Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

This year another BizTalk Summit will take place. A recollection of last year’s event is described in a blog post by Michael Stephenson. The 2-day conference last year the was held in December on the Microsoft Campus . It was followed up by BizTalk conference in January in Amsterdam, London and Stockholm.  Both the US and European BizTalk events were successful. Each with over a 100 or 200 participants. Microsoft Products was present at each of the events, speaking and engaging the community . The BizTalk Summit this year will follow directly after the MVP Summit and the Registration of this event is now open! The event is focused on Microsoft Integration technologies, which includes BizTalk Server, the Windows Azure BizTalk Services, and the Windows Azure Service Bus. During the summit you can expect presentations, discussions, and labs to help you understand Microsoft's Integration strategy and roadmap. Since there will quite a few Microsoft Integration MVP (I expected...

On of the demo’s during Developing Hybrid Solutions with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2013 and Windows Azure presentation talk was about connecting to Windows Azure Storage and pushing a document to a blob container. Based on that demo I created a TechNet Wiki article. What was missing in the demo was functionality to strip path from ReceivedFilename context property. I created a pipeline for it to do so and build the complete messaging solution . Here is the abstract of the TechNet Wiki article: BizTalk Server 2013 supports connectivity with Windows Azure through its new adapters WCF-BasicHttpRelay, WCF-NetTcpRelay, WCF-WebHttp and SB-Messaging. The relay adapters enables connectivity with relay service in Windows Azure Service Bus. SB-Messaging adapters provides means to connect to queue and subscriptions (topic). Finally the WCF-WebHttp for instance supports connectivity to REST endpoints. Windows Azure Storage and other services in Windows Azure and the cloud support a REST Int...

Microsoft offers REST support in BizTalk Server 2013 through the WCF-WebHttp Adapter . Something that has been anticipated by BizTalk developers for sometime. With BizTalk Server 2010 there was already quite a demand resulting: in a TechNet Wiki Article called Invoke ReSTful Web Services with BizTalk Server 2010 describing a solution to consume Restful services with BizTalk 2010, and a REST Start Kit for BizTalk to provide support for REST made by Microsoft Integration MVP Mikael Håkansson . REST API’s have grown big on the web. Twitter, Google, Salesforce, eBay, Amazon all offer REST API's to use their services. Together with the increase of mobile devices and light weight rich (Ajax) web applications the adoption of REST grows more and more. So the Microsoft BizTalk product group has made a good decision by supporting REST through the new BizTalk release 2013. Since there is so much REST API’s available now it wouldn't be a surprise if this leads to more integration ...

Recently I wrote a post for TechNet Wiki Blog and pointed out that many resources can be found through the TechNet Wiki . So in case you want to check out what is available on TechNet Wiki around integration I suggest reading Integration is my business and business is good! . I have been working on a couple of articles for TechNet Wiki last 18 months and published them. I am not the only one. There's a lot of us in the BizTalk community for instance that have published and edited numerous articles. The number of BizTalk related articles on TechNet Wiki is close to 200 by now ranging from BizTalk versions 2006 R2 to 2013, general ones (common across versions) and Windows Azure BizTalk Services. You can access them from one place: BizTalk Server Resources on the TechNet Wiki . In case you have not yet bookmarked it then you the opportunity now. If you like to participate in writing and/or editing articles feel free to do so. You will need to sign in or up and you all set to g...

I will be not the first nor last one that will blog, tweet or share through other social media that BizTalk Server 2013 is RTM . The 8th release in little over twelve years. That is amazing as I do not believe any Server Product has such a release cadence. Impressive as the Microsoft BizTalk Server Product keeps pushing out new features in the product. There was talk, rumors or loud statements that this product was near its end. Some even pronounced or claimed it was dead. Au contraire is still alive as Microsoft will keep innovating the on-premise version. Besides on-premise you can run BizTalk in a VM i.e. IaaS solution for development/testing purposes. That is not all as BizTalk Services will follow in the Windows Azure Platform. This will be an enhancement of the previous EAI/EDI labs. Microsoft’s BizTalk strategy will be that there is one BizTalk, on-premise and in the cloud. The cadence of the Windows Azure BizTalk Services will differ as it will be innovated in a faster p...