by community-syndication | Jan 1, 2015 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
It is that time of year where I take a step back and reflect on the previous year and then start thinking about the upcoming year. 2014 was an incredible year, one that I will not forget any time soon. I did a lot of travelling in 2014 and met a lot of great people, for this I am grateful for the opportunities that allowed this to happen.
So let’s get into it, here are some of the events that took place over the past year.
Released another book
Johan Hedberg, Morten la Cour and myself released a second edition of the (MCTS) Microsoft BizTalk Server (70-595) certification book to include new BizTalk 2013 content. We released the book in March, 2014 as it also co-incided with the launch of the Microsoft Partner Assessment exam that Microsoft uses to measure its Silver or Gold Application Integration partners.
If your are interested in getting certified, either personally or as part of the Microsoft Partner network, I still feel that it is a great resource that will aid you in achieving your goal.
The Book is available from both Amazon and Packt.
European Adventure
In March, I had the opportunity to head to Europe to present at a few events. These events included the BizTalk Summit in London on March 3rd/4th, Swedish BizTalk User group in Stockholm, Sweden on March 5th and the Netherlands BizTalk User group on March 6th.
Special thanks to Saravana Kumar, Johan Hedberg and Steef-Jan Wiggers for allowing me to participate in these different events in your countries. The BizTalk community is second to none in Europe so it is always an honour to head over there.
Even though it was an extremely busy week, we did have some time to see the sights in London. But otherwise a lot of time was spent at airports and in airplanes.
MuleSoft
After my return from Europe, I made a career change and joined MuleSoft. Event though MuleSoft has its headquarters in San Francisco I was able to sign on as a Remote Solutions Architect.
In 2014, MuleSoft made a lot of investments in supporting the Microsoft eco-system. Most of the activities I was involved with included Microsoft at some level. The highlight of my time there would have to be getting involved in the release of a couple of investments related to calling .NET code (.Net Connector) from a Mule workflow and the MSMQ connector. I had the opportunity to demonstrate these components at MuleSoft’s flagship event called Connect in San Francisco in May 2014.
I decided to leave MuleSoft at the end of September 2014. The logistics of me being a remote worker in Canada created some challenges and as a result I decided to move on. Overall, I value the time I spent at MuleSoft. I got to learn about a new eco-system, met a lot of great, smart people and got exposure to API Management which I hadn’t been exposed to previously.
After leaving Mulesoft, I traded my eclipse IDE for Visual Studio. I have shifted my attention back to the Microsoft Integration stack including BizTalk, Azure Service Bus and Azure API Management.
MVP Summit
I was able to attend the Annual MVP Summit in Redmond. It was another great opportunity to talk shop with my integration colleagues from around the globe. Since the Summit has moved to the fall instead of Spring, we have developed a bit of a tradition by heading to Lowell’s, in the Pike Market, for breakfast before heading to a Seattle Seahawks game. Even though it rained pretty much the whole game it was still a fun way to to spend a Sunday ffternoon.
Microsoft had a bit of a surprise for us once the sessions started. It was at this point that we started to hear more about the next generation platform that they were building. This more than kept us occupied in many discussions through-out the week.
Channel 9
The amount of brain-power that shows up for MVP Summit is flat-out impressive. Some of the brightest minds in the industry are present and eager to share some of their experiences. Mark Mortimore, who runs marketing for BizTalk, decided to tap into some of this knowledge and have people record some short demos in advance of the Integrate 2014 event. I took this opportunity to discuss a scenario I had built in the spring involving capturing data from a Power Plant and making it available to mobile devices via BizTalk, Azure Service Bus and Azure Mobile Services. You can view my clip and others here.
Integrate 2014
Microsoft held its annual Integration event in North America in December 2014. I had the opportunity to speak at this event. My topic involved considerations when choosing an Integration Platform. The Integration Platform landscape has been very crowded lately and there are a lot of mixed messages flying around. The point of my session was to take a step back an look at a requirements based process to selecting a platform. I discussed some of the top requirements that I would be looking for in a platform.
I also took this opportunity to announce a Whitepaper that myself, Michael Stephenson and Steef -Jan Wiggers had been working on called Choosing the right Integration Platform. This whitepaper is available for free on the BizTalk360 site.
The Integrate 2014 event had an incredible amount of announcements and gave attendees a lot of insight into where Microsoft is headed with Integration. You can find a more detailed recap of the event here.
ASU
During all of these activities, I was also pursuing a Master’s Degree. In December 2014, I graduated from Arizona State University with a 4.0 GPA. The program that I was enrolled in was called MSIM (Masters of Science in Information Management). The program is delivered on-campus and online through the W.P. Carey School of Business. For the past 16 months I have spent approximately 20 hours a week in the program.
It was a great experience and I am glad that I had the opportunity to go through it. I had some great teammates in my group and we worked really well together even though both of them are in Phoenix and I am in Calgary.
2015
In 2015, I am definitely looking for a slower pace and being able to spend more time with my family. While I will continue to focus on technology with my spare cycles, I definitely plan to spend more time skiing and running this year. Between school and doing a lot of travel last year these are some of the activities that I had to concede.
From a technology perspective, I certainly plan to dive deeper into the upcoming Microsoft Microservices offering, Azure API Management, Azure Event Hubs and Stream Analytics.
MVP Award
I did receive word that my MVP status has been renewed for 2015. I want to thank both my Canadian MVP leads Sim and Joel and the Product Group leadership team Vivek, Guru and Mark for keeping me in the program even though I spent some time away in another platform. 2015 is going to be a really big year for Microsoft in the Integration space and I am thrilled to get involved.
I also want to take this opportunity to thank all my twitter followers and readers of this blog for their continued interest in what I have to say. The Microsoft Integration community is really amazing and I am inspired to be part of it. Here’s to a great 2015!
by community-syndication | Jan 1, 2015 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
What a great personal and professional start of 2015. Once again I’m delighted to share that I was renewed, for the 5th straight year, as Microsoft Integration MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional). I would like to thank to all my blog readers, friends, members of BizTalk Community, to my fellow Microsoft Integration MVP’s: Michael Stephenson, […]
Blog Post by: Sandro Pereira
by community-syndication | Dec 30, 2014 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
I enjoyed 2014 and spent much of the year learning new things and building up an exceptional Product team at CenturyLink. Additionally, I spoke at events in Seattle, London, Houston, Ghent, Utrecht, and Oslo, delivered Pluralsight courses about Personal Productivity… Read More ›
Blog Post by: Richard Seroter
by [email protected] Steef-Jan Wiggers | Dec 28, 2014 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Close to the end of the year 2014. It has again been quite a year from me, travelling to different places of our world. Some familiar and some new places. 2014 brought me to the following cities, area’s and countries:
- Italy Tuscany, Emilia Romagna and Lombardia (Pisa, Lucca, Viareggio, Florence, Piacenza, Poggi Bonsi, San Gimignano, Volterra, Sienna, Valconasso di Pontenure, Podenzano, and Val Trebia).
- United-States Washington State (Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond, Deception Pass, Whidbey Island, Fidalgo Island, Camano Island, and Bainbridge Island).
- Australia Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland (Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney).
- Spain Basque Country, Spanish Pyrenees (Girona, L’estartit, Vielha).
- Sweden Stockholm.
- Belgium, Mechelen.
For one it has been a very busy year like last year 2013. To summarize all my activity bullet wise:
- I have had multiple speaking engagements in the Netherlands and abroad (UK, Norway, Sweden, Belgium and Australia).
- Attended the annual MVP Summit (November).
- Attended the BizTalk Summit (INTEGRATE2014) in Redmond (December).
- Technical reviewer for a number of books and white papers.
- Watched dutch soccer perform well during the WorldCup 2014.
- Written multiple TechNet wiki articles on BizTalk and ran two half Marathons, The Hague and Berlin, in March.
- Written dozen blog posts on this blog (especially liked the ones on service virtualization I created with the help of Andrew Slikver/Nevatech) and on the TechNet Wiki Blog.
For me personally I am happy to finally been to Australia and had a great time speaking at three cities. I really like to thank Saravana Kumar, Dean Robertson, BizTalk360 and Mexia to make this possible. Both companies made a huge commitment and made a tremendous investment in the community. Besides BizTalk360 and Mexia there are some other companies that have shown a lot of affection to our integration (BizTalk) community like: Codit, Quicklearn and Bouvet.
After the event I had a great time with my friends Mikael Hakansson and Mick Badran. Both showing me the Aussie way of live. Thanks guys!
I am also happy to see that both Richard Seroter and Stephen W. Thomas, two of my other friends, welcomed a healthy, lovely daughter in their family lives: Charlotte and Haydon.
To conclude I have had an amazing year spending working on several integration projects, travelling, seeing the Seahawks become SuperBowl champs, seeing my kids grow up, spending time with the family, friends and of course the BizTalk community. Thanks everyone for reading my blog and I will continue to share my knowledge through speaking and writing in 2015.
Cheers,
Steef-Jan
by community-syndication | Dec 28, 2014 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Close to the end of the year 2014. It has again been quite a year from me, travelling to different places of our world. Some familiar and some new places. 2014 brought me to the following cities, area’s and countries:
United-Kingdom London.
Ireland Dublin.
Italy Tuscany, Emilia Romagna and Lombardia (Pisa, Lucca, Viareggio, Florence, Piacenza, Poggi Bonsi, San Gimignano, Volterra,
by community-syndication | Dec 24, 2014 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
One more year and the tradition is back For me it was a year of radical changes in my life, most of them extremely good others less so, however Christmas came and with it the time to live good times with those we love most. Friendship, family, joy and happiness is all around us – […]
Blog Post by: Sandro Pereira
by community-syndication | Dec 18, 2014 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
So far in this blog series, I’ve taken a look at how to provision and scale servers using five leading cloud providers. Now, I want to dig into support for “Day 2 operations” like troubleshooting, reactive or proactive maintenance, billing,… Read More ›
Blog Post by: Richard Seroter
by stephen-w-thomas | Dec 18, 2014 | Stephen's BizTalk and Integration Blog
My current client is looking for a few additional BizTalk Developers to come work with us! They could start as soon as next week.
This would be a 6 month contract. The work is mostly remote (work from home) but travel to the client site up to 50% may be required. All travel expenses would be paid by the client. The rates are open and tend to be better than what I have seen in the past at some other clients.
This is a great opportunity for anyone to grow their BizTalk skills by working with a great team of veteran BizTalkers!
If interested, please email me at [email protected] with your resume, availability, and requested rate.
Look forward to working with you!
by [email protected] Steef-Jan Wiggers | Dec 17, 2014 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
The beginning of december I visited the Microsoft Campus (Building 92) for the 3rd global BizTalk Summit, which was branded as Integrate2014. The event was organized this time by BizTalk360 along side with Microsoft itself and core partners like Quicklearn, Nevatech, Codit, and LogicalTech SysTalk. It was a three day event filled with numerous sessions by Microsoft themselves, a few MVP’s and partners.
The first important message to me, partners and end-users I believe was that BizTalk Server is going to play an essential role for integration systems and applications on-premise. Besides that its also provide support with connectivity to cloud (Azure with adapters that support SB-connectivity, and relay). That means BizTalk Server can also provide enterprises the ability to build cloud to ground or ground to cloud based solutions (see also Richard Seroter’s course on Pluralsight called Cloud Integration Patterns). The product group explicitly shared that there will be future platform upgrades (full version, or R2). See also my post on the TechNet Wiki Blog: The Future of Integration.
Second even more important message was the new direction for BizTalk Services. MABS 1.0 will change course to adopt architecture called MicroServices. This means that MABS 2.0 will fundamentally change to support this architecture. What the architecture basically boils down to is that granularity will increase. A BizTalk Service solution can consist of many small services like connectors (called triggers and actions), mediation (that supports VETER pattern we know from MABS 1.0), BPM, Mappings, and Business Rule Engine (BRE). During the event we have seen different sessions on MicroServices from different speakers. All sessions were recorded and will be made available soon.
Finally the number of attendees and partners (sponsors) showed me that ecosystem of Microsoft Integration is very alive. Microsoft will continue to innovate it’s on-premise product BizTalk Server and it’s cloud based offering BizTalk Services, which will be named Azure BizTalk Microservices (MABS 2.0). We stand before the door to the next generation of integration solutions. We slowly we move (migrate) integration solution to Azure Platform and build new solutions to communicate with distributed systems (anywhere, anyplace, anytime) and devices.
Other blog post on INTEGRATE 2014 definitely worth to checkout are:
It has been an amazing event and it was awesome to meet with people like Microsoft Integration MVP’s present, Microsoft BizTalk Product Group, Biztalk360 Team, Quicklearn Team, Andrew Slivker (Nevatech), Jason Sander, Dwaine Gilmour, Mandi Ohlinger, Richard Broida, Tom Canter, Rob Fox, Jean Paul Smit, Martin Peters, Rene Brauwers, JoAnn Een, Michael Shea, Koen van Oost, Eldert Grootenboer, Rex van der Laan, Bart Scheurweghs, Rajesh Kolla, Howard Edidin, and list goes on.
BizTalk360 as event organizer have done an outstanding job taking the BizTalk Summit (Integrate) to the next level!
Cheers,
Steef-Jan
by community-syndication | Dec 17, 2014 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Published By: Bill Chesnut
It has now been just over a week since I attended the Integrate 2014 Conference at Building 92 on Microsoft’s Redmond Campus along with 2 other Mexia colleges Grant Samuels and Dan Toomey.
We were all set to hear about Microsoft Azure BizTalk Services 2.0, but from Scott Guthrie’s Keynote it was obvious we were going to get a different message, Integration needs to be a core component across all of Azure (and on premises with the Azure Pack for Windows Server 2012 R2). To that end we now have MicroServices (not an official name, but what everyone was referring to it as), more details about MicroServices later in my post. I think this concept of having integration across all of Azure is a good thing, BizTalk Services was more of a integration vertical in Azure where the vision for integration is a horizontal across all of the Azure technologies.
There will be a public preview of the new MicroServices in Q1 2015, expecting this to be early March 2015.
Things that I know about MicroServices so far:
- They will run in a container like Azure Websites (most likely a renamed version of the current websites container)
- The configuration to define how the MicroServices will be orchestrated/process flow will be JSON
- There will be templates that allow you to define a generic process flow and then customize for a specific message flow
- The MicroServices will expose their information via WADL/Swagger
- There will be a market place were you can upload your MicroServices for others to use (free and chargeable)
- There will be versioning, but no specifics on how it will work
- There will be unit testing for MicroServices
- BizTalk style Adapters will be implemented as MicroServices
- MicroServices will be based on the Web API
Things that I don’t know about MicroServices so far:
- What the cost to run them will be
- How to debug MicroServices running in Azure
- The exact payload going between the MicroServices (will it be common between all or unique between all)
- What the conversion from MABS 1.0 to MicroServices will look like
- What the conversion from BizTalk Server to MicroServices will look like
- Not sure of the unit testing for a process/flow (multiple MicroServices)
- Not sure of the automated deployment picture
During the Conference there were several session about MicroServices covering Business Rules, EAI and EDI the slides are available here: http://integrate2014.com/sessions/
For those that think MABS 1.0 is dead, they made it perfectly clear, MABS 1.0 is still a viable supported platform for it’s targeted workload, primarily EDI. To reinforces this, there was a presentation by Microsoft IT about their on-going migration from BizTalk Server to MABS, which is an extremely large migration.
Also, during Integrate 2014 there was also a couple of presentations on BizTalk Server where Microsoft confirmed the 2015 release of BizTalk Server, but there were few details on what would be in the 2015 release, other than BizTalk Server will continue to be the tool of choice in a Hybrid Integration Scenario. There was also a presentation about HCA health care’s use of BizTalk Server with some very impressive numbers of around 60 million message processed per day on a BizTalk Server configuration that consists of BizTalk Server 2010 and 2013 in 5 groups of 7 servers each (4 CPU with 16GB of RAM)
I would also like to thank BizTalk 360 and all the sponsors for making this great event possible.
Stay tune for more details around MicroServices
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