by community-syndication | Sep 14, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Welcome to Integration days 2011!
If you are in the integration space, you’ll find all kinds of interesting and valuable sessions in any of the four tracks; Strategy, Public, Microsoft and IBM. Each track has six sessions with speakers from both Enfo Zystems and other partner organizations such as Microsoft.
At Thursday evening, you’re invited for dinner with entertainment, which of course will be a great time to meet up with other integration geeks (such as myself)
And the best of all -It’s all free, so sign up now!
The event starts on the 13thof October and covers four tracks, each with six sessions. The Microsoft platform track will cover the following six sessions:
Microsoft BizTalk Server and Microsoft’s Middleware vision
BizTalk Server has been at the center of Microsoft’s Middleware platform for a number of years, to provide a rich set of capabilities for services and integration. AppFabric, both on-premise and on Windows Azure provides additional capabilities as well as some overlapping ones. So what is the strategy here, what is Microsoft up to long term and short term? How will this affect solutions you create and what opportunities will it create for your company? In this session, you will get the answers to these questions.
Presenter: Marcus Gullberg, PM Microsoft Sweden
Microsoft BizTalk Server & Windows Azure AppFabric
Microsoft’s Middleware platform is currently undergoing a change, which in turn offers different solutions with unique capabilities. What is available today, and how can we today make these solutions work together? This session will cover Microsoft BizTalk Server, Windows Server AppFabric and Azure AppFabric, to show how you can extend the reach of your integration platform outside your own domain.
Presenter: Mikael H%u00e5kansson, Solution Architect, Enfo Zystems
Windows Azure AppFabric Platform futures
Where is the future of Microsoft’s Middleware platform going? How will we design, build and monitor our solutions in the future? What capabilities will we have in our tool box? These and many other questions will be addressed in this session, which will focus on Microsoft Azure AppFabric Platform and emerging capabilities such as Composite Application, Access Control Center, Caching, ServiceBus Topics & Queues and other enhancements, and Integration.
Presenter: Johan Hedberg, Solution Architect, Enfo Zystems
Using AppFabric Cache to Maximize the Performance of Your Windows Azure and On Premises WCF Applications
Caching is an integral part of an overall scaling strategy. By properly utilizing caching you can radically increase the number of concurrent users your application can service. Much of the caching information available to users today only focuses on server side caching. Server side caching is important, we will cover it in this session, and we will show concrete techniques to maximize its effectiveness . However, this session will also cover client side caching techniques. Client side techniques are often overlooked in spite of the fact that in order to truly hit extreme scale those techniques are nearly always necessary and often end up being bolted on after the fact. After attending this session, the attendees will walk away with the concrete knowledge and code necessary to immediately improve their WCF application performance.
Presenter: Paolo Salvatori and Mikael H%u00e5kansson
Deep dive: How to integrate BizTalk Server with Windows Azure Service Bus Messaging
The Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus and Windows Azure Connect are the foundation for building a new class of distributed and hybrid applications that span the cloud and on premises environments. The Service Bus is an Internet-scale Service Bus that offers secure, scalable and highly available connectivity and messaging capabilities. Windows Azure Connect provides a network-level bridge between applications and services running in the cloud and on-premises data centers. Windows Azure Connect makes it easier for an organization to migrate their existing applications to the cloud by enabling direct IP-based network connectivity with their existing on-premises infrastructure. In this session you will see how to integrate these technologies with BizTalk Server to create solid and cloud-ready solutions.
Presenter: Paolo Salvatori, Senior Program Manager Microsoft
Baseline for BizTalk Hands-on
Baseline provides a comprehensive framework that supports the design, development and maintenance of systems integration solutions. In this session we will provide a practical example of how to use the Baseline methodology and tools to refine project requirements into a working BizTalk solution – tested, documented and packaged, ready for deployment in BizTalk Server 2010. In the process we will use Baseline documents and the Baseline Portal to highlight the main strengths of Baseline.
Presenter: Martin Rydman and Mikael H%u00e5kansson
Blog Post by: wmmihaa
by community-syndication | Sep 14, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Following the previous post, here is a second bit of wisdom. In the Load method of a custom pipeline component, only assign values retrieved from the property bag to your custom properties if the retrieved value is not null. Do not assign any value to a custom property if the retrieved value is null.
This is important because of the way in which pipeline property values are loaded at run time. If you assign one or more property values via the Admin Console (e.g., on a pipeline in a Receive Location), BizTalk will call the Load method twice – once to load the values assigned in the pipeline editor at design time and a second time to overlay these values with values captured via the admin console. Let’s say you assign a value to custom property A at design time, but not to custom property B. After deploying your application, the admin console will display property A’s value in the Configure Pipeline dialog box. Note that it will be displayed in normal text. If you enter a value for Property B, it will be displayed in bold text. Here is the important bit. At runtime, during the second invocation of the Load method, BizTalk will only retrieve bold text values (values entered directly in the admin console). Other values are will not be retrieved. Instead, the property bag returns null values. Hence, if your Load method responds to a null by assigning some other value to the property (e.g., an empty string), you will override the correct value and bad things will happen.
The following code is bad:
object retrievedPropertyVal;
propertyBag.Read(“MyProperty”, out retrievedPropertyVal, 0);
if (retrievedPropertyVal != null)
{
myProperty = (string)retrievedPropertyVal;
}
else
{
myProperty = string.Empty;
}
Remove the ‘else’ block to comply with the inner logic of BizTalk’s approach.
by community-syndication | Sep 14, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Here is a small snippet of BizTalk Server wisdom which I will post for posterity. Say you are creating a custom pipeline component with custom properties. You create private fields and a public properties and write all the code to load and save corresponding property bag values from and too your properties. At some point, when you deploy the BizTalk application and test it, you get an exception from within your pipeline stating, unhelpfully, that “Value does not fall within the expected range.” Or maybe, while using the Visual Studio IDE, you notice that values you type into custom properties in the Property List are lost when you reload the pipeline editor.
What is going on? Well, the issue is probably due to having failed to initialise your custom property fields. If they are reference types and have a null value, the PipelineOM PropertyBag class will throw an exception when reading property values. The Read method can distinguish between nulls and, say, empty strings, due to the way data is serialised to XML (e.g., in the BTP file). Here is a property initialised to an empty string:
<Property Name=”MyProperty”>
<Value xsi:type=”xsd:string” />
</Property>
Here is the same property set to null:
<Property Name=”MyProperty” />
The first is OK. The second causes an error and leads to the symptoms described above.
ALLWAYS initialise property backing fields in custom pipeline components. NEVER set properties to null programmatically.
by community-syndication | Sep 14, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
We often hear this question from people asking our Roadmap, the honest answer is "We don’t have one".
Being a small company we can’t afford to have a lengthy business plan with long set of features. Having big plans only scares people off, instead of doing things. We keep things simple, we work on 1 or 2 features at a time. Do it very well and make sure it works as promised.
We give demos to 1 or 2 customer a week consistently, and our future directions are mainly driven by those customer requests. When we hear something for the first time we ignore it (it’s true, we ignore it). When we hear the same thing second time, we make a note of it, and finally when we hear it third time that feature is definitely getting into our next release.
The other areas we concentrate is on reliability, we improve the quality of BizTalk360 on every release. Again, being a small company the last thing we want is to spend time diagnosing unknown issues raised by customers. It just puts lot of stress and pauses our regular routine, so we constantly improve the quality.
BizTalk360 now is a completely different product to the one we have planned 19 months ago. If we had spend time writing business analysis documents with all the feature sets, it probably would have taken us 6 months just to get us out of the ground. You probably won’t know, we have thrown away 2-4 months of our work, just because we understood it doesn’t add too much value and it simply bloats BizTalk360.
We wanted to solve real business problems faced by customers, we wanted to be as close as possible to reality. We wanted to make BizTalk360 a nice little solution, that addresses a niche problem for the Microsoft? BizTalk Server customers.
by community-syndication | Sep 13, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
A couple weeks ago one of my clients was experiencing constant “Cannot generate SSPI Context” errors in BizTalk. These are Kerberos errors and they are extremely annoying because they happen constantly whenever you are trying to use any database function with BizTalk. These would fill up the event logs on my client’s server and was […]
Blog Post by: clineer
by community-syndication | Sep 13, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
I’ve started to take a look at the Azure AppFabric Access Control Service (ACS), and have started an ACS sectionon Cloud Casts. The first webcast looks at using social identity providers to provide authentication for websites. I’m going to focus on ACS for a bit and wait for the AppFabric messaging capabilities to be released before returning to them and looking in more detail. I have a few webcasts on AppFabric messaging here.
by community-syndication | Sep 13, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
The first keynote of Build was all about the launch of new Windows 8 for developers. As they said, Windows 8 is a reimaging of the way we interact with devices and use computers. With all this reimaging comes some major changes to the development paradigms that we are currently use to and […]
Blog Post by: Ben Dewey
by community-syndication | Sep 12, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
A number of people
(including Shawn Wildermuth) have been writing and speculating about the Build conference.
I’m about to pack to drive down to Anaheim and wanted to document in the blogosphere
my hopes about what will be announced there.
I actually hope that .NET on the client is dead. Well not dead – but IMO .NET has
had a good run and it’s time to let go. When I say .NET on the client I mean WinForms,
Silverlight, WPF, all of it.
You might ask why someone who has spent 10+ years working on the platform would say
that – and my answer is HTML5.
People often think of me as the BizTalk guy (OK, well we know that BizTalk is dead
if not on its way out), or the REST guy. But before I was into either of those things
I was actually a pure web developer. HTML, JavaScript, ASP, and then ASP.NET.
In essence I feel like I am going back to my roots these days (come see me talk about
HTML5 and mobile app development at VSLive this
fall, for example).
That’s why as of today this site is now renamed www.masteringhtml5.com –
I’m going back to my roots.
My hope is that Microsoft sticks with its first announcement about Windows 8 and that
new “immersive” apps or whatever they are going to be called *have* to be built using
HTML5 and JavaScript. Not only do I hope that because I’m happy to be going back to
my “roots”, but I think it is the smartest thing to keep the Windows platform relevant.
I’ll have more to come on this topic as the week progresses.
Check out my new book on REST.
Blog Post by: Jon Flanders
by community-syndication | Sep 12, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
A few days ago I was working on finishing up an ADFS implementation and I had customized quite a bit of the built-in ADFS website pages. I needed to use Windows authentication to access a database, and I realized that the ADFS Proxy website app poolby default runs under Network Service. This was troubling because […]
Blog Post by: clineer
by community-syndication | Sep 9, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
This blog post is about how to resolve “System.InvalidOperationException” when trying to start the EPiServer scheduler service. A failing service
The error occurred on a EPiServer CMS 5…
Daniel Berg’s blog about ASP.NET, EPiServer, SharePoint, BizTalk
