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Showing posts from November, 2008

Service Architecture Pocket Guide

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Thanks to Richard Seroter I stumbled on the Service Architecture Pocket Guide , which provides an overview and prescriptive guidance for designing services on the .NET platform. The guide contains the following chapters and resources: • Chapter 1, "Service Architecture," provides general design guidelines for a service application, explains the key attributes, discusses the use of layers, provides guidelines for performance, security, and deployment, and lists the key patterns and technology considerations. • Chapter 2, "Designing Services,” helps you to understand the key scenarios for designing services including scenarios for both service providers and service consumers. Use these scenarios to help you better understand how to design your service architecture. • Chapter 3, "Service Layer Guidelines,” helps you to understand how the service layer fits into the typical application architecture, learn about the components of the service layer, learn

BizTalk Server and "Oslo" and .NET

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In light of the announced and presented project OSLO, Microsoft’s modeling platform, during last PDC makes it interesting how it will relate to BizTalk. The reason I think it is interesting is, because of OSLO architecture (displayed below). If you look at runtimes, than BizTalk could be a runtime for models. At Microsoft’s BizTalk Server website it is stated in the roadmap that: In fact, you won’t need to upgrade BizTalk Server to take advantage of "Oslo" – current BizTalk Server 2006 R2 or BizTalk Server 2009 customers can benefit from "Oslo" by being able to leverage and compose existing services into new composite applications. BizTalk Server today provides the ability to service enable LOB systems or trading partners as web services (using WCF supported protocols), which can be composed with the "Oslo" modeling technologies. Hopefully more will be made clear how OSLO and BizTalk will work together during coming SOA & BPM Conference end

Last Dutch BTUG Meeting This Year

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Last BTUG meeting this year will be held at Microsoft Dutch Headquarters in Schiphol. This time the agenda is as follows: BizTalk Implementation at Interpolis (Large insurance firm in Holland); PDC Experience; Business integration with BizTalk; Microsoft about new developments on BizTalk. Last session will probably go to into new features of BizTalk 2009. This will also be one the subjects for coming SOA & BPM Conference held at Redmond Conference Center 27 – 30 January. Technorati: Microsoft SOA and BPM Conference BizTalk BizTalk 2006 R2 BizTalk Server 2009

A First Look at WF 4.0, Dublin, and Oslo

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During PDC I could not attend any session on WF 4.0 or Dublin. I focused more on Azure and OSLO. Having just blogged about David Chappell’s talk today I noticed he has written a whitepaper about WF 4.0, Dublin and OSLO too. These technologies can be used together or independently (see below). I have taken this picture above from the whitepaper. David did a talk during Teched about the subjects. Also Robert-Jan has done a couple of posts as he was more focused on Dublin. According to Marcel Fernee this paper should also be read by people that attended PDC as well. Some impression of this topic: TechEd – Developers : DeveloperFusion ; BizTalkGuru’s ; Bloggersguide . Check out these resources and read the paper; I will start now. Technorati: Microsoft OSLO WF PDC 2008 Microsoft Dublin

Future is in the cloud

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David Chappell did a talk about Windows Azure Services Platform today at Microsoft Innovation Center (MIC) in Barneveld (not according to his schedule ). In stead of travelling thousands of miles in a plane to see/hear him talk, I now could step into my car drive a couple of miles (I live in Ede, which is nearby). His talk is centered around Azure Service Platform whitepaper he wrote recently and held for LEAP alumni, ones attending LEAP before and ones attending it now led by Serge van Schie from Microsoft. I ran into an old colleague Christian Siegers ; we both used to work for Atos Origin and he is a very good BizTalk pro. Also talked with Robert-Jan from Logica, who I spend a lot of time with during PDC in LA (check out his blog !). This cloud computing is going to be huge. After mainframe’s (in 60’s), Mini-computers (70’s), Personal Computer (80’s), Servers (90’s), Device’s (mobile and so on, now) we will have 6th platform now ‘The Cloud’ ; that is just in 50 years time, ama

WCF Restful Services

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Steve Maine did a session about Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)for building Web 2.0-style services that use URIs, HTTP GET, and other data formats beyond XML. See how these features can be applied to AJAX web sites, "REST" applications, and data feeds. Now Jon Flanders has his book released on Safari about Restful .NET. Book description is as follows:   RESTful .NET is the first book that teaches Windows developers to build RESTful web services using the latest Microsoft tools. Written by Windows Communication Foundation (WFC) expert Jon Flanders, this hands-on tutorial demonstrates how you can use WCF and other components of the .NET 3.5 Framework to build, deploy and use REST-based web services in a variety of application scenarios. RESTful architecture offers a simpler approach to building web services than SOAP, SOA, and the cumbersome WS-* stack. And WCF has proven to be a flexible technology for building distributed systems not necessarily tied t

BizTalk Deployment

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Very recently there is a new version of BizTalk Deployment Framework available through codeplex. It used to be hosted by Scott Colestock . It is 4th release of the framework. I will use it in my High Performance Learning for BizTalk environment (see post part I , post part II,   post IIa , post part III, post part IVa ). I will continue with this environment any time soon, discussing development, then deploying, administration/monitoring through SCOM and some troubleshooting stuff. Technorati:: BizTalk 2006 R2 BizTalk Server 2006 R2 BizTalk

BizTalk WCF Whitepapers

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In my previous post I talked a little bit about what going to happen with BizTalk . It going to be around a very long time and Microsoft has big investment in it and keeps innovating and supporting it. Latest examples of this are recently new published white papers about BizTalk and WCF: Using the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Adapters in BizTalk Server Consuming and Hosting WCF Services with Custom Bindings in BizTalk Server The new Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) adapters in BizTalk Server 2006 R2 bring the flexibility of WCF to the world of BizTalk Server messaging. The WCF adapters make it possible to define send ports and receive locations that use WCF behind the scenes to integrate with the BizTalk MessageBox database. The first paper involves this. The other paper (second) provides an in-depth explanation on how to use the BizTalk Server WCF adapters for hosting and consuming Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services with custom bindings. The

What is going to happen with BizTalk

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During PDC some BizTalk folks wondered what is going to happen with BizTalk now Dublin is coming. I talked with some Microsoft people from the Netherlands and they say is going to be around for at least a couple of years if not longer. In past Charles Young posted a post around difference between Dublin and BizTalk. This week Aaron Skonnard did a post about OSLO and future of BizTalk. I believe and I am no insider that BizTalk is going to be around for a long time, because it is a great application server for integration. With a log list of adapters out of the box, LOB adapters and new WCF adapters it can do enterprise application integration very well. I have done a great deal of integration projects with BizTalk Server and a few are coming up next year. A lot of customers are very happy with the product (at least 2006 or R2 versions). If you talk about business processes it will be a different story, BizTalk is perfect for machine to machine communication and processes; there are m

Modeling with M

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This week I posted my lap around OSLO experience and in addition to this today Jon put out a intro into M video of approximately 40 minutes. It shows how to model with SQL tools inside SQL Server 2008 versus modeling in M using IntelliPad. In both cases tables are created, data is added and shown through a simple application made in Visual Studio 2008 using Dynamic Data Entitities Web Application Template. It is a very good introduction to M showing how a developer can easy model with M, but you will need to learn language M. Using M instead of SQL tools is that with M one has a database definition file that can be stored for instance in version control system to do differences between versions, branch and/or merge with well known tools later on (Scott ColeStock post on Models as Text post ). Check out the video and other related posts. Technorati: Microsoft OSLO

Views and Opinions about OSLO

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I am fairly new to DSL and especially now with OSLO. In my previous post today I did my own lap (experimenting) with OSLO and only scratch the surface. There are some experts in world though around DSL and better understanding of OSLO than me. I am at the beginning of a long and steep learning curve, but I eager enough to accept the challenge to learn and understand it thoroughly. Here are some great posts of people with a opinion or view of OSLO: Clemens Reijnen - Three Model Archetypes for Oslo… Edward Bakker – Another Modeling Platform Jon Flanders – Intellipad(Ipad) – adding commands Mary-Jo Foley - Microsoft Big Brains: Brad Lovering Martin Fowler – OSLO Charles Young - Microsoft 'Oslo' - the vNext SOA Platform Dennis Doomen – What is Oslo? William Vambenepe - First in-depth look at Microsoft’s Oslo and the “M” modeling language Chris Sells - Oslo Week One Wrap-Up (contains a lot of links to some valuable resources) Tien TienLi - O

My lap around OSLO

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Now I am home I can start experimenting with things I heard at the PDC. In my previous post I created a Azure Service; my first one. This time I am going to do my own lap around OSLO. In some post you have already read what OSLO is; if not here’s a brief explanation. OSLO is a platform for model-driven applications. It contains three components: “M” (The language for authoring models & DSLs) “Quadrant” (The tool for interacting with models & DSLs ) Repository (The database for storing & sharing models, this will be SQL Server) “M” gives you the modeling and textual DSLs. With M you write down the things you need to drive your application.  The things could be application configuration data, or application specific data, or data which is actually your application. With “Quadrant” you have a visual tool to view the models in the Repository (interaction with data). It gives the user a flexible and focused design surface (some people like drawings). Finally