Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

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 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...

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 ...