By using StreamInsight to develop CEP applications, you can achieve the following tactical and strategic goals for your business:

• Monitor your data from multiple sources for meaningful patterns, trends, exceptions, and opportunities.

  Analyze and correlate data incrementally while the data is in-flight -- that is, without first storing it--yielding very low latency. Aggregate seemingly unrelated events from multiple sources and perform highly complex analyses over time.

• Manage your business by performing low-latency analytics on the events and triggering response actions that are defined on your business key performance indicators (KPIs).

  Respond quickly to areas of opportunity or threat by incorporating your KPI definitions into the logic of the CEP application, thereby improving operational efficiency and your ability to respond quickly to business opportunities.

• Mine events for new business KPIs.

• Move toward a predictive business model by mining historical data to continuously refine and improve your KPI definitions.

SOURCE: MSDN

Presenter: Stephen W. Thomas
Stephen  is an independent consultant specializing in BizTalk Server and other Connected
Technologies including AppFabric and .Net 4.  He is a six time BizTalk
Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and runs the community site www.BizTalkGurus.com. 

Speaker:
Ewan Fairweather currently works as a Program Manager in the Business Platform Division (BPD), where he works on the Customer Advisory Team (CAT) focusing on BizTalk, other application tier technologies and SQL Server.  Prior to this, Ewan spent three years working for Microsoft UK in the Premier Field Engineering team. Ewan co-authored the successful Professional BizTalk Server 2006 book and has written many whitepapers for Microsoft including the Microsoft BizTalk Server Performance Optimization guide which is available on Microsoft’s MSDN website.

Speaker:
Richard Seroter is a solutions architect for an industry-leading biotechnology company, a three time Microsoft MVP for BizTalk Server, and a Microsoft Connected Technology Advisor.  He previously worked at Microsoft as technology specialist for SOA/BizTalk Server and at Accenture and Avanade as a technology consultant.  Richard is the author of “SOA Patterns for BizTalk Server 2009” (Packt, 2009) and frequent blogger at seroter.wordpress.com.

Speaker:
Richard Seroter is a solutions architect for an industry-leading biotechnology company, a three time Microsoft MVP for BizTalk Server, and a Microsoft Connected Technology Advisor.  He previously worked at Microsoft as technology specialist for SOA/BizTalk Server and at Accenture and Avanade as a technology consultant.  Richard is the author of “SOA Patterns for BizTalk Server 2009” (Packt, 2009) and frequent blogger at seroter.wordpress.com.

Speaker:
Ewan Fairweather currently works as a Program Manager in the Business Platform Division (BPD), where he works on the Customer Advisory Team (CAT) focusing on BizTalk, other application tier technologies and SQL Server.  Prior to this, Ewan spent three years working for Microsoft UK in the Premier Field Engineering team. Ewan co-authored the successful Professional BizTalk Server 2006 book and has written many whitepapers for Microsoft including the Microsoft BizTalk Server Performance Optimization guide which is available on Microsoft’s MSDN website.

Ewan Fairweather currently works as a Program Manager in the Business Platform Division (BPD), where he works on the Customer Advisory Team (CAT) focusing on BizTalk, other application tier technologies and SQL Server.  Prior to this, Ewan spent three years working for Microsoft UK in the Premier Field Engineering team. Ewan co-authored the successful Professional BizTalk Server 2006 book and has written many whitepapers for Microsoft including the Microsoft BizTalk Server Performance Optimization guide which is available on Microsoft’s MSDN website.

AIF is a standards-based framework that allows you to publish and consume web services.  It’s used primarily in integration scenarios when connecting Dynamics AX with other systems.  AX also has .NET Business Connector (BC.NET) for integrating with .NET applications.  BC.NET is more for client side integration.  AIF is all about web services and is completely standards-based. Under the covers AIF takes full advantage of .NET using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).  For more complex integration scenarios AIF can also help expose services using MSMQ and BizTalk.

With Dynamics AX 2009, the team ships a bunch of services (about 60 out of the box) that are ready for use.  That includes, for example, the more common scenarios like integration with sales orders or customers.  AIF allows you to create, read, update and delete those sales orders while maintaining the integrity of the database (i.e. without directly touching the database at all).  This is done independent of the transport so when developing you could begin by updating via http and later switch to MSMQ.  This can be as simple as enabling the service then “generating” which generates the WCF interface (i.e. WSDL).  That web service is then available to be consumed by any standards-based client (including apps written in php, java and naturally any of the languages in Visual Studio).  You can also configure the service endpoints to change the binding or authentication parameters.

In the video, Michael walks us through using a standard Excel Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) project to consume a AX 2009 sales order service that is exposed using AIF.  He also shows us how, by using WS-Addressing in the WCF headers, you can pass a target company for a web service call. By default, AX limits error messages coming back from the server for security reasons.  Michael shows us how to configure AX to propagate those errors when you need to see them.

Dynamics AX is a rich platform for supply chain management and financials.  AIF opens up AX so that ISVs can build on that richness by integrating their own applications.  Sometimes when you do that you need to consume a web service exposed by external applications.  We see here how you can plug external web services into the AX processes.  In this case, Michael shows us how when trying to create a customer in Dynamics AX with a name that has been blacklisted by the US government (“Bin Laden”, for instance.  Yikes!  ) the customer create process calls out to an external web service in the cloud to verify the customer name.  This seamless integration of external processes is a boon for ISVs that need those deep integration points.  Michael explains how. In order to do this sort of integration you build a Service Reference in the Application Object Tree (AOT) to provide the parameters.  AX takes care of much of work by generating the artifacts (compilation, deploying, bundling etc) that are deployed and executed on the server.  CLR interop is available in order to use .NET DLLs and their classes.

Some code samples are available here:

• Application Integration Framework Overview (MSDN)
• Calling the Customer and Vendor Services (Dianne Siebold)

I began our conversation with a reference to a blog item posted by Clemens Vasters back in April when BizTalk Services was announced. He described a Slingbox-like application he'd done for his family.

It's a custom-built (software/hardware) combo of two machines (one in Germany, one here in the US) that provide me and my family with full Windows Media Center embedded access to live and recorded TV along with electronic program guide data for 45+ German TV channels, Sports Pay-TV included.

Clemens did this the hard way, and it was really hard:

The work of getting the connectivity right (dynamic DNS, port mappings, firewall holes), dealing with the bandwidth constraints and shielding this against unwanted access were ridiculously complicated.

And he observed:

Using BizTalk Services would throw out a whole lot of complexity that I had to deal with myself, especially on the access control/identity and connectivity and discoverability fronts.

I began by asking John to describe how BizTalk services attacks these challenges in order to mitigate that complexity. We talked through a couple of scenarios in detail. The one you've heard the most about, if you've heard of this at all, is the cross-organization scenario in which a pair of organizations can very easily interconnect services -- of any flavor, could be REST, could be WS-* -- with reliable connectivity through NATs and firewalls, dynamic addressing, and declarative access control.

There's another scenario that hasn't been much discussed, but is equally fascinating to me: peer-to-peer. We haven't heard that term a whole lot lately, but as the Windows Communication Foundation begins to spread to the installed base of PCs, and with the advent of a WCF-based service fabric such as BizTalk Services, I expect we'll see the pendulum start to swing back.

At one point I asked John whether BizTalk Services supports the classic optimization -- used by Skype and other P2P apps -- in which endpoints, having used the fabric's services to rendezvous with one another, are able to establish direct communication. He said that it does, and followed with this observation about the economics of hosting BizTalk Services.

When we host it, we'll incur certain operational costs, so we'll want to recover those costs. But our goal is not to differentiate our offering from others because we host the software, it should be the case that Microsoft competes on an equal basis with other hosters.

In many regards, our motivations differ from other providers. Take Amazon's queueing service as an example. Because we've got software running both up in the cloud as well as on the edge nodes, we can create a network shortcut so that the two endpoints can talk directly. In that scenario, we don't see any traffic up on our network. All we did was provide a simple name capability, so the two applications end up talking to each other, using their own network bandwidth. We can use the smarts in the clients and in our servers to reduce the overall operating cost.

Now in that scenario, the endpoints are presumably servers running within an organization, or maybe across organizations. But WCF-equipped clients can play in this sandbox too. The idea is, in effect, to generalize the capabilities of an application like Skype, and enable developers to build all sorts of applications that leverage that kind of fabric.

That's a vision that many of us in the industry share. We'd just like to reduce the barriers to being able to connect our machines and our solutions. The industry's seen a bit transition to a hosted world, because that's been the easiest way to get universal connectivity. If a big organization with a whole bunch of high priests of IT were out there running the servers for you, then you didn't have to get your machine to be able to do that.

But sometimes I might just want to put those things on my machine, and if it were easy enough, wouldn't that be a great model? Why do I want to be beholden to some organization that's capturing my data? Maybe I want to have more privacy.

Of course there are benefits to moving it out to the cloud, but we think that should be a decision you make after the fact. Build your application to a consistent abstraction, then decide where you want the dial as the demands on the application change. If I'm just trying to do a quick video share with my friends, why do I have to create a new space? Why not simply say, here's the URL? And have that URL be stable?

Why not indeed. At its core the Internet has always been fundamentally peer-to-peer, but after a while we couldn't sanely continue in that mode. Things got too scary, so we built walls and created ghettoes. Technically our PCs are still Internet hosts but, except when they're running a few important P2P apps, they haven't really been hosts for a long time. It'd be great to get back to that.

The BizTalk Adapter for Windows Workflow Foundation SDK Sample (June 2007 CTP) is a preview of some new technology for business logic and process developers. It provides for workflow models developed using Windows Workflow Foundation from the .NET Framework 3.0 to be hosted in BizTalk Server 2006. By doing this the workflow gains access to services from BizTalk Server 2006 including scalability, reliability, manageability, and access to messaging with BizTalk Server ports. The next major version of BizTalk Server is planned to be built on Windows Workflow Foundation and this CTP provides an option for customers to do this with current technologies. A release date has not yet been planned and will depend on customer feedback and the sample is currently not planned to be Microsoft supported. The CTP is suitable for software developers familiar with Windows Workflow Foundation and is provided as an SDK sample with source code.

The sample provides a tool that evaluates an existing WF workflow model and creates a BizTalk orchestration project as a proxy for that WF workflow model. The orchestration can then be deployed to BizTalk Server and the WF model is used.