this year. Technorati: LEAP Dik Bijl

My first experience with SSIS

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L ast week I had my first experience with SQL Server Integration Services. Customer I am working now needed a data transfer from Oracle to SQL Server. The reason they wanted this was because availability of Oracle was not guaranteed. Data needed to be available at all times and Oracle databases were hosted by a third-party and SQL Server database were in house and we control over them. If one has access to SQL Server Instance with SSIS installed and templates for creating solutions are available inside Visual Studio one can start a analysis project, where SSIS packages can be incorporated (I do not know if this the exact approach to do it, but here I found a SSIS packages). I created a new SSIS Package. Next thing I did was creating two connection managers, so I can make connection to Oracle and SQL Server. When one creates a new connection manager there are a number of providers available like Native OLEDB\Microsoft OLE DB Provider for Oracle. Choose this one fill in the details a tes

New BizTalk Server book

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I received a new BizTalk book today. In some of my previous posts I mentioned a BizTalk book from APRESS, this one is published in May and from WROX. The authors are Darren Jefford , Kevin B. Smith and Ewan Fairweather . It’s a programmer to programmer book that will teach you: How the BizTalk Engine works and how to develop effective pipeline components; How to develop BizTalk orchestrations that achieve maximum performance; Methods for using Business Activity Monitoring within your solution for enterprise-wide instrumentation; How to utilize the rules engine within your solutions to produce quality and reliability; Techniques for conducting performance and scalability tests to identify bottlenecks; Ways to minimize the latency of your solution to meet challenging low latency requirements; How system administrators can proactively manage and maintain mission-critical BizTalk solutions; Features for BizTalk Server 2006 R2, such as the BAM Interceptor for Windows® Workflow. It has so

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 WCF Adapter

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In a previous post I described my experience with installing and configuring BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Beta2. This time I wanted to try out one of the features of R2, WCF Adapter. I found an example of Stephen W. Thomas together with a video demoing WCF Adapter on BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Beta 1. Demo still applies for beta 2 with some differences in screens (wizard) when publishing the WCF Service. Below the first screen when one is using the wizard. I forgot to check enable metadata endpoint, there for in the config file of the service the following line was commented out: endpoint name="HttpMexEndpoint" address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="" contract="IMetadataExchange " . So do not forget to check it. The rest of screens are the same as in the video. I also did not VS extensions for VisualStudio 2005 installed containing the WCF SDK. Generating the proxy was not possible without svcutil. As soon as I had it ins

CDATA Mapping Experience inside BizTalk

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XML CDATA is something I was not really familiar with before. Xml parsers normally parse all text in an xml document. Text inside a CDATA section is ignored. This week I stumbled over CDATA sections inside a message. This message I had to map to another message with a different structure and later on had to be passed to a web service. During mapping I seem to have lost the CDATA Section. I googled around, but I could not find a satisfactory solution to my problem. So I started experimenting with inline xslt and c# inside a script functoid. Unfortunately I had no result. I got CDATA section around data, but <> translated into ;lt and ;gt when I opened the resulting message inside notepad (when I temporarily saved it to file). In the end I got fed up with it and called a function inside a class module. I created a component (class library) with the class module and passed the mapped message as xml document to function I created. The function is listed below: public XmlDocument Ad