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Showing posts from June, 2012

BizTalk Community series: Introducing Mikael Sand

This week I attended TechEd Europe in Amsterdam . Accompanying me was Mikael Sand , a BizTalk professional from Sweden . I have met Mikael a couple times before and we always have some good discussions over BizTalk, beer, politics and sports. This time I have asked him some questions for the BizTalk Community Series and here is his story. Mikael Sand , a 30-something integration architect specializing on the Microsoft stack. He lives just south of Stockholm with his wife Catarina and 4-year old son Gabriel. Mikael’s expertise is what he would like to call “ the flow of the message ”. He is constantly thinking in flows and services. Mikael’s primary tool for implementing these flows is of course BizTalk Server and quite often he resorts to using that for all the work he does, so I guess the short answer is Mikael is an architect. Mikael’s opinion on BizTalk is: “BizTalk as a product is, what I would like to call “incomplete”. There are still a lot of room for improvement w

Visual Studio Service Bus Explorer versus Standalone Service Bus Explorer

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In a previous post I explored a new feature of the Windows Azure SDK 1.7. in Visual Studio, the Service Bus Explorer. I demonstrated the capabilities of this feature in Visual Studio, creating new queues, topics, subscriptions and rules. The same capabilities are present in the Service Bus Standalone tool (Windows Forms Application) built by Paolo Salvatori . INTRODUCTION The stand alone tool can be download from MSDN Code Gallery. You can then open the compressed file. Subsequently open the solution in Visual Studio 2010 or 2012 RC. Build and run it. To use the tool you need to connect to the Service Bus. In menu bar you select Menu –> Connect. In dialog that pops up you fill in the details. You click Ok an connection with the Service Bus will be made. You can now start creating and using queues, topics and subscriptions similar as with explorer in Visual Studio. However, the user experience is different as the Standalone version offers more functions when you right c

BizTalk Community series: Introducing Randy Aldrich Paulo

BizTalk community is very much alive. Around the world sessions are given to the community by BizTalk Server MVP’s and members of the BizTalk community. The BizTalk events site will give you a good overview of events taking place around the globe. Besides the events there is a lot more activity going round in the community. Forums, TechNet Wiki, blogs and the publication of books. One of the members that is active in the community is Randy . I sent him an email a few weeks ago with a couple of questions and he responded. So here is another story of a BizTalk community member I like to bring to the foreground: Randy Aldrich Paulo . Randy Aldrich I. Paulo is 28 years old and from the Philippines . Last couple of years he is living in the Netherlands ( Leiden ) with his wife and two wonderful children ages 3 (son) and 8 (daughter). Randy currently works as a BizTalk Consultant for a company in Sassenheim and aside from BizTalk development,he also works on ETL solutions using (

Exploring the Service Bus Relay, Queues,Topics and Subscriptions with Visual Studio 2012 RC and Windows Azure SDK 1.7

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  Introduction In my post on Future BizTalk Server Release and Microsoft Integration Strategy I discussed the three pronged Microsoft integration strategy: On-premise BizTalk (a CTP of next version will be released this summer) BizTalk IaaS ( Infrastructure as a Services ), Windows Azure offers services like Virtual Machine and Virtual Network to enable to have your BizTalk infrastructure in the cloud; BizTalk PaaS ( Platform as a Services ) with EDI/EAI integration capabilities using the Service Bus. In this post I like to share my exploration of the Windows Azure Service Bus . My focus is on BizTalk professionals that do not yet have much experience/knowledge of the Windows Azure Service Bus.Two sessions by Clemens Vasters from last TechEd North America were my baseline before I started my exploration: Overview and Roadmap of Windows Azure Service Bus Achieving Enterprise Integration Patterns with Windows Azure Service Bus I will explore capabilities of

Will BizTalk Server be first class citizen? Yes, Microsoft will strongly invest in BizTalk Server now and in the future!

Almost two years ago I posted a story on the BizTalk roadmap and made a statement that it here to stay. I ended the post with: “My thinking with current evolution of BizTalk is that it will become a first class citizen with Microsoft offerings.” I am not Nostradamus or a fortuneteller yet my feeling back then told that BizTalk is not dead yet. With such a strong and vibrant community and over 10.000 customers I could not imaging that Microsoft would stop investing in it. Another story that confirmed my thinking and of many others I think was the well known and written post “ Is BizTalk Server Going Away At Some Point? Yes. Dead? Nope .” by Richard Seroter July last year. Year 2012 Microsoft is still investing in BizTalk and bringing out the next version beginning of 2013. A lot of features/enhancements are revealed during TechEd North America . Kent Weare , BizTalk MVP from Canada has been cranking out some excellent posts on what Microsoft will be bringing out in the near futur

Capturing Image of Windows Azure Virtual Machine and creating an new Virtual Machine with the Image

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In my previous post I showed how to provision a Virtual Machine in Windows Azure. The Virtual Machine was used to create a BizTalk 2010 Development environment. Now in this post I would like to go into creating an image of this Virtual Machine and then use it to create a new Virtual Machine. An image is a virtual hard disk (VHD) file that is used as a template for creating a virtual machine. This can be useful when you want to create multiple virtual machines that are set up the same way. Another reason can be to capture the image as you do not want to use it for a while and prevent incurring costs. Capturing a Virtual Machine To capture a Virtual Machine you need to perform a few steps. One is to sysprep the virtual machine. For Window Server 2008 R2, like my BizTalk Development environment, I followed instructions from article " How to Capture an Image of a Virtual Machine Running Windows Server 2008 R2 ". After sysprepping your machine you need to capture it. Sy

BizTalk IaaS solution: Provisioning Developer Environment

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One of the new Windows Azure services is Virtual Machines (see announcements ). Virtual Machines in Window Azure support the ability to deploy and run durable VMs in the cloud. You can easily create these VMs using a new Image Gallery built-into the new Windows Azure Portal, or alternatively upload and run your own custom-built VHD images. Virtual Machines Virtual Machines give you application mobility, allowing you to move your virtual hard disks (VHDs) back and forth between on-premises and the cloud. You can migrate existing workloads such as Microsoft SQL Server or BizTalk Server to the cloud, or bring your own customized Windows Server or Linux images, or select from a gallery. As you see from the screenshot above there are compatible operating systems and images available in the online gallery; Windows Server Windows Server 2008 R2 SP 1 May 2012  Windows Server 2008 R2 with SQL Server 2012 Evaluation Windows Server 2012 RC Linux: OpenSUSE 12.1 CentOS 6.2