New “BizTalk Performance” Blog To Check Out

I’m happy to see Rob starting a “BizTalk Performance” blog, and have high hopes that this doesn’t fall into the BizTalk team dust bin of dead blogs.

Subscribe to both of Rob’s blogs (personal BizTalk thoughts here and reference-oriented content here). You’ll find that he’s already put some good content down around planning performance labs.

Technorati […]

BizTalk Usergroup meeting – next on Jul 6th

I’ll post more details very soon, but for this session

I will be covering

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) – 101 basics all you need to know

BizTalk meet Workflow, Workflow meet BizTalk – Hosting WF Workflows within
BizTalk 2006 R2!!!
(how good is that!!!)
(persistence/tracking etc etc all taken care of – a wizard comes to the rescue)

Stay tuned for a full update.

 

July 6th is our next meeting (I had to move it till next Wednesday)

BizTalk Usergroup meeting – next on Jul 4TH 4TH 4TH

I’ll post more details very soon, but for this session

I will be covering

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) – 101 basics all you need to know

BizTalk meet Workflow, Workflow meet BizTalk – Hosting WF Workflows within
BizTalk 2006 R2!!!
(how good is that!!!)
(persistence/tracking etc etc all taken care of – a wizard comes to the rescue)

Stay tuned for a full update.

 

July 6th 4TH is our next meeting (I
had to move it till next Wednesday) (thanks Bill)

Workflow meet BizTalk, BizTalk meet Workflow

It’s great to see, for some time now I’ve been a huge advocate of how BizTalk and
WF *can* work together.

In the past the message that has been sent by MS has been an either/or message – never
together. (e.g. small things WF….enterprise SAP/Siebel etc. = BizTalk)

Well my good friend Paul Andrew is all over this with the release of a BTS WF Host
Tool that:

1. Takes a WF Workflow

2. WCF is used for the underlying communications between BTS and WF – seeing that
BTS06 R2 is now WCF capable, it’s a perfect synergy!!

3. WCF Message Contracts defined in the WF Workflow

4. The tool runs over the WF workflow to produce the ‘stub/proxy’ Wrapper Orchestration
so that (and this is the most exciting piece of news) BizTalk will serialise
the idle executing Workflows
when needed AND the wrapper orchestration automatically
handles all the correlation to locate the appropriate WF within the WF Runtime, via
a WF Host class called _WFHost (also automagically generated)

For me the most exciting thing is that – now you dont need to write wrapper Orchestrations
etc. and do a bunch of work within BizTalk to get the communications to happen.

We can use CBR to route to our Workflows etc…..very very coool

Available to the public BY THE END OF THIS MONTH 🙂

—————— FROM PAUL ANDREWS BLOG ————————-

(bless his cotton socks 🙂

BizTalk
Adapter for Windows Workflow Foundation sample (June 2007 CTP)

Just announced today at TechEd 2007 in Orlando Florida. We are developing a new SDK
Sample that lets software developers build workflow models in Windows Workflow Foundation
and then host then in BizTalk Server 2006.

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.

Watch a Demo Video

Jon Flanders has recorded a 45 minute video demo of using the CTP to host a WF workflow
model in BizTalk Server 2006 and he shows it running. Watch here.

BizTalk Services Explained here!

Hi All,
Check out Channel 9 videowhere 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 […]

REMIX MELBOURNE is in Full Force

Remix Melbourne is in full force!

Lee just blogged about his session. Lee has been instrumental in providing training for designers on WPF you can see his training work here and here.

Also when I was up at MIX in Vegas I pulled Celso Gomes (the legend that built all the starter kits for Expression Blend) aside and told him he should take a leaf out of Lee’s book and provide bite sized tutorials, you can imagine how stoked I was to see http://www.nibblestutorials.net appear last week! Enjoy!

Transfering files with BizTalk Services

Transfering files with BizTalk Services

BizTalk Services has been out for a few weeks, but only recently did I have the time to try out the samples included in the June SDK. BizTalk Services is one of Microsoft’s moves in the Saas (or rather, S+S) game, and is self-described as an Internet Service Bus (ISB), and is not related to the BizTalk Server line of products, consisting more of an additional functionality stack on top of the Wcf framework, hosted in the cloud.


Channel 9 published a 30-minute video about BizTalk Services which I recommend. The video includes demos of some of the samples included in the SDK, like the Echo and Multicast/Pub-Sub ones.


I have tried several of the samples, starting with the Echo. This short sample includes a simple setup of Wcf service and client, but with the communication between the two being done via the ISB, using a relay binding which allows two-way communication between service and client. The interesting part of this is that you can go through firewalls (it just works, much like Office Groove). I played with the different instancing modes and several simultaneous clients (all of them work as expected), checked how long it takes for the client to get the reply back (a little less than a second) and how big could the echo message be (8k). A somewhat annoying aspect of this sample is that CardSpace’s identity selector keeps popping up, both when starting the client and the server.


Anyway, it’s a great starting point, and I quickly wrote a simple file transfer service, something I could use (with the appropriate security, obviously) to get files from my company’s file share when I have no VPN connectivity.


The service implements a GetFile contract, receiving as parameters the filename, size of page/block/chunk, and page number, and returns a byte array. The service’s instance mode is PerCall.


The client app asks the input for a path to a file located on the server, and gets it page by page, saving it to the C:\Incoming folder.


Download the code bellow. 


There are two other samples posted on the net which I recommend: Clemens Vasters’ “Tweetiebot” and Christian Weyer’s post “safe and secure WCF duplex callbacks through NATs and firewalls”.