Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

In this post I would like to summarize how my year 2011 went. For one it has been a very busy year. I have been writing a BizTalk Server 2010 Cookbook that due March this year. It took me more than nine months to write. I have had great support from Randal van Splunteren , Richard Seroter , Saravana Kumar , Tord Gard Nordahl , Mikael Hakansson , Sandro Perreira , Rene Brauwers and Abdul Rafay . They have supported me by reviewing it, contributions and valuable advice. That is not all I have been doing more than just writing a book. I have written 47 blog posts on this blog and some on the BizTalk Ordina blog , a lot of wiki articles , code gallery samples , articles for magazines, book reviewing, and public speaking. I enjoyed my interview with Richard Seroter during the MVP Summit and the interview about me by Ed Price. I loved the opportunity to speak at Ordina , BizTalk User Group Netherlands and Sweden: Masterclass BizTalk and AppFabric BTUG: BizTalk integration with Sale...

In my previous post I blogged about release of Azure Service Bus EAI/EDI December 2011 CTP   last Friday and now I like to demonstrate an EAI solution involving Oracle. First I discuss the installation, labs environment, then the solution setup, deployment and test. Installation Installation of Azure Service Bus EAI/EDI 2011 CTP requires attention as I found out the hard way   and I advice to carefully read and study the installation article on MSDN. Previous installed SDK need to be removed . If you fail to do so you will receive error like below. Note: You can run the RelayConfigurationInstaller.exe tool (which shipped with the previous versions of the Windows Azure AppFabric SDK) with the /u option to remove the WCF Extensions from machine.config. Labs Environment After you’ve installed the SDK and ServiceConnect both available through here , you can sign in to the labs environment using a Windows Live ID. Once you signed in you need to click AppFabric positio...

Microsoft today has put Windows Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs on its Windows Azure Platform . These labs provides integration capabilities for the Windows Azure Platform to extend on-premises applications to the cloud, provides rich messaging endpoints on the cloud to process and transform the messages, and helps organizations integrate with disparate applications, both on cloud and on-premises. In other words, Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs provides common integration capabilities (e.g. bridges, transforms, B2B messaging) on Windows Azure Service Bus. Below you find list of resources (taken from Windows Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs - December 2011 Release page ): Installing the Windows Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs - December 2011 Supplies details about what is required to properly install and run Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs. Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs - Tutorials Start learning the basics of developing Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs solutions using these sho...

A topic that I think BizTalk professional find appealing in Windows Azure is the Service Bus (part of Windows Azure AppFabric). Service Bus provides secure messaging and connectivity capabilities that enable building distributed and disconnected applications in the cloud, as well hybrid application across both on-premises and the cloud. One of new features is topics and queues . Clemens Vasters did a talk on Windows Azure Service Bus Topics and Queues during Windows Build and an advanced one , which you find on his blog. You can work with this new feature through Windows Azure AppFabric SDK V1.5 - September 2011 . The version 1.5 SDK includes an updated Service Bus assembly that includes support for durable, or “brokered” messaging features, such as queues, topics, and subscriptions. These features require the .NET Framework version 4.0. ( Note: If you have a dependency on the .NET Framework version 3.5, you should download or continue to use version 1.0 of the AppFabric SDK.) I...