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Showing posts from March, 2014

Windows Azure BizTalk Services: Pulling Messages from a Service Bus Queue

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Windows Azure BizTalk Services (WABS) provides capabilities for EAI and B2B in the cloud. This relative new service was made available for customers in November 2013. WABS is a cloud integration platform or integration platform as a service or IPaaS . Characteristic of IPAAS is that you build your integration on premise, deploy in the cloud, where it is hosted in a service (set of dedicated hardware). The service is offered through a subscription model for operating the service in the cloud (for BizTalk Services this means Windows Azure hence the name Windows Azure BizTalk Services). Currently there are quite some players offering that service like Dell, Attunity, MuleSoft, TIBCO, and so on. Microsoft is currently pushing the service hard to catch up with some of these players and try to quicken/hasten the maturity of the product. Therefore, Microsoft has committed to have a release cadence for new features every three months. The recent release was in February 2014, which added new

BizTalk Services Bridges/Operations – Troubleshooting

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Windows Azure BizTalk Services (WABS) is general since November 2013 as a service within Windows Azure. Recently it has been enhanced with new features like backup/restore . This new service in Windows Azure is meant to provide EAI or B2B services through the cloud. The EAI Service enables you to exchange data through different protocols and transform it to and from different formats. Similar to what the on premise BizTalk offers through mapping and routing. The B2B services offer Businesses to exchange data between their partners. You can view it as a new way of EDI data exchange other than a value added network (VAN). During provisioning of a BizTalk Service you need to specify tracking database (Windows Azure SQL Database), and a storage account for monitoring and archiving. The tracking data can be useful for diagnostic purposes and to monitor what messages goes through BizTalk Service. The Tracking Database can be extended to meet your own tracking requirements, see W