Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

My first white paper on BizTalk Server has been published. The title is Supportability and operations of BizTalk Server and it can be downloaded through this link . The white paper will discuss supportability of BizTalk Server. Something you should be thinking of when setting up a BizTalk environment or when your current environment lacks or needs improvement in that aspect. Thinking about supportability of BizTalk from the very beginning should be one of the best practices that organizations need to implement. Because the team responsible for supporting the BizTalk Server environment is not involved at the beginning, during the deployment of the environment or are pulled into a project at the very end, in many projects the supportability is overlooked or not part of the initial project plan. This will lead to increasing costs of supporting the BizTalk environment as the administrators are ill prepared, poorly trained or may lack the necessary skills, and even worse given a poorly ...

I have done an interview with fellow BizTalk MVP Sandro . You can read it here . Sandro is one of the technical reviewers of my forthcoming BizTalk Server 2010 Cookbook . Enjoy the story!

BizTalkadminsblogging has had a tremendous start. Within a week and a half 13 posts already and this will be number 14. An average almost two blog posts a day. This reflects the high demand for BizTalk administration related information, the need for sharing it and desire to create more exposure for this aspect of BizTalk Server. Jeroen and Joris have done an excellent job setting up this blog site, running and maintaining it. The recent posts have touched topics like PowerShell, Microsoft Operation Framework, and so on. There is also a TechNet Wiki, where some of the bloggers and others have written articles on BizTalk Administration. I , Tord G. Nordahl , Sandro Pereira , Howard S. Edidin and Microsoft have written the following articles that are related to BizTalk administration: BizTalk Server 2010 - Tools BizTalk Server: Disaster Recovery BizTalk Monitoring Tools Administering BizTalk 2010 - Roles and Responsibilities BizTalk Server 2010: MSDTC Installing Biz...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post for the Official blog of TechNet Wiki with the topic “Wiki-Ninjas on Technology: BizTalk Server” . In that blog post I wrote a story on contributions of the community and Microsoft employees for the TechNet Wiki . Mid December there were little of 40 BizTalk Wiki Articles and over a month’s time it has grown to little over 70 . That is a tremendous growth of articles (around 30 ). It show increasing popularity of the TechNet Wiki as a channel of information on Microsoft technology and products. The newly added articles on BizTalk Server have been written by myself, Tord Glad Nordahl , Sandro Pereira , Howard S. Edidin , and Mick Badran . All these articles (existing and new) are being improved every day by people mentioned here and others (Microsoft employees and the community). I expect the number will grow over time to over 100+ articles as more community members will probably join. With the wealth of information on TechNet Wiki, MSDN and...

On BizTalk Server General forum I sometimes see people asking how to start learning BizTalk. Responses to these questions vary a little and links are provided to numerous resources, but what would be a good starting point? In my view the Microsoft BizTalk Server site and BizTalk Server Developer Center are good starting points. A successful  learning path for BizTalk Server depends on: Knowledge of .NET and Visual Studio (BizTalk artefacts); Knowledge of SQL Server since BizTalk depends on SQL Server (see BizTalk Architecture picture below); For publish/subscribe, see patterns/practices article and understanding BizTalk Server 2009 . Invest in time and money, a good training from experienced professionals can speed up the process of learning BizTalk. Spend time to build up routine and experience. Knowledge of .NET and Visual Studio Development for BizTalk Server is done through Visual Studio . Visual Studio has templates for BizTalk artefacts like orches...

In this post I would like to continue, where I left of in Part I where a did a run down in setting up an account at SalesForce, building a service and how to consume its WSDL. Also explained some security details necessary for communication with your SalesForce service. In an orchestration you can consume a web service build in SalesForce, through running BizTalk WCF Service Consuming Wizard. If you run the wizard and pick WDSL generated for your service BizTalk will generate schema and binding file for you. Schema en binding file shown below. Binding file will be helpful in creating WCF-Custom send port. I have built an orchestration that consumes my created SalesForce web service. The orchestration is initiated (activated) by picking up a file form a folder location. Xml file contains account name I want to retrieve details from SalesForce. Information in the file will be used to call the service and response message is sent to MSMQ. In MessageAssign shape code from ForceToken is ...

In this post I like to show all table operations possible with WCF-SQL Adapter. The WCF based SQL Adapter can be used to connect BizTalk applications to SQL Server. WCF-SQL Adapter is part of BizTalk Server Adapter Pack 2.0, but can also be downloaded separately. To work with the adapter you will need to install the WCF LOB Adapter SDK SP2 before installing this adapter. Something that is overlooked easily, which also accounts for the fact that this adapter is offered as a supplement to BizTalk Server 2009. You must have a valid license for the BizTalk Server in order to use the SQL adapter and be eligible for support and to receive updates. Important to note here are the supported operating systems: Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 Windows Server 2008 Windows Vista Windows XP Service Pack 3 Windows XP SP3 Windows Server 2003 SP2 Windows Server 2003 R2 Windows Server 2008 Windows Vista and required is .NET 3.5 SP1. The Adapter Metadata wizard is supplied through WCF LOB Adapter...

In this and following blogposts I would like to share my experience with integrating SalesForce with a fictive system via MSMQ (fictive system could be ERP, package application, service, ect). Integration is facilitated by BizTalk Server 2009 running on one of my VM machines (hosted by Hyper-V, see BizTalk Virtual Machines with Windows 2008 R2 Hyper V ). SalesForce is a leading CRM software solution that runs in the cloud and can be viewed as software as a service (SaaS). SalesForce itself states it is a leader in CRM (true if you consider their offering as off-premise software) and platform as a service. Latter sounds optimistic as there are some similarities with Microsoft Azure, which is also viewed as platform as a service with richer set of capabilities and a lot more flexibility. SalesForce is more targeted on CRM and you can build applications around it that can be hosted in the cloud or develop services, which I did and I am not the only one. I was inspired by Richard Seroter’s...