Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

This year I became member of Software Developer Network , which is mostly Dutch group (network) of developers. As a member one receives their magazine called SDN Magazine and is legible for attending a couple of conference they organize through the year in Holland. Yesterday I received their 93th issue of the magazine. It contained a nice article of SOA called: Semantic Coupling; the Elephant in the SOA room. You can get electronic copy of it later this month through the above link. It’s a great article to agree or disagree about its content (I agree with some parts, but not all). It is starting off with SOA being the current and continuing industry fad. Where SOA continues along the hype curve (Gartner, see link to have this explained in a critical manner) and not being the silver bullet or a replacement for n-tier client/server or object-orientation (which he likes, see his site ). He explains that SOA will fall into the pit of disillusion (not seen in curve shown here). In San Fran...

Marty Wasznicky and Scott Zimmerman wrote an article in MSDN, where they lined out a couple tips and tricks for programming in BizTalk (best practices). In the article they write about: · Always Use Multi-Part Message Types; · Always Try to Design Orchestrations with Direct-Bound Ports; · Always Use Separate Internal and External Schemas; · Never Expose Your Internal Schemas Directly in WSDL; · Always Optimize the BizTalk Registry for Web Services; · Always Set the Assembly Key File with a Relative Path; · Never Overlook Free Sample Code; · Debug XSLT in Visual Studio. Besides best practices for programming there is also a BizTalk Server Best Practices Analyzer to use for deployment of the product in high availability, security, management and performance scenarios. There also logging possibilities for BizTalk to use log4net, see Scott Colestock's blog for this. One can also generate a CHM file containing summaries of all your BizTalk artifacts (and relationships), plus busine...

T oday attended a SharePoint training. The speaker was Bart Gunneman and he spoke about SharePoint, explaining the free part SharePoint Services 3.0 in the morning and the licensed MOSS 2007 in the afternoon. SharePoint Services provide in document collaboration, information sharing and enhancing productivity in for instance software developer teams (at least I used SharePoint Services a lot in software development projects in the past). SharePoint Services 3.0 delivers new functionality like: · Document collaboration (check-in/out, versioning, metadata); · Wikis, · Blogs, · RSS, · Discussions; · Project task tracking; · Contacts, calendars and tasks; · E-mail integration; · Directory integration; · Integration with rich clients through protocols and API’s; · Integration with smart clients like Outlook 2007. These functionalities were a demoed by Bart. Next MOSS 2007, the benefits buying a license are the features like: · Search; · Audiences; · Content targeting; · My Site; · Enhanced...

Excellent article about WCF messaging by Aaron Skonnard. I stumbled over it today. It's about some key messaging features in WCF: XML Representation; Message Class; Message Versions; Reading and Writing Messages; Typed Message Bodies; Message lifetime; Message Headers and Properties; Mapping Messages to Methods; Endpoint and bindings. Good stuff....

D ay before yesterday I was participating in a discussion about SOA in a meeting with architects with different technology backgrounds. These backgrounds include Oracle, Microsoft, IT Infrastructure (Windows, UNIX and Linux), IBM and SAP. Generally the discussion was about what is SOA, or what worked and did not work design, implementing a SOA. Questions were raised like does SOA fulfill promises like business agility and reuse for instance? Well last week in San Francisco I heard Rob Daigneau say business agility is a bogus claim, because of it is not quick or easy. I agreed on this so entered this remark into the discussion with an Oracle architect, who answered he disagreed with me hence his practical experience at a customer showed it can be quick and easy. Since I do not have that much experience with SOA in practice other than one project at local government organization so to speak, I could only bring in that experience, where it did take a long time and was not easy at all. So ...

H ere you can see me with Bird Rock in the background. VS Live has come to an end and before I went home I enjoyed one more day in sunny northern California. I went on a daytrip from San Francisco to Monterey Bay, 17-mile drive with a stop at the Bird Rock. This stately landmark is home to countless shorebirds and groups of harbor seals and sea lions. It ended in an hour stop at Carmel by the sea; just awesome. VS Live conference was a bit different than the one I went to six months ago in October 2006. In Redmond the focus a clearly on SOA, BPM and BizTalk. Whereas this conference was more for developers, with subjects like ASP.NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005, Vista,.NET best practices, Visual Studio Team System and the upcoming (or already here) .NET 3.0 framework. For me the .NET 3.0 was most interesting and that's where all my attention went to. There was not allot of SOA in the .NET 3.0 Sessions, although it was mentioned in the title, talks around WCF and SOA were more about best pr...

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...

Day 4 at VS Live in San Francisco. Today I went to a WPF talk done by Billis Hollis, a great speaker who I have seen a couple of times of the years. He showed some cool demo's and I am amazed what one can do with WPF. Notes about this one I refer again to Jan van de Pol , who is more a UI expert than I am and does a very good job of making notes of this one on the technical side of things. Next one up is more my cup of thea, workflow. It's second part of introduction of workflow and a followup one the one done yesterday. The slides are here . Goal today with his talk today is how to build workflows with WinWF. Three basic patterns, out of the box, others can be customized. (1) Sequential Synchronous ASynchrounous Natural Sequence of operations Workflow is in control (dictates what comes next) (2) State Machine Control outside workflow Workflow restricts choices Simpler than sequential (3) Rule based workflow pattern No natural sequence Rules model relationships independent of t...

Oke third day here at VS Live in San Francisco. Today went to a couple of .Net 3.0 talks. To start things of I went to Rob Daigneau's talk about Implementing SOA design Patterns with WCF. Well it was more on SOA and little about WCF. He wanted to show the web service softeware factory in the end, but it didn't work. Talk about SOA was good though. He kicked off with SOA myths, where he claims business agilty is a bogus claim, hence it is not quick or easy; both are true in my view. Than he went on reuse, where message and data types are the ones that can be resued at best (well that's on lowest dominator and resue on micro-level). Finally he got to versioning and demo extension to exsisting interfaces, which in my humble opinion is not versioning but modifying interfaces the way it was done with COM+ without breaking it. Next talk about WPF for Windows Forms Developers, but I am not one of them. Nevertheless its out there in .NET 3.0 and I wanted to see more of it. And it w...

Well second day at VS Live in San-Francisco. Today met some interesting guys from my home country Holland working for Bergson . So that's nice and there are excellent people, so I am not lonely. Oke .Net Focus day bringing us a chat from Prashant Sridharan about Vista, 2007 Office system and Asp.net AJAX with a great demo about Fabrikam (haven't we heard or seen that one before) using Exhange 2007, SharePoint 2007 and WPF. Top notch. This talk was followed with a Vista feature talk not very interesting, with a speaker who messed everything up big time. This guy did a similar job later on that day about Vista for managed code. After this session the talks improved a lot, see blog Jan van de Pol . So I don't have to repeat it here.

First day at VS Live San Francisco with a couple of workshops to start things up. I attended the workshop for a whole about building distributed object oriented apps in .net 3.0 from Rockford Lhotka. In this workshop started with designing Windows, Web and Web-Service-based apps that have a reusable business layer composed of objects. Rocky believes it’s all about layering your app in least amount of tiers. Layer structures your application, so maintainability can be achieved. Using least possible tiers results in less complexity, but one needs them in case of scalability, fault tolerance and security. This are enhanced by more tiers, but comes with performance degradation, which means there is a trade off to be made. This also counts for service orientation, where a consumer of a service can be layered as well as the service itself. There is an open source project done by him about CSLA , which is an application development framework that reduces the cost of building and maintaining a...

B it late to share my experience during the integration master class given by Microsoft consultants, but here it is. The master class took two days and the information shared was good. Three Microsoft consultants went through integration in general with their pallet of products and technologies like SQL Server Integration Service, BizTalk, WCF, WinWF, SQL Broker, WSE, ASMX, .Net Remoting and Host Integration Server. With this in your let’s say toolbox or kit one can face the integration challenge the Microsoft way. A demo was shown using WCF, MSMQ, SQL Replication, SSIS and BizTalk. From general view they went on down the BizTalk path and talked about: • Design lessons learned BizTalk Scenario’s; • Developing effective BizTalk Server Solutions; • Deployment And Operations of BizTalk Server Solutions; • Future Developments; • Integration Project Recommendations. Information shared was good and brought in a proper context: Integration. Ok well that’s all I like to share for now, next sto...

8 and 9 march I will be attending the exclusive integration master class with some of my colleagues at Microsoft near Schiphol Airport. This master class will be about a number of technologies concerning integration like BizTalk Server, SQL Server Integration Server, Host Integration Server and Microsoft Windows Foundation. Besides technology architectural scenarios will be discussed taking scalability, performance, latency and fault tolerance in to account. Microsoft consultants will be the speakers during this master class. My colleagues and I are very interested what this master class will bring us in Microsoft insights about EAI and their technologies. Hence integration of different information systems is complex and brings a lot of challenges. I have experienced that during a number of EAI projects in the past. Well I am looking forward this week to the master class. I will post my experiences after this event .

This post is about adapters delivered by BizTalk. Through adapters of this toolset of Microsoft heterogeneous connectivity can be achieved. In a previous post I mentioned the adapters delivered by Host Integration Server 2006, the article about it will be published in June edition of the Dutch .NET Magazine. These adapters can be found here . Adapters for Oracle, SAP, Siebel can be found here as a download , so one can install them and can connect to these systems. Using the adapters in a solution one is preparing the first step is usually configuring connection for instance to DB2 (see picture). Followed by this step can be security, ecetera. Important with working with connecting to other systems like DB2 or Oracle, is permissions. One needs to have the proper permission to connect to the system, but also to for instance query views or tables in a DB2 or Oracle database. Having the proper permission can be checked when going though the adapter wizard (see figure below). More about a...

I have been blogging for almost half a year now. Did I say (blog) allot about SOA, not really actually. I am going to, well that depends a little on the projects I am getting. I am working for my current company for a year now and I only got integration projects so far; letting system A or application A talk to system B or application B. These jobs were fun to do and had some interesting challenges in them, but no SOA. Hopefully I will get a project concerning SOA in the future. I also haven't spread a lot of thoughts about SOA on this blog, but I am planning to do this in the near future. I can finally honor the title of my blog, because now it tends to be turning a little bit into a BizTalk blog. That said lets look into the future of this blog. Blogging is fun that my experience so far, but I want to get more serious in placing content. Ok that’s it for now. Back to my current new project concerning yet again application integration with BizTalk; connecting Oracle eBusiness Suit...

T oday I passed the TS: Developing Business Process and Integration Solutions by Using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006. Was it hard? Well I did the Beta last year and I failed by 651 score, because I was not quite strong on BAM and BRE. BRE was no problem this time and I strongly improved on BAM, so the score was 957 this time. So for an experienced BizTalk professional it is not a difficult exam. So if one wants to do the exam I would suggest lots of hands on experience, books like Foundation of BizTalk or BizTalk Pro are good help (see my previous posts) also look at preparation guide . Finally there is also a compiled help file for BizTalk 2006, where you will find everything about the product together with great walkthroughs and tutorials (I strongly recommend).

APRESS Released another BizTalk 2006 book. Their third after Pro BizTalk Server and BizTalk 2006 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach . This book Foundations of BizTalk Server 2006 is for a novice to get understanding of BizTalk basics. From installation to deployment, the reader will grow increasingly more comfortable with the product as one can work through a multitude of hands-on examples and demo applications. This book will demystify the product and emphasize the new 2006 BizTalk Server features. I have read a couple of chapters and tried some examples. They are quite good and overal it will give a new comer to the product a good view and understanding. In my opinion the author did an excellent job and reading through it and doing the examples I think the reader is better off than doing a beginner course. After reading the complete book one could go for an more advanced couse like deep dives being offered by for instance Quicklearn or Developmentor . If not one can start with P...

I will be attending VS Live Conference end of march in San Francisco. VSLive! returns to San Francisco's Moscone Convention Center West March 25-29, 2007 with more than 160 hours of hard-hitting technical content. Over five action-packed days, VSLive! San Francisco will provide a depth of resources and perspectives to help you be productive now and prepare for the near future. Attend sessions featuring practical techniques for writing software with today’s tools. From Ajax and data binding, to VB, C# and the .NET Framework, we have you covered. Our speakers have years of experience mastering the tools you need to get your job done. This will be the agenda: So I am looking forward to this event and hope to learn as much as my previous experience at Redmond during the SOA & BPM Conference. I also am excited to meet new people and have lots of interesting discussions.

Last year I have done an integration project for slaughterhouse in Holland. This slaughterhouse had a logistic program running on AS/400 with a DB2 database. I was asked to extract data out of the database concerning planning of vehicle’s to arrive at the slaughterhouse with livestock to be slaughtered. This data was displayed (consumed) by an ASP.NET application. When vehicles arrived this was registered by operators using the ASP.NET app. During the slaughter process earmarks on livestock was used to provide more data like weight, meat quality and so on about the animal. The app had an SQL Server 2000 database as backend. All this data had to be put back into DB2 database. An integration solution was wanted in this scenario, where the slaughterhouse wanted to use BizTalk to get planning data out of the database each night and all data gathered during the day back in DB2. The planning data in DB2 had to be extracted through a sequence of queries on different tables in a certain order....

Beginning of the new year a new book concerning SOA and Microsoft will be released through Apress. It is called PRO WCF: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation. It is written by a number of professionals like Amit Bahree, Chris Peiris, Aftab Chopra, Shawn Cicoria, Nishith Pathak and Dennis Mulder. Last one is a dutch guy I met during SOA & BPM conference at Microsoft in Redmond. He’s a very nice guy and I had a couple of chats with him during the conference. He also mentioned he was working on this book. So it cool to know one of the authors, but I am also very interested in its content. So what’s the book about: Part of Microsoft’s radical new WinFX API is the Indigo foundation, more formally known as the Windows Communication Foundation, or WCF. Pro WCF: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation is a complete guide to WCF from the SOA architecture perspective and shows you why WCF is important to web service development and architecture. The book covers the unified programming model...