Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

One of new enhancements (or improvements) of BizTalk Server 2009 is the developer/team productivity through ALM.   I myself am not an expert yet on ALM so I decided to start digging into the subject. The following resources will help me get through this process (I hope): Pro Visual Studio Team System Application LifeCycle Management book by Joachim Rossberg; Have discussions or ask questions to experts you know, maybe colleagues (I for instance can ask Edward Bakker ); Microsoft resources; Blogs. I hope this can be helpful to anyone moving towards BizTalk Server 2009 or is going down that path. If anyone has some other suggestions I am glad to hear them. Technorati: ALM BizTalk Server 2009

Next talk after this morning talk is the new Application LifeCycle Management experience for BizTalk Developer session by Stephen Kaufman. This session will dive into deep integration with Team Foundation Server and ALM. It started with a retrospective to what happing now with build, deploy, testing and debugging of orchestrations or mappings. This things are tedious and slowing down developers these days when using BizTalk 2006 R2 or lesser versions. New features of BizTalk Server 2009 are listed below in the slide (same as previous session ). What is ALM Experience? It is defined as in slide below.   And it benefits through increased business value (see my post about value proposition). It improves team results and brings indeed added value. This is demoed by co-speaker Vinay Ahuja in demo called BizTalkALM. Source Control for instance is completely integrated and functions better than source control in conjunction with previous versions of BizTalk (as soon in demo). ...

There is an need for an Application Server and Integration Server in SOA space. First basic what is word integrate mean: Content for talk today is why? (challenges: what will BizTalk solve), What? (Scenario’s capabilities), Who? and What’s new” (Now BizTalk 2009 and future); and Why is it important? Talk is focused to more with BizTalk! Landscape is changing, domain EAI is not new, where to unify systems and share data. Historic time line is displayed below: BizTalk plays a role in latter to. What does BizTalk solve? Summarized in IT Business Challenges. In the big picture it comes down to real world SOA. So it is people (consumers) and technology (supply data) to compositions (offer functionality). Common scenario’s for BizTalk are displayed below. BizTalk Server Workloads divided in six types (what can be done with BizTalk). Customer video Oncology Hematology Associates (Electronic Patient Dossier); Good video something for Dutch Health Care Secreta...

BizTalk Server 2009 CTP is out together with its documentation . Looking at the information provided by compiled help file BizTalk Server 2009 product I did not feel that much had changed. So I looked at BizTalk value proposition section and gave some insight to what actually is new or more important why investments could be made in this upcoming edition of the product. First thing that strikes me or could be viewed as obvious is the alignment with 2008 products: Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008. BizTalk Server 2009 supports latest Microsoft platform technologies and that’s good, but it should have already been the case. Organizations nowadays might have to support more platforms. Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 for BizTalk Server 2006 (R2) and updated platform being Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 for new development projects that need latest technologies embedded in that platform. Hopefully for next release of BizTalk Server the alignment will go ...