I’ve been consulted by clients as they stand before the crossroads of investing in a new platform for intranet and/or website: EPiServer CMS or SharePoint server? Which path to take?
The…
Daniel Berg’s blog about ASP.NET, EPiServer, SharePoint, BizTalk
I co-authored an article titled ‘Design Considerations for S+S and Cloud Computing’ in this months Architecture Journal. I co-authored this along with 8 other architects at Microsoft. They were Fred Chong, Alejandro Miguel, Jason Hogg, Ulrich Homann, Brant Zwiefel, Danny Garber, Joshy Joseph and Scott Zimmerman.
Here is the summary: The purpose of this article is to share our thoughts about the design patterns for a new generation of applications that are referred to as Software plus Services, cloud computing, or hybrid computing. The article provides a view into S+S architectural considerations and patterns as they affect common architectural domains such as enterprise, software, and infrastructure architecture.
Check it out at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/aa699439.aspx
Also be sure to check out the other great articles in the 21st edition of the magazine. This edition is focused on SOA today and tomorrow.
In my previous post, I explained my cloud orchestration scenario where my on-premises ESB coordinated calls to the Google App Engine, Salesforce.com and a local service, and returned a single data entity to a caller. That post looked at creating and consuming a Google App Engine service from BizTalk.
In this post, I’ll show you how […]
Emil Velinov from the Customer Experience Team in the Business Process Division (CSD + SQL) came to the New Zealand Tech Ed in September to present on BizTalk Server 2009 and Dublin.
During the visit the manager for BizTalk Server in New Zealand, Darryl Burling, spent some time with Emil to discuss BizTalk and Dublin […]
A while back now I got the Pro BAM in BizTalk Server 2009 book. I have always liked BAM and we always try to use it in our solutions, if nothing else then for infrastructural logging purposes. However BAM has never been something that has been described in any detail or highlighted within the BizTalk documentation. There are also a great deal many BizTalk solutions and developers out there that have never used BAM, perhaps in part because they haven’t had a good source to learn about it. When we had a user group meeting and talked about BAM last year we did a short put-your-hand-up poll and, if my memory serves, only about one out of five did put their hand up. And this in a group that to a large part I would judge as pretty progressive. I didn’t ask how many had used BAM outside of BizTalk, but I am pretty sure that if I had the answer might have been one or two, out of the whole group, if that.
If the issue is that it’s hard to find a source that covers BAM, one that is decently complete in its coverage, then that is one issue that is now resolved. Pro BAM in BizTalk Server 2009 succeeds in being that source. It covers both development, administration and business aspects of BAM. And with Business I don’t solely mean the Business Analyst role, but also where BAM fits, where it makes sense, and how you can get your data into the observation model as well as how you can get it out and report and research on it.
Although BAM presently is a BizTalk bundled technology the book approaches BAM from a BizTalk independent way, and talks as much about BAM in relation to other connected system technologies like WCF and WF as it does BizTalk. But that’s in line with the trends of BizTalk in general, where WCF more and more is taking on a very central role. Not everything is 100% up to date, but that’s not to be expected – change happens so fast that yesterday can be old news today, but the book still strives to put things in context of the latest technology and concepts and touches on topics such as Dublin and Oslo.
The book also goes into great detail about how to use the different types of tooling that comes along with BAM aimed for the different roles of Business Analyst, Developer, Administrator, and Information Worker (or Data Consumer as the book calls it). I also like how the book has specific sections on troubleshooting, should everything not work as expected, and tips that goes beyond just configuring it but also living with it.
It’s a really complete book in its coverage of BAM, and pointing out what’s missing is not an easy task, and isn’t really fair to the authors. If anything a discussion on BAM and performance could have been present. Although BAM has a highly performing infrastructure, a performance discussion is always of interest, especially from a BizTalk perspective when comparing it to for example the DTA tracking. The book also doesn’t go into much detail about when different tables are used, or what they contain and what flags have what meaning. Such things are however not need to know for you too call yourself a BAM wiz, something which this book may very well help you become.
Thanks Jeff and Geoff, it’s a great addition to my library. And I’m a better BizTalker for reading it 😉
Well folks, it’s been a very long time coming, but I’m happy to say that the end is near! As you can see below, we’re heading towards availability in Q1 of 2010.
“SOA with .NET and Azure” is an addition to the highly successful and respected Thomas Erl Service-Oriented computing series from Prentice Hall. It’s been a pleasure working with Thomas and the entire team as we’ve gone through this. Some pre-release content will be available at the SOA Symposium in Rotterdam that I’ll be speaking at in a couple of weeks.
To sign up for notifications, visit http://soabooks.com/book.asp?book=soa_net&page=overview
SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is not a clustered resource. Connecting to SSIS generally means connecting to any of the SQL Server servers in your cluster environment directly, not to a virtual cluster address. Configuring SSIS for a named BAM instance still involves configuring it against your clustered BAM database instance. The BizTalk install documentation (Multicomputer) also claims that SSIS needs to be installed on the BizTalk Servers. That’s incorrect. You could install SSIS and that’d be good, but I much rather install the management tools, as explained and outlined here.
While talking about BAM I can’t help but to mention an excellent article recently written by Saravana Kumar here.
IT departments and consulting companies alike are not populated by bad developers, or lazy developers, or impassionate for that matter. The word passionate is appropriate for developers or architects that do keep in sync with all the new choices available to us. Pragmatic may very well be a good definition for the rest. But calling them bad developers wont motivate anyone, and, in my opinion, is unfair. Keeping that up to date is not a task necessary for all developers. But all developers could benefit and grow from doing so.
However, as I see it, the problem isn't with the developers, the problem is with management. Developers want to learn. I think that applies to most if not all developers. The problem however is two fold. One, Developers are not given the time need to learn by management to be able to make educated choices. You really have to be passionate to take that learning outside of your working hours, and push that passion onto your family and friends, to the point where it's not just your job – it's become a much bigger part of your life. That's why I think the word passionate fits.
So if you aren't given time to learn as part of your job, you really have very little choice. The choice left is instead to do it in your free time or not. Two, even though Microsoft may sometimes claim that new choices are driven by business demand, and I'm sure it often is, it's often not driven by the business that you as a developer are supporting. What I mean is – the people manning your business will not always (and do not often) see how the new technologies benefits the business. The use for the business is often visualized to them by the developers, and this is where the real issue and catch 22 lies…
This increased flow of choices is in itself the root of the problem. Developers used to know it all. Management has gotten used to that. Today, the technologies to learn are so many more and diverse. We will never know it all again. But we can become fairly good and know enough to be good at our job. But we need to be given the time and possibility. Given that, I think everyone would choose to learn.
So, my call to action is to instead shift the focus from the developers, whom I'm believe in general want to learn, to management and the business, and make them understand how enabling people to learn new technology will help them realize their business goals. Because I do firmly believe they will benefit.
This post was my thoughts on the topic initiated by the duoblog done by Johan Lindfors and Patrik L%u00f6wendahl. Oh, and incidentally, we’ve been here before. I wrote about this topic, or one very close too it, as a result of things said or written by close to the same people a year ago, see here and here, if interested.