Posts

Showing posts from June, 2008

SOA Design Patterns

Image
Thomas Erl will publish a book soon about SOA Design Patterns . An article about SOA Design Patterns Patterns can be found in SOA World June issue. Later this year a SOA Symposium for practitioners will be held in Amsterdam with some workshops later on. In these workshops one can gain certification for SOA Consultant, SOA Architect and SOA Analyts. On the website launch of SOA Design Patterns book is announced. If you are interested read the article and/or visit the soasymposium site . Technorati: SOA SOA Design Patterns

High Performance Learning Environment for BizTalk Part I - Concept

Image
In post I would like to explain my view of how one can be very productive inside a BizTalk Development/Production Environment by setting up the right learning environment, installing open source tooling to help you as a developer/administrator with testing, setting up projects, development, deployment, monitoring and so on. Schematic overview below will outline what I am going to do in near future in what I will call High Performance Learning Environment for BizTalk. In coming posts I will go through each step. By following these steps displayed above one will gain fully understanding and experience in developing BizTalk Solutions with High Quality, how to test, deploy and monitor it. So in the coming posts I would like to explain and share my experiences with this concept. In my humble opinion going through these steps one will familiarize itself BizTalk in a complete holistic way using a lot of the potential BizTalk Platform offers combined with tools out there. Technorati: BizTalk

Interesting stuff

Image
Sometimes I wander around on the internet looking for more interesting things about BizTalk. I came across of Benny Mathew post about open source utilities for BizTalk. I found out there are more than I thought there were and there post gives an excellent outline what can be found on codeplex. Another interesting thing I found was about SOA, Sam Gentile gathered and written a great deal about a paradigm shift towards SOA. Furthermore I found a post about testing concurrency using threadpool, very useful and interesting stuff . Finally Nilay Parikh displays a MOSS concept about workflows intersecting with EAI and so on. So I have a lot to look into this weekend. Technorati: BizTalk BizTalk Server 2006 R2

BizTalk and SCOM 2007

Image
T his week I came across some interesting stuff around BizTalk. I found this post about using MOM to restart BizTalk Server and reminded me of a project I done two years ago setting up MOM to monitor a complete BizTalk Group, consisting of two instances of BizTalk in load balancing configuration, a clustered SQL Server (passive-active mode). So if working with MOM and experiencing some problems with restarting host instance check this post. Speaking of MOM it has now a successor in System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) and there has been a management pack release for BizTalk Server 2006 and R2. The BizTalk Server Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 is a entirely new management pack that provides comprehensive discovery and monitoring of BizTalk Server components and applications. In addition to general support for BizTalk Server 2006, BizTalk Server 2006 R2, this management pack provides coverage for new BizTalk Server 2006 R2 features, such as the native EDI runtime and RF

Improve productivity with BizTalk Software Factory

Image
Jean-Paul Smit released v1.0 of BizTalk Software Factory and supplies guidance for developing BizTalk applications. This release is based on the project Dick Dijkstra started a year ago on CodePlex (BASF). It has been extended with functionality, consists of source code, some documentation and one can do the following: * Create BizTalk multi project solution structures using a wizard * Create BizTalk single project solution, grouping artifacts into folders, using a wizard * Guidance for adding Schemas to a project * Guidance for adding Maps to a project * Guidance for adding Orchestrations to a project * Guidance for adding pipelines to a project. I downloaded this from Codeplex and gave it try on my VPC image containing, BizTalk Server 2006 R2 installed on Windows 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition SP2 with Visual Studio 2005 Professional ( NOT TFS ) as IDE. Steps I took to make it work were/are as follows: (1) Download BSF from codeplex; (2) Do not forget Guidance Automation Extentions 1

OLSO is coming to us

Image
Wandering around in the blogosphere I stumbled on a announcement that the first three components of OSLO , model driven connected-systems development initiative of Microsoft will be made available during Microsoft Professional Developers Conference( PDC ) this October. I hope I will be able to attend this event and witness it all. Components made available are: * Modeling tool * Repository * Declarative programming language. "The models will maintain deployment information such as system resources allocated for an application and information about the corresponding service level agreements. The modeling tool will be a graphical tool for building any kind of application. You'll be able to leverage the schema design in Visual Studio and BizTalk ." (I see BizTalk here so that will be definitely interesting for us BizTalk pro’s). Plans to support Unified Modeling Language (UML) were announced for inclusion in Visual Studio Team System release code named Rosario . The declara

Wandering through BizTalk land

Image
As I wander through BizTalk land I find more and more interesting stuff, when I read other people’s BizTalk blog. There more people, smart people blogging about BizTalk as I found out. This product has major capabilities and is gaining a lot popularity over last couple of years. I am just contributing a tiny bit by blogging with my experience with the product together with my interest in service orientation (and architecture). Things I came across this week was Richard Seroter’s post about new BizTalk performance and Whitepapers., which lead me to a blog (a very interesting one) for BizTalk Engineers. Pipeline testing tool by Thomas Restrepo. Repeating nodes in XML Document found at connected thoughts , another great blog I also added to my blogroll. A post about BizUnit and more interesting BizTalk Solution Factory by Santosh Benjamin. I could go one for while mention just things I discovered it just amazes me that is a lot out there. This is good, very good indeed because it kee

Custom Configuration BizTalk Solutions

Image
I recently found this post about custom configuration for a Biztalk Solution by Micheal Stephenson. I found very usefull since I posted something about configuration files before. I just scratched the surface in possibilities concerning configuration for BizTalk. Micheal gives you great insight in how custom configuration can be done. In extension this post I found another possibility written by Paul Petrov using Enterprise Library for custom configuration. So there are a lot of possibilities doing configuration for BizTalk solutions and I am happy these two guys have contributed in explaining the options. It will take some time for me and maybe you too to explore all the options, but it will be fun. Technorati: BizTalk BizTalk 2006 R2

Microsoft ESB Guidance

Image
Since November 2007 Microsoft ESB Guidance 1.0 is out there. Recently a customer asked what ESB actually is and if it runs in a production environment. I am talking here about Microsoft ESB implementation. During DevDays 2008 in Holland Christian Weyer in his talk about BizTalk Services pointed out that ESB is a super pattern, which can be implemented with a variety of technologies. Again I hear somebody saying it is a pattern or architectural style and not a product. I posted a question on linkedin asking people in and outside my network, if they think ESB is a well known (super)pattern and when to apply. And I got some answers that it is a way to bring all of the technologies within a company, entity, or enterprise together. Depending on the magnitude of what that could encompass, it *could* mean a simple product that "maps" everything together. Usually, though, it is a way -- and therefore, an architectural pattern as you stated -- to bring all of the different software’s

BizTalk Exception Management

Image
The latest publication of BizTalk Hotrod Magazine is available and can be downloaded . The topics in this issue covered are: • BizTalk Exception Management • Exposing Business Rules Engine Policies as WCF Services • Tools of the Trade • Parallel Convoys in BizTalk • A Glimpse of the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 WCF Adapters • Smart Use of XSLT BizTalk • In the beginning • What's Under that Hood? I have read this edition and found the BizTalk Exception Management Application is a great article. It walks you through an enterprise BizTalk Exception Management application based upon the Patterns and Practices ESB Exception Management Framework. If you have ever thought about using the ESB Exception Management Framework, this article serves as a great primer. So I started experimenting with this Framework, not in a BizTalk 2006 R2 environment, but just BizTalk Server 2006. In my environment I had Microsoft Windows 2003 Standard Edition SP2 OS, 1,6Ghz processor and 512 Mb of RAM. It had Office