Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

This week I attended DevDays in The Hague. The most interesting or intriguing for me was Workflow 4. Matt Milner did a preconference Wednesday and some session during the conference. He did his demos in VS2010 Beta 1, which is available right now. I downloaded beta 1 and installed in on (YES!!) Windows 7 RC on VPC (that is possible ). Windows 7 is just marvelous and runs smoothly inside my VPC (It is goodbye Vista). You can download his code and session material from his blog . Ok lets turn to VS2010 Beta 1 and WF 4. I am not a Workflow expert, but i did follow its evolution in 3.0 and 3.5 during conferences in Holland and abroad, like VS2007 in San Francisco (beautiful city, open, warm and liberal). I must say I was impressed at first what it could do and experimented a few things after I attended some of the sessions, but since I am more in BizTalk doing project in that space the interest for workflow went to the background of my mind. Now I got interesting for me again with ...

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 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

Today I went to the first day of DevDays 2007 in Amsterdam. It was a fun day and met a lot of people, old colleagues, people I worked with, speakers, trainers from companies like class-a, Microsoft people like Arie Leeuwensteijn (organizer DevDays). It was just awesome. I started the day with a keynote from Scott Guthrie, who talked about Silverlight . Most of you probably already heard about this new Microsoft Technology. From a SOA perspective it is interesting to note it has an API for connecting to web services, so consuming services for displaying data will be no problem. He also showed a new product of Microsoft called Expression. This product was demoed by Wayne Smith. After this demo a few more followed around Sliverlight with one you can look or try out yourself called bananas. So in a nutshell Silverlight will give you: Broad reach Rich Multimedia .Net Multiple languages (Ruby, Python, Dynamic VB) Express Studio Visual Studio Services Second session I went was SQL Server Inte...

Final day at VS Live in San Francisco. I following today the post conference about introduction (gentle) into workflow by Ken Getz and Robert Green. This lasted all day and went through what workflow is, creating one for the first time (this was demoed already a couple of times during conference, so nothing new here), and how to host one (see my previous post with WF Runtime Architecture). Next subject was handling conditions and Exceptions, where they went through a couple of activities like IfElse, While, ConditionedActivityGroup, Replicator Activity and finally Exception handling. After this they discussed and demoed more activities like delay, handling properties, listen, suspend and terminate, parallel, synchronizeScope and handling cancellation. This was not the end of it, because more activities coming up, like ones used when dealing with rules, Policy Activity (see there’s a lot of them, more than in BizTalk Orchestration). Rules in workflow are somewhat the same as in Business...