Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

I have done an interview with fellow BizTalk MVP Sandro . You can read it here . Sandro is one of the technical reviewers of my forthcoming BizTalk Server 2010 Cookbook . Enjoy the story!

Last week I posted an issue around BizTalk Adapter Pack 1.0 in x64 environment. Now I like to clarify a couple of things concerning installation BizTalk Adapter Pack 1.0 in x64 environment and running the adapter in x64 host instance. One thing to consider is having an Oracle specialist around and someone with access to meta-link, because for x64 environment you will need patch 5337014 and 6344569, latter being a OPatch. For 64-bit according to installation guide a Oracle 10.2.0.3 64-bit client is required, which supposed to be a part of one of the mentioned patches. This is how I interpreted, but this is not the case. The patches do not contain a 64-bit Oracle client. You will need to download and install 102010 win64 x64 client first and then install ODAC and apply patch 5337014 and oPatch 6344569 in same directory as ODAC. Applying patch 5337014 is pretty straight forward, but oPatch something different. First you will to need to copy patch in oPatch directory of 64-bit client a...

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. Technorati: BizTalk 2006 R2 BizTalk Server 2006 R2 BizTalk

New Year 2009 has started a already read some interesting blog posts. One by Lucas Vogel about how Zapthink thinks wrong about BizTalk Server. Or viewing and tracking in BizTalk Server 2009 CTP and aggregated monitoring using BizMon . Very interesting reading material. I myself am working on a process around BizTalk Application LifeCycle: Analyse, Design, Build, Test, Deploy and Administration (Maintenance). Process involves a couple of steps to be able to analyze requirements for a BizTalk Application to fit in a certain architecture or impact of a change to a existing BizTalk application. Next design of application or change to existing design. Build or change application, tests in one or more environments (OTAP) and deploy. Final step is maintenance/administration. In future blog posts I will further explain things involving this process. Technorati: BizTalk 2006 R2 BizTalk Server 2006 R2 BizTalk alm

A couple of days ago new BizTalk Server 2006 R2 documentation was released . It is available in two formats : CHM and HxS. Technorati: BizTalk 2006 R2 BizTalk Server 2006 R2 BizTalk

I found out that Microsoft released another whitepaper around BizTalk Server recently than the one from Dennis Mulder. There is an other around troubleshooting SOAP adapter in docx format. Summary: Microsoft® BizTalk® Server uses the SOAP adapter and orchestrations to receive and send Web service requests. The SOAP adapter enables orchestrations to be published as Web services and consume external Web services. Because configuring and/or using Web services can be complex, BizTalk Server handles many of these complexities on behalf of the user. Even so, there are still issues arising from time to time. This white paper is designed to highlight common issues and to provide guidance for how to resolve them. Another good resource :) Technorati: BizTalk 2006 R2 BizTalk Server 2006 R2 BizTalk

I will be attending SOA & BPM Conference next year end of January. Today I received an email from Paul Sanford that one can expect the following during the conference: Network With Your Peers Arrive early on January 27 th for the welcome reception co-sponsored by Microsoft Dynamics.  There will also be a reception the evening of January 28 th hosted by Global Premier Sponsor HP.  Agenda and Session Lists will soon be available! By Friday, December 5 th the full session list and other information will be posted on the event website, please click here to view.  Real World Customers Roundtable Discussion In a first for the SOA & Business Process Conference, you will have the opportunity to talk to customers at the end of day 1 in an unmonitored, peer-to-peer discussion so that you can learn directly from those who have been in the trenches. Microsoft Product Groups Roundtable Discussion Microsoft product group re...

Dennis Mulder has written a whitepaper available through MSDN about Developing Integration Solutions using BizTalk Server 2006 and Team Foundation Server. Last BTUG meeting he did a presentation around BizTalk and TFS with focus on msbuild. Whitepaper The provides developers with techniques for designing, developing, and deploying solutions within Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2006 (R2) in conjunction with Team Foundation Server. This paper was based on "Developing Integration Solutions with BizTalk Server" by Angus Foreman and Andy Nash and updated for BizTalk Server 2006 (R2) and Team Foundation Server. Technorati: BizTalk 2006 R2 BizTalk Server 2006 R2 BizTalk

There are various approaches for developing BizTalk solutions in team environments e.g. isolated "sandbox" models versus shared development servers, the use of VPC or physical boxes and moving from development to staging to production. Having a “sandbox” is best option, which is something I learned recently during a session at BTUG. Having an isolated environment to develop, test and build your solution is a good thing, because it is difficult to develop a single solution with more developers and one will get in the way with another during development (have to share the same management database for instance). Using TFS for source control is a good thing and one can check in/out his solution in his own environment with his own management database and so on. Isolated environment can be a VPC or a physical box with an operating system Windows Server 2003 or even Vista, which Jay Kinker did a recent post about. Yes an installation of BizTalk is possible and works fine on Vista,...

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 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

W ell as you all will know is that basic components in a SOA are services that provide a service. Other components in my humble view are orchestration (composition of services) and a communication infrastructure to provide in messaging between services. Optional components like Business Activity Monitoring, Business Intelligence, Business Rule Evaluators or Security and so can provide in more desirable or needed functionality given specific situations. Services are building blocks of a SOA and provide a specific predetermined function that adheres to open standards like WS-*, which dictates what service requirements are in case of interoperability, protocol and message format. Orchestration is a composition of services to create a new set of functionality. This is not just a gathering of two or more services, but adding logic to for instance validate if services can be called to do work. Processes are in fact orchestrations and are not the same as service composition. Services commu...

In one of my previous post I mentioned Log4Net. Configuration of log4net is done through a registry pointing to a configuration file, where one can determine how configuration of logging inside BizTalk for instance can be done. So using a config file for configuration purposes in BizTalk is also possible in another way. One can create an environmental variable by going to control panel --> system --> advanced. Next one can create an new enviromental variable by clicking enviromental variables and new button under system variables. After creating the variable it can be checked by using the command prompt and type : set enviromental variable . Once this is al done a class library can be added to a BizTalk solution. In class module the following assemblies are necessary: #region Using using System; using System.Xml; using System.Text; using System.Reflection; using System.Configuration; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.IO; #endregion namespace xxx.Components {...