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...

Today I have received an e-mail from Microsoft with exciting news that my MVP status has been renewed again! For me this is the sixth time to receive this award. The fifth 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 B irgit Huebsch . The BizTalk Product Team, Mark Mortimore, Guru Venkataraman, Ed Price, Mandi Ohlinger , Allesandro Teglia , Dan Rosanova , Jon Fancey , Paolo Salvatori , and all other Microsoft employees involved. People at my former employers: Rene Brauwers , Eldert Groo...

In my last post I created some awareness on the upcoming BizTalk Summit in London, 13 and 14th of April. This event will be the biggest Microsoft integration focussed summit in Europe. Microsoft BizTalk product group, Microsoft Integration MVP and veterans will speak about integration, Azure and API Management.This event is once again, like the previous two events, being organized by BizTalk360 in conjunction with Microsoft and the BizTalk Product group. There are various reasons you can think to attend like for instance described in the blog post by one of the speakers Sandro Pereira . My topic is on Hybrid connectivity and more specifically what BizTalk Server 2013 R2 platform offers today. You can read the details below. Hybrid Solutions with the current BizTalk Server 2013 R2 platform The IT world has changed with the rise of the internet (cloud). Google, Amazon and Microsoft offer a variety of services in the cloud for storage to applications. Besides them there are a ...

April 13-14 London the BizTalk Summit 2015 , the third time this event is organized by the world renowned BizTalk monitoring product: BizTalk360 . Integration has it’s momentum now, as the IT-landscape has changed completely with the evolution of the cloud, growth of devices and being connected to everything and anything. Information Technology has reached a completly new level, where we as people are connected and consume tons of data to process and interpret. Connectivity has become key to enable us to be connected. This means applications, systems and services need to integrate (communicate) with each other to exchange data. Data that resides in multiple places. We will not see all data move to the cloud. Reasons are privacy, regulations and divers laws. This is another main driver for integration as data needs to be pushed around. In London you will hear and learn about Microsoft’s evolving (cloud) application platform, Microsoft Azure with its numerous services, BizTalk Server...

In previous post I described a way to consume a public Rest API using the BizTalk WCF-WebHttp adapter in combination with JSON-decoder, which is a new component with the BizTalk Server 2013 R2 edition. Now I like to mix things up a bit and consume a different API that is public. That is you can use this API from Last.fm . This is an online music discovery service that gives you personalised recommendations based on the music you listen to. To use the API of this service you need to registering yourself first. Because when you call of one of the methods of the API you need to stick in an api_key as one of the parameters of your request. This is not uncommon as various cloud API’s have this kind of mechanism. Scenario I have the following scenario, where I have built a client application ( still one of those old fashioned guys that use window forms ). The client application have the following functionality: Get information of an artist. Get the top albums from the artist. Infor...

BizTalk Server 2013 introduced a couple of new adapters. One of them was the WCF-WebHttp adapter that offers REST Support. The WCF-WebHttp adapter gives you the ability to send messages to Restful services and receive messages through an exposed endpoint. One of the limitations with the adapter (binding) was the lack of Json support. You had to write your own custom pipeline components to serialize the Json format to XML (you can read about it in this blogpost: BizTalk Server support for restful services ). In the new BizTalk Server 2013 R2 there is out-of the box support for sending and receiving JSON messages with the following features: a wizard to generate XSD schema from a JSON instance, and an Encoder and Decoder component to use with custom pipelines. You do not have to write your own custom components anymore. By creating a custom pipeline and dragging either a JsonEncoder or JsonDecoder you can serialize Json into xml or vice versa. With an instance of a Json message y...

Close to  the end of the year 2014. It has again been quite a year from me, travelling to different places of our world. Some familiar and some new places. 2014 brought me to the following cities, area’s and countries: United-Kingdom London . Ireland Dublin. Italy Tuscany , Emilia Romagna and Lombardia (Pisa, Lucca, Viareggio, Florence, Piacenza, Poggi Bonsi, San Gimignano, Volterra, Sienna, Valconasso di Pontenure, Podenzano, and Val Trebia). United-States Washington State (Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond, Deception Pass, Whidbey Island, Fidalgo Island, Camano Island, and Bainbridge Island). Malaysia , Kuala Lumpur. Australia Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland (Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney). Spain Basque Country, Spanish Pyrenees (Girona, L’estartit, Vielha). Norway Olso, Bergen. Sweden Stockholm. Belgium , Mechelen. For one it has been a very busy year like last year 2013. To summarize all my activity bul...