Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

The BizTalk Service in Windows Azure can be managed through a REST API. The API provides programmatic access to much of the functionality available through the Management Portal. With the REST API for managing BizTalk Services you can perform the following operations: Register BizTalk Service Create or Update a BizTalk Service Get Cloud Service Get Cloud Services Get BizTalk Service Properties Suspend BizTalk Service Resume BizTalk Service Restart BizTalk Service Poll on an Async Operation on BizTalk Service Sync Access Control Keys Delete BizTalk Service Backup BizTalk Service Restore Azure BizTalk Service from Backup In this post I like to show how you can leverage the REST API to manage BizTalk Service by means of a windows form application. Security To send request messages through the operations of the API you will need to have authentication in place. The REST API like the Windows Azure Service Management API uses mutual authentication of manageme...

Windows Azure BizTalk Services (WABS) provides capabilities for EAI and B2B in the cloud. This relative new service was made available for customers in November 2013. Microsoft committed to have a release cadence for new features every three months. Currently in February 2014 Microsoft has released new features for WABS. These new features are: EDIFACT Protocol Support and X12 Schema Updates Pulling Messages from Service Bus Queues and Topics Service Bus Shared Access Signatures (SAS) support with Service Bus Queues and Topics BizTalk Adapter Services No Longer Needs SQL On Premises Backup and Restore Support Operation Log Support This blog post will discuss the latter two new features available for WABS. Both features will enhance the ability for operation professional responsible for business continuity of the service. The first release of WABS offered support for backup and restore through a REST API. With the new release the capability is now available through the Win...

The weekend before the first BizTalk Saturday in the Netherlands took place. 17 attendees including a representative from Microsoft The Netherlands, people from Belgium, myself and Saravana Kumar were present in the head office of Axon Olympus . The topic of the day was Windows Azure BizTalk Service (WABS), one of the new services in the Windows Azure Platform. This service provides a means of hosting an integration solution that is running and managed through Windows Azure. It is general available since mid-November 2013 and offers EAI and B2B services: The EAI Service provides means to exchange data through different protocols and transform to and from different formats. Similar to what the on premise BizTalk offers through mapping and routing. The B2B service gives businesses the ability to exchange data between their partners. You can view it as a new way of EDI data exchange other than a value added network (VAN). The focus during the day was on the EAI service. After my...

Windows Azure BizTalk Services (WABS) is general available now as a service within Windows Azure. Nice, so now I can update my local installation in my VM. The upgrade is pretty straight forward. Thanks to pointers I got from Nick Hauenstein in BizTalk Integration Summit 2013 Recap . You download the new SDK(Tools and WindowsAzureBizTalkServicesSetup-x64.exe or WindowsAzureBizTalkServicesSetup-x86.exe) that is available through the Windows Azure Portal. The tools consist of the BTMMigrationTool and TPMMigrationTool. The first can aid in migration of an on-premise BizTalk map to a BizTalk Service map. The second tools can help in the migration of BizTalk Server parties. The WindowsAzureBizTalkServicesSetup-xxx.exe is a zip file. When unzipped you can run the WindowsAzureBizTalkServicesSetup application. This single msi will indicate, which version is installed. I already ran it once and I am on the latest version now. So the update is straightforward. The WindowsAzureBizTal...