BizTalk Server 2009 Official Release

BizTalk has been officially released yesterday 27th of April. All its features and for instance which features are gone can be found at new features BizTalk Server 2009 page. Check out Brian Loesgen latest post.

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New BizTalk Server 2009 Book

I have bought the eBook and hardcopy at Packt Publishing site of Richard Seroters new book called SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009. This book specifically shows how to map service-oriented principles and patterns to the BizTalk product. It is a technical resource for professionals looking to implement service-oriented patterns while exposing new services or consuming existing ones. How BizTalk Server works with new WCF Service model will be covered amongst other topics like BizTalk Engine to build asynchronous processes and reusable orchestrations. First three chapters will introduce reader to BizTalk and WCF. These chapters serve as a base for latter chapters that helps one with designing and applying increasingly complex patterns and scenarios. There is also some source code belonging to this book that can be downloaded. I have started with reading the book and will try code out on my BizTalk Server 2009 VPC.

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Some New BizTalk Documentation

New BizTalk Hotrod Magazine is out. It seams there back in a flow releasing a magazine every quarter of a year. Other thing I noticed that there is a BizTalk Server 2009 Hyper V Guide out. That some documentation on BizTalk Server, which keep growing and growing. Also check out BizTalk 24 * 7 – BlogDoc if you haven’t already. There is a lot information there too and it’s updated with new content regularly.

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BizTalk Operations

In one of my current projects I am working on documentation regarding BizTalk Operations for a DTAP environment (see one of my previous post about DTAP). To maintain a healthy, responsive and available environments certain procedures and IT staff are necessary to meet these responsibilities. A dedicated team of BizTalk operational specialists and SQL Server DBA’s should be created for the task of maintaining operational (P) and test environments (T,A) and development environments. A good post a couple months ago by Nick Heppleston about The BizTalk Ops Team - Maintaining a Healthy, Responsive and Available BizTalk Environment helped me a lot. Also chapter 9 of BizTalk pro book contains a lot of information and gives a lot of background on tasks mentioned in post by Nick. One other resource I used was BizTalk 2006 R2 core documentation. One of my challenges now is to digest information around SCOM and how to use it efficiently to monitor BizTalk Server environments. Last year I created a single box installation on virtual machine containing BizTalk and SCOM, where I applied BizTalk Management Pack. Just to give an impression how SCOM works, when Management Pack is applied and health services are running see screenshot below.

Application state view an alert is signaled stating there is a problem inside BizTalk application Order Processing. As you can see there are many views and panes, each having some meaning in monitoring BizTalk Server 2006 and System itself (in case virtual machine). As said before it is now time for me to dive into SCOM. Suggestions are welcome.

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My first Service Specification Experience

I am currently involved in a SOA project and working on Service Specifications. Organization I am working for started their first steps towards a full blown SOA. Choice of an ESB has been made and Microsoft BizTalk Server it is. Next step is identifying and specifying services. That is the stage where I am involved now. It is quite an encouraging experience and I have support (guidance) from an excellent architect. Service identification is a process of determining, which services enterprises really need. Business will be leading in this and IT has to realize them and where alignment between comes into play. This is serious process to shorten gap between business and IT. All tough business is leading a strong focus on this side may result in services, where implementation considerations have not been taken into account and services that are too specific and therefore not reusable (one of the SOA Principles). The same risk is there when identification of services is focus on single business functions leading towards possible overlap of services and redundancy. Focus here is on identifying services with reusability in mind. This is something project I am in has its main focus on: Reusability. Linda Terlouw and others have written an excellent article about approaches towards identifying services. Also one of her latest posts concerns service catalog, an important artifact for consumers to discover services and determine whether or not they are useful (meet requirements). I am very excited to be working on service specifications and to have an opportunity to gain some more experience in SOA.

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BizTalk Server 2009 is here

On blog posts I read that BizTalk Server 2009 is available on MSDN and through Volume License Key. This means as BizTalkers we can start working with official released product. I have started with yet again a sandbox installation with MSDN BizTalk Server 2009 Developer Edition. And try a couple thing out like Brian Loesgen post Walkthrough: Composite Operations with the new WCF-based SQL Adapter.

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SlideShare Rockstar

Two years I published a couple of slides about a presentation I did about BizTalk 2006 Orchestration Vs Messaging. It was a introduction of BizTalk towards my colleagues at Inter Access. In this presentation I made distinction between messaging and orchestrations. Two main features of BizTalk 2006 besides BAM, BRE and RFID. Recently I got a message from SlideShare telling me I was/am a SlideShare Rockstar (#bestofslideshare). I liked to be rockstar (in my dreams), but I have no music background or talent (feeling) for it. So I am rocking sometimes by playing guitar hero III (can’t wait to play Metallica coming out soon in Europe) and feel like a Rockstar with my plastic guitar :) The presentation is in Dutch and can be found at slideshare.

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