BizTalk Community Series: Introducing Ritu Raj‏

The BizTalk community series blog posts have been running for a number of months now. Since January I have introduced 20 BizTalk community members. Yet there are a still more stories to follow the next couple of months. There are a lot of IT professionals around the world dedicated towards BizTalk. Many of them contribute to community through blogs, forums, wiki's, articles, books and giving presentations.

The people I interviewed and talked to for these series are representatives of the BizTalk community. They are committed to BizTalk and to its community by providing their knowledge and experience through channels I just mentioned. Today I have another story for you on an enthusiastic BizTalk professional from India: Ritu Raj.

Ritu is 27 years old engineer working in the IT industry for the last 5 years. He is currently
based out of Pune, Maharastra, India. After graduating Ritu started working with BizTalk at KEANE as a Software Engineer. He then moved on to work with CompuGain and Mahindra Satyam as a Senior Engineer working on BizTalk 2009 and 2010. Having worked with Microsoft for a relatively short period, Ritu moved on to join “Syncada from VISA” as a Senior Developer/Architect using his experience and expertise on BizTalk to develop and design solutions.

Ritu is a dedicated follower of the TechNet wiki and tries to help on the BizTalk forums. In past he has made a few blog posts. He is a core developer through out and that is what he loves doing.

"Developing is what I am best at. I have been actively working on architecting solutions on BizTalk and related technology."

Ritu's view on BizTalk is as follows:

"For me BizTalk is the best tool available in market for bizness (read Business) talking. BizTalk with the evolution of technology and science is remarkable. I think myself to be a privileged to see this transition and working with the same. BizTalk has adapted itself within the moving technology space. It has been growing more robust and reliable with every new release."

Ritu loves spending time with his loved ones and friends. He likes reading articles on new trends in technology. Besides that he loves soft music, action and historic movies.

Like many fellow Indian (BizTalk) professionals Ritu is a cricket fan and loves playing it in his free time. He is a hard core Indian Cricket team fan and likes to see the  England team win, if India is not the opponent. Besides criket he follows lawn tennis and Roger Federer is his all time favorite sports person.

A final comment from Ritu and expressing his appreciation for these series:

"Also, a big thanks to Steef-Jan for featuring me on introducing series and starting such a great initiative to bring BizTalk community closer and closer by each day. I would like to thank you for all the great posts and work you have done towards helping out the community."

Thanks Ritu for your time and contributions so far, keep it up.

Windows Azure Service Bus Management - Queues, Topics and Relays

The new Windows Azure Management Portal now supports Service Bus management and monitoring. This is one of the new improvements of the new portal. This will a mean a new experience for the user compared to the older management portal based on Silverlight. The functionality remains similar as per creating a namespace, creating queues and topics.

Above you see a screenshot of Service Bus management in the old portal and below a screenshot for the new portal.

 

 

As you can see the look and feel is totally different. The ALL tab gives an overview of all the Queues, Topics, and Relays. Compared to the old portal the relays are now visible. Queues, topics and relays can be viewed separately by clicking the its tab. For instance the relay tab in my case will show the relays.

You will find more on working with relays using the new portal through Trying Out the New Windows Azure Portal Support for Relay Services blog post by Richard Seroter. On each tab you will find + NEW button on the left hand corner below. If you click NEW a dialog will appear.

Now you have to ability to create a new queue, topic or relay. You can create a new queue for instance through QUICK CREATE with default settings or CUSTOM CREATE with custom settings. If you for instance want to create a custom queue you can click CUSTOM CREATE. A Wizard will start and you will have to fill in a Queue name, region (i.e. data center), subscription (one you create when signing up for Azure) and Namespace (which can be created through Service Bus service view by clicking CREATE button in menu below).

Next step is configuring the queue by determining the max size, message time to live, move messages to dead letter queue, lock duration, duplication detection and enable session.

If you now click the check mark button the queue will be provisioned.

As you can see the queue is created and visible in the portal. You can click the newly created queue and see some characteristics in a dashboard.

You have to ability now to view the connection string of the queue, delete, disable it or view the access key. By click the access key a dialog will pop up showing you the connection string, default issuer, default key and link to ACS Management Portal.

The walkthrough above showed you how to create and manage a newly created queue. For creating a topic the steps are similar. For relays see Richard's post. As you can see new portal gives you a new user experience, yet same functionality and new enhancements compared to the old portal.

Finally I also like to point out that you can also manage the service bus through Visual Studio 2012, or Service Bus Explorer. I did a comparison between the too in my Visual Studio Service Bus Explorer versus Standalone Service Bus Explorer blog post.

Cheers,

Steef-Jan

Microsoft Windows Server AppFabric Cookbook - eBook Contest

December 2011 almost a year ago I wrote a blog post for TechNet Wiki on Windows Azure- and Server AppFabric. Now on the Server part a cookbook has been released written by fellow Microsoft Integration MVP Rick G. Garibay and Microsoft Architect Hammad Rajjoub.  I know both Rick and Hammad (both very active community leaders) have done a great job. Windows Server AppFabric can be viewed as a part of the Microsoft Integration Stack together with BizTalk, SQL Server and Azure ServiceBus. For lightweight integration Windows Server AppFabric together with WF (Windows Workflow) and WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) can be a right fit within your enterprise without using the more scalable, robust BizTalk Server or Windows Azure Service Bus.

The eBook Contest

I have teamed up with Packt Publishing and am organizing a give away especially for you my blog readers. All you need to do is send me an email with your view on Microsoft integration at SteefJan @ msn dot com and you might win a free copy of Microsoft Windows Server AppFabric Cookbook. Three lucky winners stand a chance to win an e-copy of the book. This contest will end at end of this month 31 October. Lucky winners will be announced on 1st of November.

Overview of Microsoft Windows Server AppFabric Cookbook

This book will enable you to:

Download, install, configure and get up and running with Windows Server AppFabric quickly

Learn how to take advantage of distributed caching for providing high performance and elastic scale on-premise today

Take advantage of the enhanced hosting capabilities that Windows Server AppFabric has to offer including Auto-Start and a greatly simplified configuration experience

Enable support for long-running composite applications that are resilient and fault-tolerant while maximizing computing resources

Gain insight into the health of your composite applications seamlessly, both proactively and when something goes wrong

Learn how to scale Windows Server AppFabric by leveraging farm deployments

My View on the book

What I like about Packt cookbooks is that it provides you as professional practical guidance on how to leverage the technology. This book focusses on Windows Server AppFabric or as it is now named AppFabric for Windows Server. This technology is a set of integrated technologies that makes it easier to build, scale, and manage Web and composite applications that run on IIS. I believe this book will tell you the complete story on how to use this technology, how to set it up and how to create robust, and state-of-the-art solutions on it. To conclude I think the content of this book will be very valuable for WF/WCF developer and also for us Microsoft integration guys.

Cheers,

Steef-Jan

BizTalk Community Series: Introducing Stuart Brierley‏

Last couple of weeks I have been preparing and giving talks on BizTalk Server in combination with Windows Azure Service Bus. The integration capabilities Microsoft provides on-premise and in the cloud are amazing and unique. There is no other vendor that has an integration infrastructure up in the cloud like the Service Bus. There are on-premise integration/messaging engines like BizTalk, however the number of adapters it offers has not been matched by any other. These are exciting times as Microsoft keeps innovating both BizTalk Server and Windows Azure Service Bus.

Today I am going to introduce you to another community member that has been contributing to the BizTalk community for quite some time through his blog. His name is Stuart Brierley and he works for Vasanta Group, the UK's largest supplier of office products, as a Systems Integration Specialist.

Stuart has worked with BizTalk Server for almost 10 years, working with many different versions of the product.  He started his involvement with BizTalk a few years after leaving University while working for Chelsea Building Society, a UK financial institution.  Initially Stuart was developing solutions using BizTalk 2000 which was replaced a couple of years later when migrating these existing systems over to BizTalk 2004.  He then spent the next few years of his time there working as a BizTalk specialist, architecting and developing solutions as a central part of the organization's IT infrastructure.   

 

Following this Stuart moved on to a "greenfield" BizTalk installation where he was the architect of a new installation of BizTalk 2009 for Clipper Group, the UK's leading provider of e-fulfillment services, working with some of the UK's largest retailers.    

 

Last year Stuart joined Vasanta Group, an existing user of BizTalk 2000 and 2006, for whom he oversaw the design and implementation of a new BizTalk 2010 installation. Currently Stuart is working on a major systems integration project where BizTalk Server 2010 is to be used as the hub connecting a large number of systems to a new Dynamics AX 2012 installation. This involves the architecting of a number of new BizTalk environments and the design and development of the BizTalk solutions that will help transform the business processes at Vasanta.  

 

Stuart has the following view on BizTalk:
 

"One of the things I like about working with BizTalk is that as well as understanding the core BizTalk product itself, you also need to build an understanding of all the systems and technologies that you need BizTalk to work with.  As such it is difficult to get bored working with BizTalk - it always offering a new challenge as technologies change around it. I have been fortunate enough to work alongside some very experienced and knowledgeable BizTalk specialists in my current role, which has definitely exposed me to new ideas and techniques, reaffirming the idea that there is always something new to learn with BizTalk!"

and on community

"Working with BizTalk you also come to realize the strength of the community that has built up around the product; bloggers posting articles to share interesting finds, developers sharing code and ideas on Codeplex or those helpful souls that populate the forums at MSDN, Stack Overflow or BizTalk Gurus.  As a BizTalk specialist you have to appreciate the effort that the community put into helping each other and the desire to push the product forwards."

 

Stuart thoughts on the evolution of BizTalk:

 

"I do think it is a shame that BizTalk itself has always followed behind the other major releases from Microsoft and it would be great to see it treated as a first class citizen and released alongside the latest versions of SQL and Visual Studio rather than some months later.  Hopefully in future releases this can be addressed and I am excited to see how the product develops into the world of Azure AppFabric and where it will take me in my continued career as an integration specialist."  

As the father of three young boys (age 1, 8 and 10) spare time is not something that Stuart has a lot of :)  He enjoys reading, listening to music, watching TV and Films, football (soccer), cycling...... too many things to fit into an average week! Most of all he enjoys spending time with his family, whether it be taking the older boys to their athletics/swimming/football (soccer)/gymnastics training, going for long tiring bicycle rides together with them and his wonderful wife or just relaxing and playing around the house.

Currently Stuart enjoys getting back into cycling with his thankfully enthusiastic family and he has always enjoyed playing football (soccer), but recently have found that he kept picking up injuries! He is a dedicated Manchester United fan:

"I am a life long supporter of Manchester United, a trait which I am pleased to say I have passed on to the rest of my family :)"

A cool soccer team as they have one of finest striker couple in the world: Wayne Rooney and Robin van Persie.

A final word from Stuart towards the BizTalk community:

"I would like to say thank you to all those who have read and commented on any of my blog posts in the past, I am always pleased when anyone else finds them useful.  I don't post as often as I would like, but thanks for reading when I do."

 

and to me:

 

"Also, a big thanks to Steef-Jan for featuring me on your introducing series and for all the work you do in the BizTalk community."

Thanks Stuart for your time and contributions!

Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event - A great experience!

Last week I held a presentation at the Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event (26 - 27 September). This was one of the biggest BizTalk events organized in the Nordic countries this year. Four BizTalk MVP's together with two distinguished community members presented two full days on BizTalk Server, Service Bus, BizTalk Administration and BizTalk360 (Monitoring). I shared the stage during this days with fellow BizTalk MVP's Sandro Pereira, Saravana Kumar, and Nino Crudele together with Tord G. Nordahl and Lex Hegt.

Bouvet organized this event for the first time in Norway. Previously BizTalk innovation events were organized in Utrecht (The Netherlands) and Milan (Italy). The venue was the Bouvet office in Stavanger.

Bouvet is a Scandinavian consultancy company, which delivers development and advisory services relating to information technology, interactive communication and enterprise management. Their strengths are broad expertise, long experience and the ability to solve problems creatively. Bouvet has more than 750 employees in 14 offices in Norway and Sweden.

Tord works for Bouvet and was together with his managers our host of the day. They did an outstanding job of organizing this event. The first day was packed with presentations and second day was around labs, live discussions of various topics.

The first day we as speakers talked about:

1) BizTalk adapter pack: Best practice and a presentation of the versatile integration capabilities of the adapter pack! This included various scenario's with Azure Service Bus (Queues, Topics, Subscriptions and Bridges), SB-Messaging with BizTalk Server 2010 R2 CTP. A Talk by myself.

2) Azure and connected systems (formerly known as AppFabric connected systems) – EAI Integration done correctly, to the cloud and beyond! A talk done by Sandro showing the bridges for EAI and EDI.

3) Jump into the usage of thresholds and throttling to squeeze the BizTalk environment to the MAX. A talk by Tord our host.

4) Also introducing the new standard in BizTalk monitoring: BizTalk 360. This talk was by Saravana Kumar and Lex Hegt. Saravana walkthrough the product and showed some of the capabilities. Lex talked about some real life scenario's with BizTalk360.

5) Large BizTalk environments, hundreds of servers and multiple adapters: how was it done and how did it scale? A talk by Nino our Italian BizTalk MVP.

This day was wrapped up by Tord and later on we had an awesome diner with the attendees and the Bouvet staff.

Second day each speaker had his own room and hourly time slots, where the attendees could come in ask questions, get some hand-on experience and raise discussions. During these sessions I was able to hand out my BizTalk Server 2010 Cookbook (multiple copies ordered by Bouvet) and sign it.

The two days at Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event were a great experience. I like to thank Tord and Bouvet for organizing this.

Our next venue as speakers will probably be London next year.

Cheers,

Steef-Jan