Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

It’s been awhile since a BizTalk title hit the market. Colin, Mahindra, Mark and Johann updated Richard Seroter’s well received book SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009. I loved Richards’s book and it inspired me to write a book myself. We have met on several occasions. And last year I had the privilege of meeting Mark and Johann in person in Sydney. Both are enthusiastic integration professionals that with Colin and Mahindra’s aid created and updated this book. Excellent work guys, and respect as writing a book is a challenge! This book covers BizTalk, WCF, JSON and Rest Support in BizTalk, Azure BizTalk Services, Azure Service Bus, SOA, Schema's and Endpoints, Asynchronous Communication Patterns, Versioning-, Orchestration Patterns, Frameworks and Tools. That is a broad spectrum of today’s integration capabilities on the Microsoft Platform (on premise and cloud). If you are new to, intermediate- or well versed in the integration, this book is going to give you more insig...

On of the demo’s during Developing Hybrid Solutions with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2013 and Windows Azure presentation talk was about connecting to Windows Azure Storage and pushing a document to a blob container. Based on that demo I created a TechNet Wiki article. What was missing in the demo was functionality to strip path from ReceivedFilename context property. I created a pipeline for it to do so and build the complete messaging solution . Here is the abstract of the TechNet Wiki article: BizTalk Server 2013 supports connectivity with Windows Azure through its new adapters WCF-BasicHttpRelay, WCF-NetTcpRelay, WCF-WebHttp and SB-Messaging. The relay adapters enables connectivity with relay service in Windows Azure Service Bus. SB-Messaging adapters provides means to connect to queue and subscriptions (topic). Finally the WCF-WebHttp for instance supports connectivity to REST endpoints. Windows Azure Storage and other services in Windows Azure and the cloud support a REST Int...

Recently I wrote a post for TechNet Wiki Blog and pointed out that many resources can be found through the TechNet Wiki . So in case you want to check out what is available on TechNet Wiki around integration I suggest reading Integration is my business and business is good! . I have been working on a couple of articles for TechNet Wiki last 18 months and published them. I am not the only one. There's a lot of us in the BizTalk community for instance that have published and edited numerous articles. The number of BizTalk related articles on TechNet Wiki is close to 200 by now ranging from BizTalk versions 2006 R2 to 2013, general ones (common across versions) and Windows Azure BizTalk Services. You can access them from one place: BizTalk Server Resources on the TechNet Wiki . In case you have not yet bookmarked it then you the opportunity now. If you like to participate in writing and/or editing articles feel free to do so. You will need to sign in or up and you all set to g...

Spring holiday is over and it is back to work. There is a new challenge awaiting for me involving IBM Maximo , WCF, MSMQ and BizTalk. Speaking of WCF there are changes and I see some postings about WCF 4.0. At PDC last year there were some talks around WCF 4.0. The discussions completely by-passed me, but I have a new chance to get up to speed. End of May DevDays 2009 will take place and I am  able to attend. Some sessions from for instance Aaron Skonnard are about WCF 4.0. Also I will attend preconference session of a complete day called “Introduction to WCF and WF 4.0 and "Dublin"” by Matt Milner . Since WCF as technology plays an essential role inside BizTalk Platform it is mandatory in my view to have experience, knowledge and understanding of it. Technorati: wcf 4.0 microsoft developer days

Steve Maine did a session about Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)for building Web 2.0-style services that use URIs, HTTP GET, and other data formats beyond XML. See how these features can be applied to AJAX web sites, "REST" applications, and data feeds. Now Jon Flanders has his book released on Safari about Restful .NET. Book description is as follows:   RESTful .NET is the first book that teaches Windows developers to build RESTful web services using the latest Microsoft tools. Written by Windows Communication Foundation (WFC) expert Jon Flanders, this hands-on tutorial demonstrates how you can use WCF and other components of the .NET 3.5 Framework to build, deploy and use REST-based web services in a variety of application scenarios. RESTful architecture offers a simpler approach to building web services than SOAP, SOA, and the cumbersome WS-* stack. And WCF has proven to be a flexible technology for building distributed systems not necessarily ti...

In my previous post I talked a little bit about what going to happen with BizTalk . It going to be around a very long time and Microsoft has big investment in it and keeps innovating and supporting it. Latest examples of this are recently new published white papers about BizTalk and WCF: Using the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Adapters in BizTalk Server Consuming and Hosting WCF Services with Custom Bindings in BizTalk Server The new Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) adapters in BizTalk Server 2006 R2 bring the flexibility of WCF to the world of BizTalk Server messaging. The WCF adapters make it possible to define send ports and receive locations that use WCF behind the scenes to integrate with the BizTalk MessageBox database. The first paper involves this. The other paper (second) provides an in-depth explanation on how to use the BizTalk Server WCF adapters for hosting and consuming Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services with custom bindings. The...

Pre-conference session of Microsoft Software Legend Juval Lowy today seems more a history lesson of WCF than something completely new. All stuff that was shown and demoed was .NET 3.0. If you read his book WCF Programming than you have a the knowledge all attendees got today during this pre-conference session. For me it was/is history repeats it-self and story about WCF and origins is the same. In my point of view there was not much added value here. His book about Programming WCF Services will be updated shortly to a second version available soon through O’Reilly. I think here you could speak about ‘power of repeating’. It must say though that his session was presented in an understandable way and his jokes about VB for instance where very funny. Technorati: WCF PDC 2008

WSCF.Blue has recently been made public ( available ) on Codeplex. My colleague Edward Bakker is project leader on this project and I am happy to join in his conquest to make this a better tool. Together with Buddhike de Silva, Benjamin Santosh and hopefully some other developers I hope to make this a very useful tool as Christian Weyer states in his blog post . He is the 'father' of this project. I must say I like this challenge, since I am very fond of WCF as technology. Technorati: SOA DSL Tools WCF

Last week Richard Seroter wrote an article for TopXML.com to provide depth on BizTalk and WCF integration. This article explains various operation patterns when BizTalk consumes a WCF service. He touches subjects like complex vs. simple types, one way vs. two way operations, (custom) fault contracts, and using the WCF-WSHttp and WCF-WSCustom BizTalk adapters. So I read the article and tried his scenario out. Setup Before I could do that I had to set a new virtual machine. I created a new virtual machine with Windows 2003 Server R2 SP2; 16 Gb Hard disk space, 1024 Mb RAM, uses dual core processor from host (my laptop). Updated the server with server update. Then I added a couple of server roles to the server: * Application Server Options with Frontpage Server Extensions and Enable ASP.NET both checked. And then IIS, COM+ remote transactions, DTC, Frontpage Server Extensions, Indexing and ASP.NET. be sure you have capture or mounted iso voor Windows 2003 Server R2 CD1 or DVD. * SharePoi...

This afternoon I attended the ‘Building Workflow Powered Services in .NET 3.5’ talk by Matt Winkler . He talked about WF,WCF combination, why combining them, the architecture Workflow Services, when/how to do combinations, implicit/explicit context management, and messaging patterns and application protocols implemented workflow services. There is a video on channel 9 where a demo of combining WF and WCF can be found. There is also one building WCF Services with WF Technorati: WCF WF Workflow Services Matt Winkler

Last session of today was around BizTalk Services aka Internet Service Bus as I learned today. Justin Smith did his talk with the following objectives: - Intro BizTalk Services - Service messaging options - Introduce BizTalk API And takeaways from this session are: - Provide generic, secure connection - Lowers bar for next gen development - Incubation technology in this point CTP is here now Some of my notes during the session: - BizTalk Services != BizTalk Server - BizTalk Services is an incarnation of the Internet Service Bus (new Buzzword coming up) - Dilemma's expose services broadly, identity and access control silos, interop to heterogeneous environment - Services hosted by Microsoft: pub/sub mechanism, discoverability, http/rest interpertation, standard security based - create account, download and install BizTalk Services SDK (compliant to .net fx 3.0 and 3.5) - Demo BizTalk Services 101 - why: Software+Services (oslo), feedback regarding pub/sub, open door for application...

This afternoon today at Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference I went to a session about service virtualization with .NET and BizTalk Server done by William Oellermann and Raul Camacho. Both work for SOA Solutions Team at Microsoft Corporation. Their objective was to establish significance service virtualization in SOA implementation and demonstrate roles of .NET 3.0, SQL Server and BizTalk R2 in service virtualization. Takeaway eventually is to let the audience understand how. Speakers did a quick intro into the subject going through SOA versus service establishment, WSDL boundaries, and service virtualization and implementing it. Then they did a demonstration of the managed service engine that can be found on codeplex site . Sam Gentile already did a post about this among other things that happen here at the conference. This is pretty interesting stuff so check it out. Technorati: Managed Services Engine Microsoft SOA and BPM Conference 2007 WCF

T oday I came across IDesign a consulting and training company, where I found out one can download a bunch of WCF samples. I mentioned them before in a previous post . They have WCF samples categorized as follows: Essentials Contracts Data Contracts Instance Management Operations Faults Transactions Concurrency Management Queuing Security I have not given one of them a try yet in my VS2008 Beta 2 on my VPC, but I think it is a great resource for samples. I definitely will try some samples out. It is nice of them to make samples available to the public. Check out their site there is far more to find out. Technorati: WCF Windows Communication Foundation IDesign

In previous post I talked about my exploration (and/or study) of WCF. I have started with building WCF services and so on (see list below). Defining service contracts and services Hosting of services in a console app or IIS Exposing of endpoints for services using various standard bindings Working with VS templates and tools (SvcUtil, Service Configuration Editor) Service metadata (browsing) Configuration of service behaviors Generate proxies and invoking services Now I am going deeper into contracts and study messaging protocols (TCP, MSMQ, HTTP or named pipes), SOAP, WS*, WSDL and so on. WCF relies on standards to serialize messages, for instance SOAP (1.1 or 1.2) which describes a general format for messages. When messages need to be secure and reliable WS-* plays an essential role. There is a long list of WS-* protocols and some of them are well-adopted like WS-Addressing, WS-MetadataExchange, WS-Policy, MTOM, WS-Security, WS-Trust and WS-SecureConversation, WS-Reliable Messaging...

I have advanced a bit more now in my study of WCF. After going through some of the basics and using channel factory to manually creating a proxy or svcutil to generate it. Now I am going into exploring tools that generate services, access metadata, create configuration settings and generating proxies. I first started with a lab where one creates a service and then configures service endpoints with Service Configuration Editor. This was done in one project where the service resides inside a host (Console app). Once I was finished with configuration using the editor; the project was run so a client project could be created and a service reference can be added (proxy will be created). With the following code inside client application the service can be invoked: ServiceReference.HelloIndigoServiceClient proxy = new Client.ServiceReference.HelloIndigoServiceClient(); Next part in the lab was using WCF Service Library to generate a service. I ran into a problem though, where I got this error...

I have started with my study of Windows Communication Foundation. As you can read in my previous post I have decided to learn it myself. There are possibilities of learning it form recommended training and consulting companies like IDesign , Developmentor , Wintellect , newtellingence , thinktecture or Pluralsight . I kicked off with a book called learning WCF written by Michele Leroux Bustamante, who also has a blog called thatindigo girl. WCF makes it possible to build secure, reliable, and transacted systems through a simplified programming model that unifies and extends many of the previous .NET technologies including ASMX, WSE, .NET Remoting, .NET Enterprise Services, and System.Messaging. And this just what I want to learn one technology that can do all stuff that ASMX, WSE, etcetera does. It has focus on service orientation and supports for standardized Web Services specifications. Ok I first lab I did was creating a service contract with a simple operation and implemented it ...