BizTalk Message Archiving

Recently at the BizTalk Summit in London I was asked a question about Message Archiving from BizTalk and one of the most common solutions to this is the Message Archiving Pipeline Component which was written by my old friend Nick Heppleson.

After the summit I was pondering this archiving feature and wish that at the time I had mentioned Storsimple. Recently Id been speaking with Michael Royster from Microsoft in the UK and he had been telling me about the new acqusition Microsoft had made and how this solution combines on-premise storage with storage in Windows Azure which offers lots of opportunities.
The key thing here is that Storsimple is an appliance which you add to your data centre which offers up file storage but only certain data is kept on premise and the rest is kept in the cloud. The appliance handles the magic underneath that but your applications just see file shares on the network which they can communicate with.
Coming back to the archiving requirement if you have a customer who needs to archive a lot of messages and your worried about house keeping around this then you should certainly consider combining Message Archive Pipeline Component plus StorSimple to provide and excellent combined solution to this problem.
There is obviously a cost for StorSimple but you can reuse the applicance across other applications and use if for storage to help sharepoint and exchange implementations too or possibly back up archiving.
Anyway just a few thoughts that were lingering around my head on the train ride home last week. Heres some links if your interested:
http://www.storsimple.com/
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000008345

Poor, confused C# compiler

The C# compiler is a pretty good thing, but it has limitations. One limitation that has given me a headache this evening is its inability to guard against cycles in structs. As I learn to think and programme in a more functional style, I find that I am beginning to rely more and more on structs to pass data. This is natural when programming in the functional style, but structs can be damned awkward blighters.

Here is a classic gotcha. The following code won’t compile, and in this case, the compiler does its job and tells you why with a nice CS0523 error:

struct Struct1
{
public Struct2 AStruct2 { get; set; }
}

struct Struct2
{
public Struct1 AStruct1 { get; set; }
}

Structs are value types and are automatically instantiated and initialized as stack objects. If this code were compiled and run, Struct1 would be initialised with a Struct2 which would be initialised with a Struct1 which would be initialised with a Struct2, etc., etc. We would blow the stack.

Well, actually, if the compiler didn’t capture this error, we wouldn’t get a stack overflow because at runtime the type loader would spot the problem and refuse to load the Struct1 type. I know this because the compiler does a really rather poor job of spotting cycles. For example, if you define generic members on your structs things can easily go awry. I have an example of this, but it would take a lot of explaining as to why I wrote the code the way I did (believe me, I had reason to), so instead I’ll provide a much simpler example. Here is a daft attempt to avoid the cycle using a nullable type:

struct Struct1
{
public Struct2? Struct2 { get; set; }
}

struct Struct2
{
public Struct1 Struct1 { get; set; }
}

Of course, this won’t work (duh – so why did I try?). System.Nullable<T> is, itself, a struct, so it does not solve the problem at all. We have simply wrapped one struct in another. However, the C# compiler can’t see the problem. The code will compile just fine. At run-time it will blow up in your face with a ‘Could not load type <T> from assembly’ (80131522) error. Very nasty.

By and large, I get on well with the C# compiler. However, this is one area where there is room for improvement.

Great start to 2013, another BizTalk Event in Amsterdam

It’s only a week since our big BizTalk Summit 2013, London event. Today I’m here in Amsterdam presenting in another BizTalk Event sharing the stage with Richard Seroter and Steef-Jan Wigger. The event was arranged by ESTREME (Netherland based consultancy company focused on BizTalkAdministrationand operations). Richard Seroter presented on Patterns of CloudIntegration’sand he explained in […]

The post Great start to 2013, another BizTalk Event in Amsterdam appeared first on BizTalk360 Blog.

Blog Post by: Saravana Kumar

Assessing Fringe User Features

If you are a UX designer, you have undoubtedly been at a client gathering requirements when they say the magic words, “There are some users who will want to do that, but they’re only a couple of people.”

This sends your internal monologue into a quizzical frenzy: How many is a couple? Are we not going […]
Blog Post by: Matt Donahue

BizTalk Server 2013: New Adapters Series: WCF-NetTcpRelay

This is the second post on new adapters that will be shipped with BizTalk Server 2013. The post is based on BizTalk Server 2013 Beta. In this post I like to demonstrate the WCF-NetTcpRelay adapter.

The WCF-NetTcpRelay adapter can be used with BizTalk to send and receive messages from the Service Bus relay endpoints using the NetTcpRelayBinding. When configuring for instance a request response

BizTalk 2013 Hands on Day-Auckland, NZ-9th Feb 2013

The 1st of the BizTalk Saturday – BizTalk 2013 Hands on Days has been scheduled for Auckland, NZ on the 9th of Feb 2013, thanks to the hard work of Nikolai Blackie, Principle Architect Adaptiv Integration.

To register for the event, go to http://akl-bts2013-handson.eventbrite.co.nz/#

Information on the rest of the event around Australia and NZ will be coming out shortly, if you are interested in the event in your city, and you have not filled out the survey, please fill out the survey – http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PXGYNRP

More …

BizTalk Summit 2013 London – The story

BizTalk Summit 2013 London – The story

128 attendees, more than 70 different companies across 16 countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, India, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, USA), more than 10 Microsoft Integration MVP’s present (speakers, Q&A members and attendees) and 3 members of Microsoft Product group, these are some of the numbers that reflect the huge […]
Blog Post by: Sandro Pereira