Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

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...

There will be another BizTalk Summit event in august in Australia. The early bird tickets are on sale now until the end of this month! The event will take place in three different cities: Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. I will be speaking at each of the events together with fellow MVP’s Saravana Kumar, Michael Stephenson, Bill Chesnut, Mikael Hakansson and Mick Badran on various topics around integration with the Microsoft technology stack: Microsoft Azure, BizTalk Service, BizTalk Server 2013 R2, Mobile, Office365, and BizTalk360. My talk will specifically go into Microsoft Azure BizTalk Service, what it offers today, what scenarios can be supported, development-, deployment-, and operation perspective of this cloud service. Session is called: Hitchhiker's guide to integration with Microsoft Azure BizTalk Service and the actual abstract: Microsoft Azure BizTalk Service (MABS) is almost available to us for a year. It is a newcomer in the world of integration Platform a...