June, 2012

Introduction In my post on Future BizTalk Server Release and Microsoft Integration Strategy I discussed the three pronged Microsoft integration strategy: On-premise BizTalk (a CTP of next version will be released this summer) BizTalk IaaS ( Infrastructure as a Services ), Windows Azure offers services like Virtual Machine and Virtual Network to enable to have your BizTalk infrastructure in the cloud; BizTalk PaaS ( Platform as a Services ) with EDI/EAI integration capabilities using the Service Bus...

My previous Windows Azure account was through an MSDN subscription I no longer have access to so I recently decided to take up the free 90 day trial that is currently on offer using my personal Windows Live account. However, I ran into an issue during the credit card details step that was preventing me [...] Blog Post by: Colin Meade

So this post is a little delayed due to all of the excitement around the BizTalk sessions.  However the sessions were that good that I wanted to still publish the post. Azure Service Bus Solution Patterns   -Clemens Vasters and Abhishek Lal Another session by Clemens and Abhishek.  This time around it was a very practical session based upon some Customer Use Cases and how to implement some popular integration design patterns based upon the “Integration Bible” - Enterprise Integration...

There are many great reviews about this book made by well-respected members of BizTalk Community like Nino Crudele, Kent Weare, Lex Hegt, Tord Glad Nordahl, Saravana Kumar, Mikael Sand, Naushad Alam, Rohit Sharma, Howard S. Edidin and many more. If you have been reading my blog you already know that I had the honor to [...] Blog Post by: Sandro Pereira

Just because I work for Tier 3 now doesn’t mean that I’ll stop playing around with all sorts of technology and do nothing but write about my company’s products. Far from it. Microsoft has made a lot of recent updates to their stack, and I closely followed the just-concluded US TechEd conference which covered all [...] Blog Post by: Richard Seroter

Following on from my other blog post on the Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC 2012), I wanted to highlight another overlooked aspect of the new iOS6 called Guided Access. This was a feature that Apple originally created for people with disabilities. Essentially what the feature allows you to do is lock out certain aspects of [...] Blog Post by: mkruczek

Overview When we were attempting to crawl an RSS feed for a client using the FAST Web Crawler, we found the following error in our RSS Crawl Logs (located at \FASTSearch\var\log\crawler\node\fetch\<content collection name>) “Invalid RSS MIME type: text/xml” We found that the MIME type being indicated by the server was indeed “text/xml”.  However, we were able to crawl [...] Blog Post by: Michael Gerety

Overview While attempting to set up the FAST Web Crawler for a client, I was unable to find a way to force FAST to re-crawl data immediately.  The web crawler uses an internal scheduler to schedule fetch operations. There are a large number of options for the crawleradmin.exe command line tool that looked like they might work: (from [...] Blog Post by: Michael Gerety

I Just returned from TechEd 2012 and one of my favorite sessions was ‘Application Integration Futures – The Road Map and What’s Next in Windows Azure’. It was refreshing to see the first slide’s title “Key takeaways: we are innovating in BizTalk”. Here is the abbreviated message from the slide deck: Continued investment in BizTalk – take your [...] Blog Post by: Stan Kennedy

Overview The most effective way to crawl RSS Content in a SharePoint / FAST Farm is to use the FAST Web Crawler.  The FAST Web crawler is a component supplied with FAST that is administered completely outside of SharePoint on the FAST server itself. Configuration In order to configure an RSS Crawl,  you must first set up some [...] Blog Post by: Michael Gerety

The new Windows Azure Preview Portal is available and I am a big fan of it already. Be aware that it’s a ‘preview’ portal and not all of the functionality is available. It’s pretty easy switching back to the previous ’silverlight based portal’, but I found it not so obvious when trying return to the preview [...] Blog Post by: Stan Kennedy

Almost two years ago I posted a story on the BizTalk roadmap and made a statement that it here to stay. I ended the post with: “My thinking with current evolution of BizTalk is that it will become a first class citizen with Microsoft offerings.” I am not Nostradamus or a fortuneteller yet my feeling back then told that BizTalk is not dead yet. With such a strong and vibrant community and over 10.000 customers I could not imaging that Microsoft would stop investing in it. Another story that confirmed...

BizTalk Map Editor (Mapper) is a good editor, especially in the last 2010 version of the BizTalk. But still sometimes it cannot do the tasks easily. It is time for the Xslt code, It is time to remember that the maps are executed by the Xslt engine. Right...

This was a follow up session to the Application Integration Futures – The Road Map and what's next on Windows Azure  session that was discussed here .  The primary focus of this session was to demonstrate some of the new capabilities of BizTalk On-Premises, BizTalk IaaS and BizTalk PaaS.  During the presentation there were many questions as to what the differences between the On-Premises version and the IaaS version would exist.  After many questions about a particular feature...

This post is to share some source code of a sample application that shows how to develop a Facebook Canvas App. hosted in Windows Azure. Ce billet a pour but de partager le code source d’une application exemple qui montre comment développer une application Facebook de type Canvas, hébergée dans Windows Azure. It leverages a bunch of technologies: ASP.NET MVC4, Entity Framework 4.3.1 with Code First, Windows Azure SQL Database, Windows Azure Tables (non relational), Windows Azure Cloud Services, part...

This presentation has hosted by Bala Sriram and Rajesh Ramamirtham   Note: This blog post is a work and progress and will be updated as time permits Key takeaway: We are innovating in BizTalk General Update BizTalk Server “R2” release will be available around 6 months after Windows 8 CTP expect this summer Commitment to releasing server for years to come. Publicly indicating there will be at least another release beyond “R2” 12k+ BizTalk customers 81% of Fortune Global 100 use BizTalk 79% of...

  An Overview of Managing Applications, Services, and Virtual Machines in Windows Azure - Karandeep Anand In this session Karandeep walked us through the new portal. The new portal does not include Service Bus endpoints like queues or topics and also does not include caching… yet.  I am told that Microsoft is hoping to have this functionality in the portal by end of the year.  However, they have enabled single sign on so you should be able to toggle back and forth between the old and...

A new release of the SchedulerTask Adapter is available. remind, The BizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter is an in process receive adapter that can be implemented on a receive location to execute a prescribed task on a daily, weekly or monthly schedule. So Bye bye windows scheduler, this adapter is very powerfull and now it’s in native [...] Blog Post by: Jeremy Ronk

This week I’m at the Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC 2012) in San Francisco and I want to share with you some of the new improvements made by Apple that will be available in the coming weeks. Instead of trying to break down each and every one of the fantastic new features, [...] Blog Post by: mkruczek

In the TechEd US session Overview and Roadmap of Windows Azure Service Bus, Microsoft demoed some really neat new bit for working with Azure in Visual Studio (both VS2010 and VS2012). We now have access to several Azure features from Server Explorer I am going to show you how to use the Windows Azure Service Bus in Server Explorer Select Add New Connection Click OK, and then expand the namespace in Server Explorer You can Do everything you need to do with Queues, Topics, Subscriptions and Rules:...