Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

Last month was a busy month and in February most of my time I spend on the road or plane. Anyways, what has Stef been up to in February? In this month, I have also written a few guest blogs for BizTalk360 blog and did a demo for the Middleware Friday Show . The blog posts are: Serverless Integration with Logic Apps, Functions and Cognitive Services   Using API Management to protect on premise exposed endpoints Building a composite service using Logic Apps The show can be found in Middleware Friday show 5 th episode about Serverless Integration . During my trip in Australia and New-Zealand I did a few short interviews, which you can find on YouTube: ·        Mick Badran ·        Wagner Silveira ·        Martin Abbott ·        Daniel Toomey ·        Bill Chesnut ·        Rene Brauwers ...

Usually like most of my blogger friends I do a write up of what I have done and experienced at the end of the year. I write a year’s review, post a few pictures and publish it. During 2017 I want to do things differently, I’ll write a review post every month and look ahead a bit in the upcoming months. Why Stef instead of Steef-Jan my real name? Well the explanation is that many of my international buddies call me Stef, rather than my full name. And that’s fine, I do not mind at all. Thus, I have decided I will call or label my monthly updates as Stef’s Monthly Update . What have I been up to in January? I have written a few blog posts for BizTalk360’s blog . Last year at the MVP in November, Saravana asked me if I was interested in writing a biweekly guest blog post with integration in mind. And I said yes let’s do that and I started in December with two posts: Archiving BizTalk Messages using Logic App and DocumentDB Getting started with Azure Functions and using them w...

In this blog post we will discuss an Azure Service called Azure Functions . This service has recently (15 th of November) gone GA (General Available) and provides a capability of running small pieces of code in Azure. With functions, you do not have to deal that much with infrastructure, it’s the responsibility of Azure or an application (see Azure Functions Overview ). The functionality you develop in a browser i.e. in the Azure Portal ( Function App or https://functions.azure.com/ ), test it and done. The only aspects other than the code are scalability and pricing. Basic Walkthrough of creating an Azure Function In the Azure Portal, you can navigate/search for Function App. And click on Function App. Next, you’ll see a button Create and once you press that a pane will appear. In this pane, you specify the name for the app, select a subscription, create or add to the existing resource group, choose a hosting plan, location and choose a storage account. Hit create...

The new kid on the block in Microsoft’s integration portfolio is Logic Apps. And for those who do not know what a Logic App is; it’s a hosted piece of integration logic in Microsoft Azure. To be more precise the hosting is done in Azure in a similar way as a Web App and the logic are built by creating a trigger followed by a series of actions similar to a workflow. And you can simply create and built them in a browser reducing development and lead-time. In just a couple minutes up to perhaps an hour you can have one running. The beauty of Logic Apps is that Microsoft provides tons of connectors that will enable you to connect quickly through various protocols and with an wide range of applications. And runs in the cloud meaning that you as developer have to worry less about hosting, scalability, availability and management. As a developer, you can focus on the connectivity and logic in the Logic App. Add a trigger, a few actions, configure, save, secure, test and you are ready to ...

A few weeks ago I received an e-mail from Microsoft with exciting news that my MVP status has been renewed again. I am now an Azure MVP! For me this is the  seventh time  to receive this award. The sixth year in the program has been again an awesome experience, which gave me the opportunity to do great things and meet inspiring, very skilled people. I have had some interesting speaking engagement, which were fun to do and were very fulfilling. I learned a lot through speaking thanks to the community and fellow MVP's. I was able to share my experiences through these speaking gigs and other channels like this blog, MSDN Gallery, and above all the TechNet Wiki. I would like to thank: My MVP old lead  William Jansen,  and new MVP lead  Tina Stenderup-Larsen . The BizTalk Product Team,  Jim Harrer,   Ed Price, Mandi Ohlinger ,   Tord G. Nordahl ,  Dan Rosanova ,  Jon Fancey ,  Paolo Salvatori ,   and all other Microsoft employees...

In two weeks time I will head out to North America. My first stop will be Calgary to visit my friend Kent Weare. My MVP buddies Saravana Kumar and Michael Stephenson will join me as we will be speaking during the Azure Hybrid Integration the 30th of October at Microsoft Calgary. The Azure Hybrid Integration will be a full day with Kent, Saravana, Michael, myself and Darren King from Microsoft speaking on the following topics SaaS connectivity, IoT, Hybrid SQL Server, BizTalk administration & operations and Two Speed IT using Microsoft Azure. The free event takes place on October 30th, 2015 at the Calgary Microsoft office. You can find more details here . After this event we will head out to Redmond for the yearly MVP Summit . This is a multi-day event that is hosted in Bellevue and at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington. All the MVP in the world that are able to come will be there to connect with fellow MVP’s and the various product groups. I look forward to both ...

Challenge is to build a WebJob that listens or monitors a queue in the Microsoft Azure Service Bus within a certain namespace and pick of each message that is send there by a message producer and process it. The WebJob acts as a message consumer of the messages on the queue. Below a high level diagram of a scenario that will be explained in this post and how I faced the challenge. You can build WebJobs inside Visual Studio by installing the WebJobs SDK . Once you have installed the SDK you have template available to build a WebJob in C# or Visual Basic. You can select this template specify a name for the WebJob and click Ok . You will see that a program class will be created. And a Functions.cs . By default a method will be created for you to monitor or listen to an Azure Storage Queue, not Service Bus Queue! To have method that will be triggered/executed when a message is written to an Azure Service Bus Queue you will need to have ServiceBusTrigger. This not availab...