Interesting Twist on Auto starting a Workflow with IIS / AppFabric

Pablo Castilla contacted me about his take on auto starting a workflow with IIS and AppFabric.

WF 4.0: How to automatically start a workflow by itself hosted in AppFabric

It looks interesting.  I read the code but I have not tried it myself.  I thought I would share it with you – I’m interested to know what the community thinks about this approach.

Endpoint Q&A Chat

Also I’m thinking of starting an open chat with the WF4 team.  The idea is 2 or 3 of us get together and respond to questions from Twitter, Facebook or LiveMeeting.  The time zone problem is an interesting one.  If we did it at 8am Pacific Time that would be 4pm UTC – great for Europe but 12:30am not so great for China.

We could alternate time for different weeks – one week doing a time good for Europe/Africa, another week doing a time good for Asia.  Of course we will post recordings of the chat so you don’t have to listen live.

I’m interested to hear what you think about the idea.

BizTalk Server 2010 AppFabric Connect for Services

One of the key requirements in development of cloud based applications is to be able to leverage existing on-premise assets by exposing them as web services. However, since most of the organizations are firewall protected, the on-premise web services are typically not accessible to external clients running outside the organization’s firewall, unless these web services are explicitly hosted in DMZ. More often than not, hosting services in the DMZ is a cumbersome process. Azure AppFabric Service Bus provides the capability to extend the reach of on-premise web services to external clients (without having to host them in the DMZ) in a secure way. This blog describes how BizTalk Server 2010 and Azure AppFabric can come together to help enterprises build hybrid cloud based applications.

  1. Feature Overview

    The new ’BizTalk Server 2010 AppFabric Connect for Services’ feature brings together the capabilities of BizTalk Server and Windows Azure AppFabric thereby enabling enterprises to extend the reach of their on-premise Line of Business (LOB) systems and BizTalk applications to cloud. This is a new BizTalk Server 2010 feature and can be downloaded from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=204701.

  2. Business scenario

    With the advent of cloud platforms and people building cloud based applications, it is still true that a lot of data for these applications resides in on-premise LOB systems. More often than not, these applications would also want to leverage existing on-premise applications. To build such hybrid applications with components residing on-premise as well as on cloud, a secure mechanism to connect an enterprise’s on-premise assets with those on cloud is the need of the hour. While this is true for any applications, it is even more true for integration applications. The following fictional scenario illustrates this better:

    Woodgrove bank wants to build an online banking portal where its customers can view their bank or stock related information, and trade their stocks. The data needed for this portal resides in on-premise LOB systems. The stock trading functionality is implemented using a BizTalk Server Orchestration. The bank has also designed an ASP.Net based web portal and hosted it in Windows Azure. To enable communication between the cloud based web portal and the on-premise assets, the bank exposes the on- premise LOB data and the BizTalk solution as WCF services with endpoints in Azure AppFabric Service Bus.

  3. Security considerations when exposing on-premise assets on cloud:

    Security is an important requirement when exposing on-premise assets on cloud. Azure AppFabric Service Bus endpoints can be secured using Azure AppFabric ACS. A more detailed description of  how to secure Service Bus endpoints is here. On top of this, the regular WCF security features such as transport level and message level security can be used to secure end-to-end communication between the client and the service.

  4. How to use this feature:

    This section provides a quick walkthrough of how to expose your on-premise BizTalk Orchestrations and LOB data as a WCF Service on cloud. A more detailed tutorial can be accessed from here.

    • BizTalk Orchestrations:

      1. Run BizTalk WCF Service Publishing Wizard

      2. Choose BizTalk Orchestration(s) to publish

      3. Extend the reach of the BizTalk Orchestration(s) to cloud

      4. Configure Service Bus endpoints

    • LOB systems:

      1. Run BizTalk WCF Adapter Service Development Wizard

      2. Choose the LOB artifact(s) to publish

      3. Extend the reach of the LOB artifact(s) to cloud

      4. Configure Service Bus endpoints

  5. Summary

    As you saw from the above scenario, AppFabric Connect feature provides tooling enhancements, which help you connect your on-premise artifacts with those on the Cloud using the AppFabric Service Bus. This will help in accelerating and building your applications on Windows Azure platform. This feature is available for download from download center (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=204701) for BizTalk Server 2010 customers. For any feedback or queries, leave a post on this blog or mail at: [email protected].

Harsh Shrimal
Program Manager, BizTalk Server Team

BizTalk 2010 Installation and Configuration – Install SQL Server 2008 R2 (Part 4)

BizTalk 2010 Installation and Configuration – Install SQL Server 2008 R2 (Part 4)

BizTalk Server provides the capability to specify a business process and also a mechanism by which the applications used in that business process can communicate with each other. SQL Server is the main repository for this communication mechanism. You must install SQL Server 2008 R2/SP1 (Enterprise Edition is recommended). Important BAM real-time aggregation (RTA) is […]

Custom Functoid Wizard

Hi all

Today a customer asked me for the Custom Functoid Wizard. Before today I had never
heard of it. I searched lots of places, and found several bog entries with links to
the 2004 source code, installer, 2006 source code, installer and what not – but none
of the links checked out.

So finally the customer found it himself, and just for the benefit of the rest of
the world, I have placed the installer for the BizTalk 2009 version of the Custom
Functoid Wizard at http://www.eliasen.dk/files/FunctoidWizardSetupInstaller.zip.



eliasen

BizTalk 2010 Installation and Configuration – Install Visual Studio 2010 (Part 3)

BizTalk 2010 Installation and Configuration – Install Visual Studio 2010 (Part 3)

The BizTalk Server development tools are based on Visual Studio 2010. Therefore, at a minimum, you must have the Microsoft Visual C#%u00ae .NET portion of Visual Studio 2010 installed on your computer before installing the BizTalk Server Developer Tools and SDK component. Visual Studio 2010 is not required if you are installing BizTalk Server on […]