Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

In the new adapters series I discussed the adapters released with BizTalk Server 2013. I demonstrated the relay adapters (HTTP, NetTcp), Service Bus Messaging, WebHttp (REST) and linked to the TechNet Wiki article on SFTP. I have written a White paper that discusses the BasicHttpRelay more in-depth. BizTalk Server 2013 offers a few new adapters. Three of them enable connectivity with the Windows Azure Service Bus. These adapters are the WCF-BasicHttpRelay, WCF-NetTcpRelay, and SB-Messaging. The first two leverage the ability to use the Service Bus Relay. The relay service is one of the entities within the Windows Azure Service Bus. Benefits of using the relay service are that: you can share data between an on premise application, Line-of-Business system or databases with a service hosted elsewhere (in the cloud or other enterprise); you have a secure connection between both sender and receiver of datawith simplified networking (less dealing with firewalls, dynamic IP addresses or...

In march I promised to do a post on the last new adapter released with BizTalk Server 2013: SFTP . I wanted to discuss all the new adapters and did so for the relays, SB-Messaging and WebHttp. I forgot about SFTP. I got reminded of that fact when I read latest TechNet Wiki article  by Suleiman Shakhtour . Excerpt of the article: In the BizTalk 2010 release, Microsoft enhanced the existing FTP adapter to support SSL (FTPS) which encrypting the data transfers between systems. With the BızTalk 2013 release, Microsoft added the SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol also called Secure File Transfer Protocol), which has been anticipated for many years. In the past for one had to rely on the open source adapter developed by Blogical found on CodePlex or an adapter from commercial third parties (like /n software SFTP ). You can further read the article on the TechNet Wiki: BizTalk Server:How to use SFTP Adapter in BizTalk Server 2013 . You will read how to configure and test the adapte...

The support for REST has been anticipated for a long time by BizTalk developers. A majority of the services in the cloud these days is REST based. When exposing a public API over the internet to handle CRUD operations on data REST has now generally been considered the best option. Twitter, Google, Salesforce, eBay, Amazon all offer REST API's to use their services. Not only these, but many more companies support REST or will support it as the number of mobile devices and light weight rich (Ajax) web applications will increase significantly coming years. In previous posts on the new adapters available with BizTalk Server 2013 I discussed both the Relay adapters: BasicHttp , NetTcpRelay and the Service Bus SB-Messaging . In this post I like to discuss the WCF-WebHttp adapter in his current state in the BizTalk Server 2013 Beta. The adapter offers the capability to send messages and to receive messages from a RESTful Service endpoints. Note: Since BizTalk sends out message bodi...

In previous two posts on the new adapters available with BizTalk Server Bus I discussed both the Relay adapters: BasicHttp and NetTcpRelay . The Relay is one of the capabilities of the Windows Azure Service Bus. It enables you to expose WCF Service that resides within your enterprise. Benefit of exposing the service or at least an endpoint (as a listener) in Windows Azure that you do need to open up a firewall connection or make changes your corporate network. You can circumvent issues with NAT or Dynamic IP. With both posts I provided links to Code Gallery to find samples that illustrate the walk-throughs. Besides the relay service the Windows Azure Service Bus also offers queues, topics and subscriptions. Service Bus Queues offer a brokered messaging similar to on-premise MSMQ. The message can be sent to the queue and a consumer can pick up the message for further processing. The consumer can be a receive port within BizTalk. A receive location within a receive port can be config...

This is the second post on new adapters that will be shipped with BizTalk Server 2013. The post is based on BizTalk Server 2013 Beta. In this post I like to demonstrate the WCF-NetTcpRelay adapter. The WCF-NetTcpRelay adapter can be used with BizTalk to send and receive messages from the Service Bus relay endpoints using the NetTcpRelayBinding . When configuring for instance a request response receive port, you can enable a receive location using the NetTcpRelayBinding . The receive location with contains an address using the “ sb ” URI scheme. Through the receive location the endpoint (address) will be registered in the Windows Azure Service Bus. The URI consists of the namespace available in Windows Azure Portal Service Bus. Windows Azure is multitenant and therefore to manage the service bus capacities like relay has to be done through a unique namespace (see Create Namespace section of How to Use the Service Bus Relay Service ). The following scenario will describe a wa...

In next couple of weeks I like to do a series of blog posts on the new adapters provided in the upcoming release of BizTalk Server 2013. In this post I like to demonstrate the WCF-BasicHttpRelay adapter . The WCF-BasicHttpRelay adapter can be used with BizTalk to send and receive messages from the Service Bus relay endpoints using the BasicHttpRelayBinding . This is a binding that BizTalk can use to configure endpoints which can communicate with ASMX-based Web services and other services that conform to the WS-I Basic Profile 1.1. The BasicHttpRelayBinding is derived from the standard BasicHttpBinding . However, the key difference between the two is that the BasicHttpRelayBinding can create publicly reachable and, if required, publicly discoverable HTTP listener endpoint listening on the Windows Azure Service Bus, while the BasicHttpBinding listens through the standard HTTP.sys listener on the local Windows computer. The following scenario will describe a way to send messages t...