For anyone following my second BTS Diary and wondering whats going on with the prolonged silence, do not fear. Theres a lot to come.
I’ve been in the planning stage for a rather sizeable project, the second phase of my current integration project. This part will stretch over a couple of years at least and should get me poking into the furthest recesses of Biztalk 2004/2006. The immediate piece of work is in integrating 3 or 4 systems and passing documents securely through webservices building on the architecture of the integration hub we started implementing a few months ago. Theres definitely going to be a fair amount of WSE involved so I picked up the MS Press Web Services Security Patterns p&p book on Amazon recently. Its so much easier to read than printing off a 1000 page PDF.The architecture in its current draft is beginning to appear a bit like an ESB with a whole of lot routing, distribution trees and dynamism built in.
Speaking of ESB, check out Brian Loesgen’s blog for some work he did recently on a ESB system involving Biztalk 2004. Theres some really cool stuff that he’s posted in terms of things to consider and how to educate developers in using the stuff you build. There was also quite a bit of a furore in the integration world recently when apparently a tech forum witnessed heated debate on the subject of ESB between some MS folk and Sonic folk. Ah!! nothing like a good fight to warm the heart !!
I’ve also been trying to get my head round some of the material on the SOA Blueprints that have been floating around the net. Theres some publicly available material on OASIS which is very interesting. You can also download the MS implementation of the Generico blueprint somewhere on MSDN , (cant remember the URL offhand). Im chewing the fat now on distinguishing Identity Services, Directory Services and Security Services and trying to see whats the best way to position them and their relationship to each other.