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)
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)
I am at New York this week. I will be speaking tomorrow at SOAWorld about Web Services interoperability; we have some cool demos showing interoperability between WCF and different J2EE-J2SE technologies. If you are in the area or attending to the conference…(read more)
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 🙂
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.
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.
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!
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!
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”.
With my current client I’ve had a chance to work with the SAP adapter for the first
time, which is a treat since most of my work with BizTalk has revolved around HIPAA
and EDI. So I’ve been working with it for several weeks, and I very much like
the delivery of the adapter with one, glaring gotcha which I’ll discuss.
The way the adapter works is that you can access any iDoc or RFC from SAP by creating
a port configured with identity you will connect with, and then selecting to add items
to your solution and select Add Generated Items… and finally select “Add Adapter
Metadata”. You can then walk through the process of selecting your port and
searching for your RFC or iDoc. When you’ve completed the wizard you will have
a newly generated XSD schema added to your project. Happy days, and off you
go, until deployment time.
You see, when the wizard walked through that process, for an RFC, it generated an
assembly, quietly, in a directory which on most boxes will be : C:\Program Files\Microsoft
BizTalk Adapter v2.0 for mySAP Business Suite\Bin. That assembly is required
for the Adapter to work at runtime, and as such must be included in your deployments.
Add to this pickle that the assembly is not strongly named, so you can’t put it in
the GAC like everything else and life get’s really interesting.
This one caught me completely off guard, and personally I consider this a major flaw
in the design of the adapter. I’ve now added two new items to my “To Do” list.
First, implement Scott Colestock’s deployment framework on my project so I don’t have
to deal with external resources and the BizTalk “Export MSI” functionality.
Second, learn more about the Line of Business Adapter SDK and the new WCF adapters
to systems like SAPthat I attended a talk about at TechEd this year.
So by now most people would have heard about the ruckus that’s going on in the blogosphere regarding Microsoft and Jamie Cansdale’s TestDriven.NET tool. In case you haven’t heard, the issue, as I read it, is that Jamie found a way to make the TD.NET add-in run inside VS Express and Microsoft sent him a formal letter asking him to stop making this available. The issue Microsoft has is not with TD.NET as an add-in or whether its a free or commercial tool but the fact that it is being used with Express and that’s something they don’t want to encourage and have said that extensibility is disabled by default in Express.
Predictably, this issue raised a lot of hackles in the community and many people took this as an opportunity to aim more broadsides at Microsoft. There were some good points in some blogs (check out one here and look for some of the posts and comments on Oren Eini’s blog here and also Dan Fernandez’s blog -one of the posts being this and Jamie himself lists the communications here) but amongst those pearls I was disappointed (but not surprised) to find just loads of vitriol. Some people see it as a hack and some as a legitimate back-door and some say that if there is an API on the machine, they are going to use it and MS cannot stop them. (By that logic, you could be releasing any additions to windows that were unsupported just because the system DLLs are on c:\ drive, and expect MS to sit back and smile indulgently)
Now let me state first of all that I really appreciate Jamie’s add-in. I cut my teeth on unit testing and TDD with that tool (nowadays i use JetBrains UnitRun), and it was very useful indeed. I can see how using this in express will open up the world of TDD to hobbyist developers and others who don’t use the higher end editions, and this can only be good for the programming community in general. However, i can also see Microsoft’s points. I have written a couple of small add-ins for my team and find VS Extensibility quite easy and the possibilities are almost limitless. If MS were to allow Jamie’s tool, lots of other tool developers will jump on the bandwagon and write add-ins for Express and pretty soon it will become a little Eclipse-like ecosystem on its own. If that happens, where will that leave VS Standard and higher end editions? (Yes, there is an argument for supporting unit testing in express and exposing newbie’s and non-pro dev’s to good programming practices, but how do you draw the line?)
This is just plain business considerations folks. Microsoft is not running a charity. Sure, there are good groups in MS like PAG who want to make things easier for architects and developers and are producing a ton of free stuff that helps us get better at what we do (yeah, so some people don’t like the patterns and the wizards, but there’s a rather large part of the .net world that does), but MS is first and foremost a business and profit is primary and there’s nothing wrong with that. How will they sell Visual Studio commercial editions if Express could be used to do everything that, say, Team System does? Of course, not all third party add-ins are going to be free and ISV’s are bound to continue the tradition of having some free editions and some paid for ‘rich functionality’ editions, but there are some top notch developers in the open source community who could whistle up some free add-ins that trump the commercial ones. So where will that leave MS? What about all the hard work the IDE team is putting into Orcas and Rosario and whatever comes after? Does it have to be free? (Okay, so I benefit from a corporate MSDN subscription and should i ever have to pay for the tool myself then shelling out for VS,especially some features of VSTS, would burn a rather large hole in my pocket, but that’s another story).
Express is Microsoft’s entry point into the non-pro developer world. They could have engineered a completely new locked down product where there were no DLLs in the GAC or anything for people to tap into, but perhaps that would have cost more than just stripping out some functionality and making a “lite” edition like Express is. As someone pointed out (cant remember where), this could well result in MS pulling the express line completely and that wouldn’t be good at all.
Anyway, that’s my two cents worth (and no, I’m not getting paid to write this !!). In summary I’d say to these parties , “Jamie, well done with TD.NET and well done on getting a huge groundswell of support especially from some of the more articulate developers around”, “Microsoft, there are folks who understand your position, but it could be made a bit more clear without bringing in lawyers against well meaning developers” and to the general community “Folks, there’s always a wide audience for well written comments no matter whose side they are on. Make a clear stand and stop the sniping and broadsides just because MS is a huge,obvious target.”.
Ciao!!
So by now most people would have heard about the ruckus that’s going on in the blogosphere regarding Microsoft and Jamie Cansdale’s TestDriven.NET tool. In case you haven’t heard, the issue, as I read it, is that Jamie found a way to make the TD.NET add-in run inside VS Express and Microsoft sent him a formal letter asking him to stop making this available. The issue Microsoft has is not with TD.NET as an add-in or whether its a free or commercial tool but the fact that it is being used with Express and that’s something they don’t want to encourage and have said that extensibility is disabled by default in Express.
Predictably, this issue raised a lot of hackles in the community and many people took this as an opportunity to aim more broadsides at Microsoft. There were some good points in some blogs (check out one here and look for some of the posts and comments on Oren Eini’s blog here and also Dan Fernandez’s blog -one of the posts being this and Jamie himself lists the communications here) but amongst those pearls I was disappointed (but not surprised) to find just loads of vitriol. Some people see it as a hack and some as a legitimate back-door and some say that if there is an API on the machine, they are going to use it and MS cannot stop them. (By that logic, you could be releasing any additions to windows that were unsupported just because the system DLLs are on c:\ drive, and expect MS to sit back and smile indulgently)
Now let me state first of all that I really appreciate Jamie’s add-in. I cut my teeth on unit testing and TDD with that tool (nowadays i use JetBrains UnitRun), and it was very useful indeed. I can see how using this in express will open up the world of TDD to hobbyist developers and others who don’t use the higher end editions, and this can only be good for the programming community in general. However, i can also see Microsoft’s points. I have written a couple of small add-ins for my team and find VS Extensibility quite easy and the possibilities are almost limitless. If MS were to allow Jamie’s tool, lots of other tool developers will jump on the bandwagon and write add-ins for Express and pretty soon it will become a little Eclipse-like ecosystem on its own. If that happens, where will that leave VS Standard and higher end editions? (Yes, there is an argument for supporting unit testing in express and exposing newbie’s and non-pro dev’s to good programming practices, but how do you draw the line?)
This is just plain business considerations folks. Microsoft is not running a charity. Sure, there are good groups in MS like PAG who want to make things easier for architects and developers and are producing a ton of free stuff that helps us get better at what we do (yeah, so some people don’t like the patterns and the wizards, but there’s a rather large part of the .net world that does), but MS is first and foremost a business and profit is primary and there’s nothing wrong with that. How will they sell Visual Studio commercial editions if Express could be used to do everything that, say, Team System does? Of course, not all third party add-ins are going to be free and ISV’s are bound to continue the tradition of having some free editions and some paid for ‘rich functionality’ editions, but there are some top notch developers in the open source community who could whistle up some free add-ins that trump the commercial ones. So where will that leave MS? What about all the hard work the IDE team is putting into Orcas and Rosario and whatever comes after? Does it have to be free? (Okay, so I benefit from a corporate MSDN subscription and should i ever have to pay for the tool myself then shelling out for VS,especially some features of VSTS, would burn a rather large hole in my pocket, but that’s another story).
Express is Microsoft’s entry point into the non-pro developer world. They could have engineered a completely new locked down product where there were no DLLs in the GAC or anything for people to tap into, but perhaps that would have cost more than just stripping out some functionality and making a “lite” edition like Express is. As someone pointed out (cant remember where), this could well result in MS pulling the express line completely and that wouldn’t be good at all.
Anyway, that’s my two cents worth (and no, I’m not getting paid to write this !!). In summary I’d say to these parties , “Jamie, well done with TD.NET and well done on getting a huge groundswell of support especially from some of the more articulate developers around”, “Microsoft, there are folks who understand your position, but it could be made a bit more clear without bringing in lawyers against well meaning developers” and to the general community “Folks, there’s always a wide audience for well written comments no matter whose side they are on. Make a clear stand and stop the sniping and broadsides just because MS is a huge,obvious target.”.
Ciao!!