Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

I am a bit of the Microsoft OSLO track, but there seems to be an update of OSLO CTP. You should check out Jon Flanders post and one from Alex Thissen. I will try some stuff out soon as I back from my Toronto trip. Technorati: Microsoft OSLO

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...

During PDC I could not attend any session on WF 4.0 or Dublin. I focused more on Azure and OSLO. Having just blogged about David Chappell’s talk today I noticed he has written a whitepaper about WF 4.0, Dublin and OSLO too. These technologies can be used together or independently (see below). I have taken this picture above from the whitepaper. David did a talk during Teched about the subjects. Also Robert-Jan has done a couple of posts as he was more focused on Dublin. According to Marcel Fernee this paper should also be read by people that attended PDC as well. Some impression of this topic: TechEd – Developers : DeveloperFusion ; BizTalkGuru’s ; Bloggersguide . Check out these resources and read the paper; I will start now. Technorati: Microsoft OSLO WF PDC 2008 Microsoft Dublin

This week I posted my lap around OSLO experience and in addition to this today Jon put out a intro into M video of approximately 40 minutes. It shows how to model with SQL tools inside SQL Server 2008 versus modeling in M using IntelliPad. In both cases tables are created, data is added and shown through a simple application made in Visual Studio 2008 using Dynamic Data Entitities Web Application Template. It is a very good introduction to M showing how a developer can easy model with M, but you will need to learn language M. Using M instead of SQL tools is that with M one has a database definition file that can be stored for instance in version control system to do differences between versions, branch and/or merge with well known tools later on (Scott ColeStock post on Models as Text post ). Check out the video and other related posts. Technorati: Microsoft OSLO

I am fairly new to DSL and especially now with OSLO. In my previous post today I did my own lap (experimenting) with OSLO and only scratch the surface. There are some experts in world though around DSL and better understanding of OSLO than me. I am at the beginning of a long and steep learning curve, but I eager enough to accept the challenge to learn and understand it thoroughly. Here are some great posts of people with a opinion or view of OSLO: Clemens Reijnen - Three Model Archetypes for Oslo… Edward Bakker – Another Modeling Platform Jon Flanders – Intellipad(Ipad) – adding commands Mary-Jo Foley - Microsoft Big Brains: Brad Lovering Martin Fowler – OSLO Charles Young - Microsoft 'Oslo' - the vNext SOA Platform Dennis Doomen – What is Oslo? William Vambenepe - First in-depth look at Microsoft’s Oslo and the “M” modeling language Chris Sells - Oslo Week One Wrap-Up (contains a lot of links to some valuable resources) Tien TienLi - O...

Now I am home I can start experimenting with things I heard at the PDC. In my previous post I created a Azure Service; my first one. This time I am going to do my own lap around OSLO. In some post you have already read what OSLO is; if not here’s a brief explanation. OSLO is a platform for model-driven applications. It contains three components: “M” (The language for authoring models & DSLs) “Quadrant” (The tool for interacting with models & DSLs ) Repository (The database for storing & sharing models, this will be SQL Server) “M” gives you the modeling and textual DSLs. With M you write down the things you need to drive your application.  The things could be application configuration data, or application specific data, or data which is actually your application. With “Quadrant” you have a visual tool to view the models in the Repository (interaction with data). It gives the user a flexible and focused design surface (some people like drawings). Fina...

Finally I can witness one of the first sessions about OSLO at PDC; now I and rest of world get to actually see it. There will be another frenzy and plethora of blog posts being shed next couple of hours. OLSO is M, Quadrant and Repository; language, tools and store/share models. More than 150 Dutch people are here and some already blogged about OSLO, therefore I am going to be lazy and refer to them. So here you go Paul , Dennis and Alex . Technorati: PDC 2008 Microsoft OSLO

Microsoft OSLO is getting more attention as PDC 2008 is approaching. In eWeek there is a new article published about 'The Origins of Microsoft's Oslo Software Modeling Platform'. Santosh Benjamin already posted some great comments on that article . But there is more look at article published on PDF zone called 'Microsoft's Oslo Helps Non-Programmers Build Data-Centric Apps', which essentially refers back to article I just mentioned. If you wondering what Don Box is doing , well he is working on Oslo. On 27 October Douglas Purdy will reveal OSLO at the PDC with his team. So there the real journey will start. There is even more posted on eWeek, Oslo: How 'Easy'is Easy? So just a few weeks before everything will be made clear to us, a lot of attention is created. In just a couple of minutes I dug this information up to see if there is some more news, information about OSLO. And that is indeed the fact, but it is not much and will just have to wait until...

Today I browse around some RSS feeds about BizTalk and came across two interesting things. First I interesting thing I found was a discussion on MSDN about ESB Guidance for BizTalk Server. I recently wrote an article together with Wouter Goedvriend about ESB Guidance package to be publish hopefully in Dutch Software Release Magazine coming fall. We posted a question: Is Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) a well known (super)pattern and if so in which scenario's does one apply it? On linked-in we got a couple of answers back. These were as follows: "My understanding of the concept of an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) is that it is a way to bring all of the technologies within a company, entity, or enterprise together. Depending on the magnitude of what that could encompass, it *could* mean a simple product that "maps" everything together.Usually, though, it is a way -- and therefore, an architectural pattern as you stated -- to bring all of the different softwares, databa...

Today I noticed I was admitted to participate in Software As A Service Topic of Computable a big ICT magazine in the Netherlands. The magazine has a large website for jobs, opinions, events, ICT topics and so on. There are a number of ICT topics like ERP, BI, Infrastructure, etcetera and SaaS is one of them. Quite lot of ICT company have people in these topics acting as experts. I lately focus more on Software + Services: Software plus Services describes the idea of combining hosted services with capabilities that are best achieved with locally running software. It describes composite applications created by combining traditional software with remote services to provide consistent and seamlessly integrated user experience across devices and form factors. Software plus Services is a concept that Software As A Service (SaaS) complements the traditional packaged software running on both client or server by services adding value ( Wikipedia ) Microsoft is currently working on the conce...

A few days ago an article appeared on eWeek titled ‘Oslo: Road to Microsoft’s Cloud’. This article displays a nice outline, where Oslo is heading. With PDC coming in October Oslo will also get its fair share of attention. I for one hope to be able to go there together with my colleague Edward Bakker from Inter Access. If you are interested you should look at the session agenda . For now I will focus on my coming summer holiday, a couple of weeks with the family visiting the Czech republic. After that I will continue with my HPL environment and finish writing some articles. Technorati: Microsoft OSLO

Wandering around in the blogosphere I stumbled on a announcement that the first three components of OSLO , model driven connected-systems development initiative of Microsoft will be made available during Microsoft Professional Developers Conference( PDC ) this October. I hope I will be able to attend this event and witness it all. Components made available are: * Modeling tool * Repository * Declarative programming language. "The models will maintain deployment information such as system resources allocated for an application and information about the corresponding service level agreements. The modeling tool will be a graphical tool for building any kind of application. You'll be able to leverage the schema design in Visual Studio and BizTalk ." (I see BizTalk here so that will be definitely interesting for us BizTalk pro’s). Plans to support Unified Modeling Language (UML) were announced for inclusion in Visual Studio Team System release code named Rosario . The declara...

T oday I got an email from Enterprise Architect Insight with yet another article around Microsoft’s OSLO. Since its announcement it has gotten a lot of attention and will have in the near future. So where can you find this information and buzz about OSLO. Well here is a list if you like to let you consume al this information: Microsoft Directions PDF by Rob Helm; Microsoft's Oslo: Putting SOA on the Map by John K. Waters; Microsoft Oslo: now where have I heard this before? by Tim Anderson ; Microsoft Roadmap Leads to ‘OSLO’ by Stuart J.Johnston; OSLO: Microsoft Get it but Hurry ! by Jean-Jacques Dubray; Microsoft’s OSLO: What is the fuss all about? By Christian Weyer ; OSLO Announcement by Tim Rayburn ; Microsoft announces major SOA initiative and a whole new wave of innovation by Brian Loesgen ; Microsoft’s OSLO Vision : Windows Becomes A Platform for Heterogenous SOA by Charles babock. Also take a look at Microsoft’s new SOA Portal, here you also will find info about OSLO. A...

I am home after a good week of conference in Redmond and some sightseeing. This year’s Microsoft and BP Conference was a good one with a focus on BizTalk, but more on SOA itself like Governance, Business & IT agility, Anti-Patterns and business cases. Conference kicked off with keynote session, where OSLO was announced. Since it was announced a lot of attention in blogosphere was noticeable. I attended a lot of session during the conference and here is an overview of them: * Increasing Business & IT agility with SOA & Microsoft – Kris Horrocks (Microsoft) * Flexible Governance Infrastructure – Frank Martinez ( SOA Software ) * BizTalk Adapters for WCF: Deep Dive – Aaron Skonnard (Pluralsight) * Best Practices for Creating Composite Activities – Matt Milner (Pluralsight) * Service Virtualization with .NET & BizTalk Server – William Oellerman, Raul Camacho (Microsoft) * How everyone should test their BizTalk based solutions – Darren Jefford (Microsoft) * Connections...

During Microsoft SOA and Business Conference Oslo project is announced. This project is about updating Microsoft technologies for service-oriented architectures, and for composite applications build on top of it. See Tim Rayburn blog post for more detail or my keynote post . Technorati: Microsoft OSLO project