Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

In the past, now and tomorrow I will keep saying that integration is relevant, even in this day and age of digitalization. Integration professionals will play an essential role in providing connectivity between systems, devices and services. Integration drives the digitalization forward by connecting everything with anything. Integration skills are still in demand. A LinkedIn study revealed a top 10 with integration and middleware in top 5 with Cloud, Data Science, UX and Web. And the expectation for 2017 is that this will be similar. Our toolbox is expanding from on premise tooling to cloud services; we have WCF, BizTalk Server, MSMQ to Logic Apps, API Management and Service Bus. Formats ranging from flat file, EDI, XML to JSON, several protocols open and proprietary, tooling from mappers to BizTalk360. It can be challenging yet much more exciting. My conclusion is more options, more fun, at least in my view. In February I, will be travellin...

A new BizTalk Server eBook is available for the 2013 R2 version with the focus on extensibility. Together with Johann Cooper and Eldert Grootenboer I have written on various aspects of extensibility with BizTalk Server. The .NET framework adds tremendous value in extending BizTalk Server solutions to create more versatile, robust solutions. We discuss the extensibility for BizTalk Server from a holistic view around the following topics: - Ports - Orchestrations - BRE - BAM - Deployment - Operations - Tooling The eBook is available through the BizTalk360 website. The journey started after my first webcast BizTalk Extensibility for the Integration Monday a year ago in February 2015. At first I did not have any plans to pursue anything after that talk. However, a few months later I got in touch with Johann Cooper, who I interviewed for my blog and met in person in 2014 during my visit to Australia. We discussed opportunities of writing a book for a well-known publisher...

A new version of BizTalk360 has been released, version 8 which comes with a boatload of features and a complete overhaul of its user interface to provide an exceptional user experience. The product adopted a concept of widgets in the dashboard similar to the new Microsoft Azure portal. A BizTalk 360 user can now create and customize dashboards for different use cases. The User Interface, Dashboards and Widgets. In this post I will review a few of the new features and let’s kick off with the UI, which has improved dramatically. Intially BizTalk360 was a Silverlight application before it migrated to HTML 5. And in version 8.0 it has adjusted to what you experience on the Azure Portal and what you see with UI in devices. Below you see a customized dashboard with several widgets. Figure 1. An example of my customized monitoring dashboard. The end user has also the ability to create his own custom widgets via the settings page. Picture ...

In two weeks time I will head out to North America. My first stop will be Calgary to visit my friend Kent Weare. My MVP buddies Saravana Kumar and Michael Stephenson will join me as we will be speaking during the Azure Hybrid Integration the 30th of October at Microsoft Calgary. The Azure Hybrid Integration will be a full day with Kent, Saravana, Michael, myself and Darren King from Microsoft speaking on the following topics SaaS connectivity, IoT, Hybrid SQL Server, BizTalk administration & operations and Two Speed IT using Microsoft Azure. The free event takes place on October 30th, 2015 at the Calgary Microsoft office. You can find more details here . After this event we will head out to Redmond for the yearly MVP Summit . This is a multi-day event that is hosted in Bellevue and at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington. All the MVP in the world that are able to come will be there to connect with fellow MVP’s and the various product groups. I look forward to both ...

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...

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...

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...