Windows Azure 12/12/11 Announcement | Annonces Windows Azure du 12 décembre 2011

by community-syndication | Dec 12, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Benjamin

Blog Post by: Benjamin GUINEBERTIERE

Ordina behaalt zilver in Microsoft Applicatie integratie

by community-syndication | Dec 12, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Afgelopen week heeft Ordina AIM binnen het Microsoft Partner Model de mooie zilveren status behaald binnen de competentie “Applicatie Integration”. Onder deze competentie vallen onder andere de bekende producten zoals BizTalk en WCF. Mede dankzij effort van Steef-Jan Wiggers en Sjoerd van Lochem is deze eerste mooie stap gemaakt. Steef-Jan ligt de prestatie verder toe:

Het Partner Model bij Microsoft is volledig op de schop gegaan, omdat in feite in heel de wereld en dus ook in Nederland teveel partners de status van “Gold” Partner hadden. Het onderscheid tussen de partners was in zijn geheel niet meer duidelijk. En “Gold” Partner waarin? Je bent Microsoft “Gold” Partner, maar wat betekent dit nu in feite voor mij als klant en waar onderscheid jij als leverancier van Microsoft diensten nu van de rest.

Als je voldoende opbrengsten levert als partner op Microsoft producten en diensten en voldoende gecertificeerde mensen in dienst hebt, dan was je “Gold” partner. Het nieuwe Partner Model van Microsoft is georganiseerd op basis van competentie, waarbij criteria gelden voor:

Referenties
Certificering
Omzet

Op basis van je status op competentie kun je je onderscheiden van andere partners. Er zijn diverse competenties voor virtualisatie, communicatie, desktop, web development, applicatie integratie enzovoort. Op de competentie kun je een “Silver” of “Gold” status behalen.

Als Ordina AIM zijn we trots dat we de “Silver” status hebben kunnen behalen voor “Applicatie Integration”. De “Silver” status betekent dat we als Ordina AIM aan onze klanten kunnen laten zien, dat we voldoende referenties hebben opgebouwd op het gebied van applicatie integratie, voldoende gecertificeerde mensen aan boord hebben en omzet maken door het leveren van diverse diensten. We behoren met deze status op “Applicatie Integratie” tot 5% van alle bedrijven wereldwijd, die dergelijke status hebben op deze competentie.

De “Silver” status is een mooie mijlpaal, die we hebben bereikt. We willen uiteindelijk natuurlijk de status “Gold”. Deze status geeft ons nog meer onderscheidend vermogen ten opzichte van onze concurrenten. Met deze status kunnen we namelijk aantonen dat we wereldwijd tot de beste behoren op het gebied van “Applicatie Integration”. De status toont onze commitment tot Microsoft technologie, die bij deze competentie hoort. Technologie als BizTalk Server, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) en SQL integratie technologie als Integration Services en SQL Broker. Als Ordina AIM zijn we in staat specifieke, hoogwaardige oplossingen te leveren en de “Gold” status zal uiteindelijk het bewijs richting onze klanten zijn.

Contest at Sandro’s blog: Win an e-copy of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns book

by community-syndication | Dec 12, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Sandro Pereira has a contest in which you can win an e-copy of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns from Packt Publishing.

Since I love the book as well (got the printed version), I thought I’d try to give the contest some extra attention.

If you would like to win an e-copy, be fast: the contest closes Friday December 16th.

Wiki-Ninja’s on Technology: BizTalk Server

by community-syndication | Dec 12, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

If you like to know what BizTalk resources are available on TechNet Wiki and what community and Microsoft is contributing see latest blog post Wiki-Ninja’s on Technology: BizTalk Server.

Cheers!

The value of a Diagnostics service

by community-syndication | Dec 12, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

For an integration solution with lots of dependencies, it’s difficult to definitively state that everything is wired up correctly and that all components in the stack are working. A while ago, Michael Stephenson proposed having a diagnostic service in a solution as a quick way of verifying that a given environment was working, end-to-end. Initially I was sceptical, on the grounds that there shouldn’t be any code in a solution which isn’t directly solving a business problem, but having tried it out I’ve been won over.

We now have a dedicated suite of diagnostics services which check a whole range of stuff, including availability of all the downstream services, the in-process and out-of-process caches, and the accessibility of BizTalk file drops. We also include environmental stuff like the version number of the solution, machine name, server date and time, IP addresses etc. And we have a rolled-up service which gives us a green or red status for the solution.

For devs and technical owners of the solution, this gives us a very detailed view of the health of the stack, but we have REST endpoints for the general healthcheck services, and we now use these all over the place:

• in our automated deployment process, we send an email after an environment had been deployed. That email contains the output of the healthcheck service, so we can tell if a deployment was successful;
• the REST URLs are published to the team, so testers and service consumers can quickly check if the environment is operational before starting work on a release;
• we have something like 10 environments which are all catalogued, and the REST URL for the version number service means we’re not manually updating version numbers in the catalogue after a release;
• we have nightly releases of the integration solution and the downstream services, so we have simple PowerShell script run from a Windows schedule every morning, which checks the output of the REST services and emails the team with the test environment status;
• calling the diagnostic service warms up the server app pool, and all the app pools of the downstream services, so the scheduled job warms everything up after a recycle.

With this simple stuff in place we’re saving a bunch of time investigating problems which turn out not to be problems in the integration solution, and the offshore test team can quickly see if there are problems with the stack before investing time on tests. Highly recommended.

Using Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus with EPiServer CMS, part 3

by community-syndication | Dec 12, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

This blog post is about registering and calling on-premise services using Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus from EPiServer CMS. In this series we activate the Service Bus feature of AppFabric,…

Daniel Berg’s blog about ASP.NET, EPiServer, SharePoint, BizTalk

Using Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus with EPiServer CMS, part 2

by community-syndication | Dec 12, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

This blog post is about registering and calling on-premise services using Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus from EPiServer CMS. In this series we activate the Service Bus feature of AppFabric,…

Daniel Berg’s blog about ASP.NET, EPiServer, SharePoint, BizTalk

Using Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus with EPiServer CMS, part 1

by community-syndication | Dec 12, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

This blog post is about registering and calling on-premise services using Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus from EPiServer CMS. In this series we activate the Service Bus feature of AppFabric,…

Daniel Berg’s blog about ASP.NET, EPiServer, SharePoint, BizTalk

Contest: Win an e-copy of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns book

by community-syndication | Dec 11, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

After having raffled, along with Ruth Resende (MVP BizTalk), two e-copies of this book for the BizTalk Portuguese/Brazilian community on the site BizTalk Brasil Is now time, and getting into the Christmas Spirit, to provide two Christmas presents to my readers and for the BizTalk community. I have 2 e-copies of the new book Microsoft […]
Blog Post by: Sandro Pereira

WCF 4.5 WF 4.5 VSNET 2011: Some details

by community-syndication | Dec 11, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Hi folks, as you may/may not have been aware these are the core corner stone technologies
of the MS Integration Stack.

The teams have been busily plugging away and coming up with the new versions – 4.5
corresponding to .NET 4.5 framework.

Here’s some links that describe what’s new from MS Santa & his elves:

1. What’s
   New in Windows Communication Foundation 4.5
1. New Items I found of note are:
• New Service Transport Default values – keep an eye on these.
• Improvements from VS.NET 2011 – validation , better intellisence support.
• Streaming improved – true async (yay!)
• WebSocket support – through NetHttp(s)Binding
• Single WSDL file generation with ’?singleWSDL’ (which is pretty handy)
• Self hosted + II hosted allow you to get to ServiceHost from code
  for dynamic configuration.
• Binary Encoder supports compression!! – this is generally gzip compression.
• My personal favourite – UDP support
  

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2. What’s
   New in Windows Workflow Foundation in .NET 4.5
1. New Items of note are:
• New Activites – NoPersistScope (possible previously but we needed to write code)
• WF Designer improvements – several here, but the ’Outline view’ looks to be easier
  to work with.
• C# Expressions – where’s the F# ones ??
• Designer Annotations – add your own comments to keep control of the jungle that is
  built.
• WF Versioning – use WorkflowIdentity & DefinitionIdentity to define the version. WorkflowServiceHost supports
  multiple versions of the same WF. All pretty cool.
• WF Designers can still be rehosted – I’ve used that many a place.
• Contract First Development – ticks the boxes.
2. WF Rules – still didn’t make the cut. There is a sample for WF4 using
   a custom Activity calling back to WF 3.5 Policy4 it’s called. It
   uses ’interop’ back to WF3.5 and is found here – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd797584(v=VS.100).aspx
1. Will have to check out perf in this new land on these rules.

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3. Async CTP – while this didn’t make the ’whats new’ list, it certainly
   does deserve a mention here.
   Over the last year I’ve built some pretty serious F# projects, and F# has the async
   support through and through the language. After over coming the challenge of learning
   it, the Async functionality is absolutely brilliant!!! F# does a great job in being
   able to turn a non-async chunk of code/method/class into an async one with by using
   the keyword async and a !. It’s straight forward
   from that aspect.

   It’s great to see the C# & VB.NETs being able to use the same fundamentals (albeit
   not as slick IMO ).
   – see a previous POST – http://blogs.breezetraining.com.au/mickb/2011/04/26/EasierAsyncProgrammingComingToCVBSoon.aspx

   As developers we sit here and say – what do I need this for? My code
   runs fine as it.and yes for the most part of what we do on our machine it does. This
   technology really comes into it’s own when you want consistent throughput from a solution
   with 1 person or 10000 concurrent people using it. That’s the difference.

   To use it:

1. Get VSNET 2011 (as it requires a new compiler)
2. Use ASYNC CTP (refresh3) with VSNET2010 SP1
   
4. Check it out from here – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/gg316360

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Blog Post by: Mick Badran