Entries tagged with biztalk - Channel 9

BizTalk Server, SOA and the Shift to the Cloud (2/2)

The Swedish Web Team — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:07:00 GMT

Presented at the Swedish BizTalk User Group meeting September 16th 2009 in Stockholm.

Session 2 of 2: This session shows how to exploit SOA principles when consuming existing services. We will also see how BizTalk can directly engage cloud offerings from the leading vendors. (View session 1)

Richard Seroter is a solutions architect for an industry-leading biotechnology company, a Microsoft MVP for BizTalk Server, and a Microsoft Connected Technology Advisor. He has spent the majority of his career consulting with customers as they planned and implemented their enterprise software solutions. Richard worked first for two global IT consulting firms, which gave him exposure to a diverse range of industries, technologies, and business challenges. Richard then joined Microsoft as a SOA/BPM technology specialist where his sole objective was to educate and collaborate with customers as they considered, designed, and architected BizTalk solutions. One of those customers liked him enough to bring him onboard full time as an architect after they committed to using BizTalk Server as their enterprise service bus. Once the BizTalk environment was successfully established, Richard transitioned into a solutions architect role where he now helps identify enterprise best practices and applies good architectural principles to a wide set of IT initiatives.

Richard maintains a semi-popular blog of his exploits, pitfalls, and musings with BizTalk Server, SOA and enterprise architecture at http://seroter.wordpress.com/.

BizTalk Server, SOA and the Shift to the Cloud (1/2)

The Swedish Web Team — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:02:00 GMT

Presented at the Swedish BizTalk User Group meeting September 16th 2009 in Stockholm.

Session 1 of 2:

In this session we will discuss the continued relevance of SOA and how to apply SOA principles when designing and exposing services from BizTalk Server. (View session 2)

Richard Seroter is a solutions architect for an industry-leading biotechnology company, a Microsoft MVP for BizTalk Server, and a Microsoft Connected Technology Advisor. He has spent the majority of his career consulting with customers as they planned and implemented their enterprise software solutions. Richard worked first for two global IT consulting firms, which gave him exposure to a diverse range of industries, technologies, and business challenges. Richard then joined Microsoft as a SOA/BPM technology specialist where his sole objective was to educate and collaborate with customers as they considered, designed, and architected BizTalk solutions. One of those customers liked him enough to bring him onboard full time as an architect after they committed to using BizTalk Server as their enterprise service bus. Once the BizTalk environment was successfully established, Richard transitioned into a solutions architect role where he now helps identify enterprise best practices and applies good architectural principles to a wide set of IT initiatives.

Richard maintains a semi-popular blog of his exploits, pitfalls, and musings with BizTalk Server, SOA and enterprise architecture at http://seroter.wordpress.com/.

Microsoft Manufacturing Toolkit

Charles — Thu, 21 May 2009 00:43:00 GMT

The Microsoft Manufacturing Toolkit is a set of guidance documentation and working code samples that demonstrate the use of the Microsoft platform to build publish/subscribe (“pub/sub”), services-based architectures utilizing open standards for broad industry implementation. The toolkit focuses on the MIMOSA and OPC/OPC-UA organization specifications, and the working code samples demonstrate scenarios that might be implemented in a manufacturing environment. The design of the toolkit, however, is flexible and built on service oriented architecture (SOA) allowing it to be expanded to cover more standards than the ones covered now in the future; this flexibility will also allow the toolkit to be easily adapted to other non-manufacturing scenarios if needed.

Charles Fichter is a Senior Architect Evangelist in the Global Partner Technical team, within Developer & Platform Evangelism Division at Microsoft. Charles’ core responsibilities include- working with Microsoft’s Global Partners in system architecture design & guidance, helping partners achieve technical readiness on Microsoft’s new and emerging application platform technologies and architecting reference applications. In the following video, Charles walks you through the architecture and various components within the Microsoft® Manufacturing Toolkit.

BizTalk Server - Development and Administration Best Practices (2/2)

Johan Lindfors — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 10:34:00 GMT

This recording continues where the first one left off, about 30 minutes in the focus shifts to...

Presented att Swedish BizTalk user group meeting 15 april 2009 in Stockholm

Providing reliable and scalable hosting for BizTalk Server in a production environment can be challenging. This session will address some of the common issues that BizTalk projects face going into production and highlight ways that you can help to ensure the environment runs smoothly and reliably.

· BizTalk deployment architecture

· Planning for installation

· Installation best practices

· Monitoring best practices

· BizTalk Server disaster recovery

· Disaster recovery best practices

Speakers are:

Brian Loesgen - http://blog.BrianLoesgen.com
Alan Smith - http://bloggersguides.net

BizTalk Server - Development Best Practices (1/2)

Johan Lindfors — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 10:33:00 GMT

Presented att Swedish BizTalk user group meeting 15 april 2009 in Stockholm

· How should we manage our development environment?
· What is the ideal project structure?
· How can BizTalk deployment run smoothly?
· What is the optimal way to handle errors?
· When should loose coupling be used?
· How do we build a service platform on BizTalk?

Seasoned BizTalk consultants tend to accumulate best practices as they implement BizTalk solutions across various projects and clients. In this session we will share some of the tips, techniques and tools that professional BizTalk developers use on a daily basis to improve the quality of their deliverables and reduce development time and effort. We will start with infrastructure aspects such as how to set up projects, naming conventions, and automating tasks for highly repeatable results. Next, we will look at architectural patterns and design approaches that yield more efficient, better performing, more extensible and more robust BizTalk solutions. Join us to learn how you can avoid common pitfalls and improve your BizTalk development experience.

Speakers are:

Brian Loesgen - http://blog.BrianLoesgen.com
Alan Smith - http://BloggersGuides.net

BizTalk 2009 - End to end performance testing (2/2)

Johan Lindfors — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 07:23:00 GMT

This is the second recording out of two from the BizTalk 2009 launch and Massive scalability night at Microsoft in Stockholm on April 16 2009. It is a joint event between Microsoft Sweden and the Swedish BizTalk UserGroup.

In this session we will introduce the BizTalk Performance Testing Guidance. This guide contains a fully documented end to end process that you can follow to achieve consistent results in your BizTalk performance testing. In addition to this we have packaged up all of the prescriptive optimizations that have been applied during the Ranger team's labs.

Many of these have been automated through Powershell and SQL Scripts to enable you to quickly and easily attain the optimum performance from your system. This session will provide a full interactive run through of the performance lab process.

It will illustrate the tools and techniques and documentation that we use and are documented in the guide. Also learn about performance lab characteristics on BizTalk Server 2006 R2, BizTalk 2009 (physical) and BizTalk 2009 on Hyper-V platform.

BizTalk 2009 – End to end performance testing (1/2)

Johan Lindfors — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 17:30:00 GMT

This is the first recording out of two from the BizTalk 2009 launch and Massive scalability night at Microsoft in Stockholm on April 16 2009. It is a joint event between Microsoft Sweden and the Swedish BizTalk UserGroup.

In this session we will introduce the BizTalk Performance Testing Guidance. This guide contains a fully documented end to end process that you can follow to achieve consistent results in your BizTalk performance testing. In addition to this we have packaged up all of the prescriptive optimizations that have been applied during the Ranger team's labs.

ArqCast Brasil - SOA-Enterprise Service Bus no Mundo Real

Markus Christen MS — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 15:39:00 GMT

ArqCast Brasil - Enterprise Service Bus no Mundo Real

Introdução ao ESB Guidance 2.0 é BizTalk Server 2009

Markus Christen:
http://blogs.technet.com/MarkusChristen

Waldemir Cambiucci:
http://blogs.msdn.com/wcamb

ESB Guidance
http://www.codeplex.com/esb

Abraço

MSDN TV - Use Team Foundation Server for BizTalk Server 2009 development

Johan Lindfors — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 12:03:00 GMT

In this demonstration in english, Johan Hedberg, co-owner of BizTalk User Group in Sweden demonstrates several aspects of leveraging Team Foundation Server when developing solutions with BizTalk Server 2009.

Johan demonstrates unit-testing, automated builds and automatic deployment with custom tasks for msbuild.

The demonstration is recorded in english!

Please visit http://biztalkusergroup.se/ for more information on BizTalk UserGroup in Sweden.

10 mest anv ndbara orchestration patterns - del 2 av 2

Swedish MSDN Team — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 18:42:00 GMT

Den 9:a december genomfördes ytterligare ett seminarium i BizTalk User Group Sweden's regi. Den här gången bidrog Charles Young med ämnet 10 mest användbara Orchestration patterns. Detta är del två av två!

OBS, presentationen är på engelska!

10 mest användbara orchestration patterns - del 1 av 2

Swedish MSDN Team — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:50:00 GMT

Den 9:e december genomfördes ytterligare ett seminarium i BizTalk User Group Sweden's regi. Den här gången bidrog Charles Young med ämnet 10 mest användbara Orchestration patterns. Detta är del ett av två!

OBS, presentationen är på engelska!

WCF and AIF in Dynamics 2009: Chatting with Michael Merz

Ben Riga — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 23:56:00 GMT

In this video I’m back on the Advanta campus chatting with Michael Merz, Program Manager for Application Integration Framework (AIF) on the Dynamics AX team.

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)

What's new in the BizTalk Adapter Pack

Charles — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 18:19:00 GMT

BizTalk adapter pack constitutes WCF-based adapters for line of business systems including SAP, Oracle DB and Siebel. This presentation by Mahadevan Venkatachalam positions the adapter pack, discusses the typical usage scenarios and the specific features of the adapters.

.NET and Java Interop with JNBridge

Kirk Evans — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 16:48:25 GMT

Kirk Evans interviews Wayne Citrin, CTO of JNBridge, looking at the JNBridge JMS Adapters for .NET and BizTalk.

geekSpeak: BizTalk BAM and ESB implementation with Brian Loesgen

llangit — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 21:41:38 GMT

Based in San Diego, Brian Loesgen is a Principal Consultant with Neudesic, a firm that specializes in .NET development and Microsoft server integration. Brian is a Microsoft MVP for BizTalk Server. Watch Brian demo BAM and ESB and hear him answer listener questions.

In addition, Brian has been involved with advanced Enterprise Service Bus solutions, and was a key architect/developer of the “Microsoft ESB Guidance” released by Microsoft in Oct 2006. He is a co-author of 6 books, including the recent “BizTalk Server 2004 Unleashed”, and is currently working on “SOA with .NET”.

He has written technical white papers for Intel, Microsoft and others. Brian has spoken at numerous major technical conferences worldwide. Brian is a co-founder and past-President of the International .NET Association (ineta.org). He is the President of the San Diego .NET user group, leads the San Diego Software Industry Council SOA/Web Services SIG, and is a member of the Editorial Board for the .NET Developer’s Journal. Brian is also a member of the Microsoft CSD Virtual Technical Specialist Team. Brian’s blog is http://geekswithblogs.com/bloesgen.

BizTalk Services SDK Echo Sample

justinjsmith — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 23:53:27 GMT

This screencast walks through the Echo Sample in the BizTalk Services SDK (R9). In a nutshell, the Echo Sample highlights how BizTalk Services makes it easy to expose services that are behind a NAT or firewall.

For a basic introduction to BizTalk Services, see
This video focuses on EDI features of BizTalk, but in the process shows off a bit of what BizTalk can do.

Throughout my entire life as a geek, I've heard the name "BizTalk" spoken over and over, but I've never known what to think beyond the name. Sometimes another geek steps in and says something like, "BIZTALK IS AWESOME," but that doesn't tell me much about what it does.

During this interview, I learned about some of what it can do. I also learned about EDI - another term I had heard, but about which I knew nothing.

My verdict is that BizTalk has a lot of room to be interesting, and people who use EDI should count their lucky little stars that BizTalk exists.

A conversation with John Shewchuk about BizTalk Services and the Internet Service Bus

JonUdell — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 17:31:26 GMT

In Microsoft Conversations series I talked with John Shewchuk about BizTalk Services, a project to create what he likes to call an Internet Service Bus. The project's blog, with pointers to key resources, is here. There's also a Dennis Pilarinos illustrate the concepts using a whiteboard and demos.

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.

BizTalk Server 2006 Extensions for WF

mwink — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 20:18:51 GMT

This video shows how to use this sample to integrate BizTalk and WF today.

From Paul Andrew's blog here.

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.

John Shewchuk and Dennis Pilarinos: BizTalk Services Explained

Charles — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 19:27:05 GMT

In this video, James Conard talks with John Shewchuk and Dennis Pilarinos about BizTalk Services.

In the simplest definition, BizTalk Services simplifies application connectivity by extending WCF and providing a set of hosted services. John and Dennis quickly explain BizTalk Services by discussing the challenges with building applications today. Dennis also shows four demos of BizTalk Services and then drops into Visual Studio along the way to show the programming model.

You can download the BizTalk Services SDK from http://www.biztalk.net

Eddie Churchill - Biztalk's sexy new XSLT Mapper

scobleizer — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 09:03:54 GMT

Who said enterprise apps have to be boring? Check out Biztalk's future XSLT Mapper, which makes use of new information interaction technologies. Here you get to meet two researchers from Microsoft research and see how they worked with the product teams to come up with an improved version of the schema mapper.

Road to VS 2005/SQL/Biztalk launch

Charles — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 22:51:13 GMT

Vice presidents S. “Soma” Somasegar, Ted Kummert, and Andy Lees taped an interview with Channel 9 talking about what it’s like to be in the home stretch of such an important delivery for Microsoft as VS 2005, SQL Server 2005 and Biztalk 2006 prepare to RTM. Find out what is top of mind for them as they count down the final days (hours and seconds) to launch.

Special guest star Jennifer Ritzinger helps Scoble conduct the interview.

Eddie Churchill - First look at Solution Designer

scobleizer — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 17:42:41 GMT

Meet the Biztalk Solution Designer team. Eddie definitely has the most colorful shirt we've seen on Channel 9 so far.