by community-syndication | Apr 10, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
We released version 3.2 of BizTalk360 on 7th of February with bunch of interesting features. Straight after that we merged ourselves on the our 4.0 version which is due to be released end of May.
Live Web Cast : 18th April 2012. Details and registration can be found here.
The main focus for 4.0 version is to expand BizTalk360 existing monitoring capabilities to other core infrastructure related areas like disk space, NT services running state, SQL jobs running state, system resources like CPU, Memory, Event Log patterns etc.
The other important thing we included in 4.0 is a plug-in architecture, monitoring sections can be written in isolation and can be plugged-in into BizTalk360 core monitoring system. These is super useful for customer who got very specific monitoring requirements. Example: One of customers want to do some sequence of steps,
1. Get a value of the element in the config file using xpath,
2. Check the database for some relevant value based on the previous config file value.
3. Alert if the database value is not expected value.
In the past BizTalk customers always got some custom in-house solution to do these kind of things. But now you can easily create such custom monitoring in BizTalk360 and make it part of your overall monitoring solution.
Why not SCOM Monitoring?
There is no question an enterprise monitoring solution like System Center operation manager(SCOM), HPOpenview or something equivalent can do these kind of jobs, but there are some real practical challenges.
1. They are complex products in themselves, and requires considerable knowledge to set it up
2. They are general purpose monitoring products and they look heavy and complicated for some of the basic scenarios
3. It’s often time consuming to setup SCOM or HPOpenview in an organisation, which could range from weeks to months.
With BizTalk360 our focus is to to concentrate only on Microsoft BizTalk Server related areas. We try to keep it as simple as possible. Our focus is to setup BizTalk environment monitoring in few minutes or hours, NOT days, weeks or months.
Come and join our BizTalk360 Live Webcast on 18th April 2012, and check for yourself what we have to offer. We are doing two session on the same day to cover east and west time zones. The details of the event and registration can be done here.
Nandri!
Saravana Kumar
by community-syndication | Apr 9, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Finally the day that many of us were waiting for arrived! BizTalk Server 2010 Cookbook was officially released by PACKT Publishing on April 05, 2012. BizTalk Server 2010 Cookbook was written by Steef-Jan Wiggers, awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) since 2010 and one of the most respected members of BizTalk Server community for his […]
Blog Post by: Sandro Pereira
by community-syndication | Apr 9, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Stories continue with the BizTalk Community Series that bring BizTalk community members to the foreground. The ninth story will be on Nausad Alam, who is currently one of most active community members on BizTalk forums. Not only on the forums has Naushad been very active. He has also written a few extensive wiki articles for Technet wiki like:
A few weeks a go I had a chat with Naushad and here’s his story.
Naushad is BizTalk Developer/Administrator/Designer/Architect, working with one of the largest Bank in the United Kingdom. He has more than 9 years of working experience with Microsoft products.
Naushad enjoys the BizTalk Administrator and Developer role the most. He started working with BizTalk early 2004 during a BizTalk 2002 project, and after that it seems he got married with this product. Nowadays he is working/thinking/sharing his knowledge on the BizTalk forums.
Naushad has certainly showed his enthusiasm on the forums, TechNet wiki and blog. I quote:
“There are really great articles/forums (MSDN)/blogs evolved during last 3-4 years, I remember when I started working with BizTalk 2002, there was not much information on the internet, So I really had some difficulties find information, but things have been revolutionized in recent years. People should get benefit from this and make the BizTalk product the most popular and successful ever.”
His view on sharing knowledge is and I quote:
“I would like to say that it really takes time and passion to write and maintain technical blogs online with a consistency, People should try to get maximum benefits from the blogs/articles because it could give them a simple solution of their complex problems.”
He feels BizTalk is a great product and as he states:
“Certainly BizTalk is a great product and its been evolved a lot during last couple of years, the guys at Redmond are really shipping great features every time making it a better product. I would love to continue the rest my career around this product and other integration products of Microsoft.”
In his spare time Naushad likes to watch animations like Cars, and Toy story with his little daughter, and he is an active reader. He recently finished reading the biography of “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson, which aligns with his passion for Apple products. Naushad likes his Mac and loves to design simple user interfaces for it. Currently he is working on a design for a user interface for one of his personal media management software.
Regarding sports Naushad loves to watch cricket; the Indian Cricket team is his favorite team and Sachin Tendulkar his favorite player. Since the last couple of months he has been enjoying playing badminton on the weekends.
Thanks Naushad for your time and your contributions to forums and the TechNet Wiki.
by community-syndication | Apr 9, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
SQL Server 2012 adds many significant improvements to the spatial support that was first introduced with SQL Server 2008. In this blog post, I’ll explore one of the more notable enhancements: support for curves and arcs (circular data). SQL Server 2008 only supported straight lines, or polygons composed of straight lines. The three new shapes […]
Blog Post by: Lenni Lobel
by community-syndication | Apr 9, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
I am very happy to announce that BizTalk 2010 Cookbook written by a great MVP Steef Jan is released. He has done a marvelous job writing this book, the contents of the book can be viewed at Packt Website. The book is mainly for Developers and Administrators who can gain their knowledge in Development, Maintaining, […]
Blog Post by: Abdul Rafay
by community-syndication | Apr 7, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
I myself have written a cookbook on BizTalk Server called: BizTalk Server Cookbook 2010 for Packt Publishing. Yet there is another cookbook heading our way from this publisher. Fellow MVP from the “Connected Systems” discipline Rick G. Garibay and Microsoft Architect Hammad Rajjoub have written a cookbook on Windows Server AppFabric.
This book will:
- Download, install, configure and get up and running with Windows Server AppFabric quickly
- Learn how to take advantage of distributed caching for providing high performance and elastic scale on-premise today
- Take advantage of the enhanced hosting capabilities that Windows Server AppFabric has to offer including Auto-Start and a greatly simplified configuration experience
- Enable support for long-running composite applications that are resilient and fault-tolerant while maximizing computing resources
- Gain insight into the health of your composite applications seamlessly, both proactively and when something goes wrong
- Learn how to scale Windows Server AppFabric by leveraging farm deployments
I know both Rick and Hammad, who are both very active community leaders and long time MVP’s, have done a great job. Windows Server AppFabric can be viewed as a part of the Microsoft Integration Stack together with BizTalk, SQL Server and Azure ServiceBus. Basically Windows Server AppFabric, BizTalk and SQL Server are a part of the On-premise integration middleware (see whitepaper by Gijs in ’t Veld).
For lightweight integration Windows Server AppFabric together with WF (Windows Workflow) and WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) can be a right fit within your enterprise without using the more scalable, robust BizTalk Server. I believe this book will tell you the complete story on how to use Windows Server AppFabric, how to set it up and how to create robust, and state-of-the-art solutions on it.
To conclude I think the content of this book will be very valuable for WF/WCF developer and also for us BizTalk guys. I am looking forward to this book and have pre-ordered it, so now go and you pre-order it!
by community-syndication | Apr 6, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
In the past few days, there have been three sizable product announcements that should be of interest to the cloud/integration community. Specifically, there are noticeable improvements to Microsoft’s CEP engine StreamInsight, Windows Azure’s integration services, and Tier 3’s Iron Foundry PaaS. First off, the Microsoft StreamInsight team recently outlined changes that are coming in their […]
Blog Post by: Richard Seroter
by community-syndication | Apr 6, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
At BizTalkAdminsBlogging I’ve written a review about Steef-Jan’s first book.
You can find it here.
by community-syndication | Apr 5, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Finally my book with recipes for BizTalk Server 2010 is officially released. After a year of hard work it is available now. You can find the complete table of contents on Packt Website for this book.
Before starting this endeavor I asked Richard Seroter for guidance and discussed the opportunity with fellow MVP Randal van Splunteren during MVP Summit 2011. Both motivated me to go for it. So I did and I signed a book contract with Packt.
I did not want to write a straight forward book with recipes only targeted on the out-of-box capabilities of BizTalk Server 2010. So I decided to do it differently.
This book will provide material on community tooling available on CodePlex like BizTalk BenchMark Wizard and many other BizTalk related tooling. Also Microsoft has built tooling for BizTalk like BizTalk Best Practice Analyzer, which can be very valuable in validating your BizTalk environment. The book provides a couple recipes on topics that you would not find in other BizTalk (recipe) books and some that you are familiar with. With all the recipes combined I wanted to draw a contrast of what BizTalk offers out-of-box versus the alternatives offered through the community and 3rd parties.
During the course of the book I have had support from fellow MVP’s Saravana Kumar, who contributed a recipe on alternative monitoring with BizTalk360, Mikael H%u00e5kansson who helped on the recipe concerning BizTalk BenchMark Wizard (BBW), and my colleague Douglas Skirving on Security.
It was lots of fun to write this book, and I hope many of you will order the book and enjoy reading it. I would like to thank both my official technical reviewers Randal van Splunteren, Rene Brauwers, Abdul Rafay and Sandro Pereira and others Tord G. Nordahl, Richard Seroter, and Paul Gielens for their insight, hints, tips and keeping me on the right path. Finally I like to thank Packt Publishing for giving me this opportunity. Finally I like to thank the team behind the scene at Packt Publishing that I worked with: Dhwani, Chris, Prasad, Laxmi, Vishal, Rekha, Prachali and Alwin.
If you do have any feedback on my work in this book, don’t hesitate to drop me a line.
by community-syndication | Apr 5, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
This blog post is about using Windows Azure AppFabric cache service together with EPiServer CMS. EPiServer CMS supports pluggable cache, replacing the standard EPiServer CMS cache component. …
Daniel Berg’s blog about ASP.NET, EPiServer, SharePoint, BizTalk
