Sergio Del Piccolo

The November edition of the K2 Networker has been released. Every edition contains a profile on one of the K2 Insiders. This month’s edition contains my Insider profile.

Also covered in this month’s edition:

• Feedback from the Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference 2007 held in Redmond last month
• How to K2 – instruction and capabilities of K2 – using Smart Objects
• The new K2 Podcast Series
• New workflow book…in Chinese!

Download: K2 Networker – November 2007
To Subscribe: The K2 Networker

Source Code, Workflow, BlackPearl, K2 Networker, K2 Insiders, K2.com

The new ESB Guidance Toolkit has been released on the MSDN Patterns and Practices web site. The ESB Guidance provides architectural guidance, patterns, practices, and a set of BizTalk Server R2 and .NET components to simplify the development of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) on the Microsoft platform and to allow Microsoft customers to extend their own messaging and integration solutions.

Download it from here!

Microsoft, ESB Guidance Toolkit, BizTalk

Integrating Legacy Assets with BizTalk 2006 R2
William Henry, IONA

William spoke a little about Iona and their history before going into their product – IONA WCF Adapter used to consuming CORBA & JMS in .Net. He spent most of the session demonstrating how to use the software. He also mentioned the Atrix Connect for WCF which is to be released in Q1 of 2008.

Advanced Orchestration Concepts & Best Practices
Stephen Thomas

Stephen started off speaking about his guiding principles regarding orchestrations:

• Design easily understandable business processes
• Build for the future
• Build business processes that can be easily unit tested (e.g. with BizUnit)
• Use all available features of BizTalk to simplify development
• Keep “abilities” in mind
• Reusability
• Build shared orchestrations to accomplish specific tasks
• Return generic responses and use the Business Rule Engine to evaluate
• Maintainability
• Build clean and simple process flow
• Select and follow a naming convention
• Supportability
• Detailed error messaging for easy administration
• Avoided suspended non-resumable at all costs

Stephen next spoke about some useful tips for orchestration development:

• Leverage publish and subscribe pattern
• Promoted properties as MessageContextPropertiesBase
• Multi-Message Mapping
• Only available in orchestrations
• Watch for namespace issues – use code instead
• Direct Port Binding
• Watch out for endless loops
• Helper .Net Components
• Passing Xlang messages as streams
• Doing simple tasks using static methods
• Robust schema validation returning multiple errors
• Define messages using Multi-Port Messages when possible

Next Stephen spoke about the following advanced orchestration topics:

Untyped Messages

• What is it?  
• Using messages a XmlDoc rather than defined schema
• How does it help?
• Accepts multiple different types of messages in the same process
• Reduces redundant orchestrations
• Easily routable using direct binding and correlation sets
• Pitfalls?
• Typically routing done by Receive Port filters
• No access to Distinguished Fields or MessageDataPropertyBase and MessageContextPropertyBase properties

Dynamic Transformations

• What is it?
• Selecting maps at runtime and dynamically creating the transform object without a Transform shape
• How does it help?
• Allows for schemaless orchestrations to support multiple types of messages
• Allows for vendor specific mapping
• There is no need to redeploy maps when changes occur
• Pitfalls?
• Best to map on Send  Receive Ports
• It is possible to yield no output message – a null will be returned
• Possible performance impacts under high load – use a caching service

Configured Ports  & Self Correlating

• What is it?
• Used to start orchestration shape to send messages back into parent orchestration without correlation sets
• How does it help?
• Separate common logic into easily called processes
• No need to worry about binding
• done using correlation token
• no need for a business connection between messages
• Pitfalls?
• Untyped messages not supported – the message must be serialized

Convoys

• What is it?
• Parallel and sequential message processing support
• Routing is independent of running orchestration instances
• How does it help?
• Allows you to handle race conditions on the message box
• Pitfalls?
• Zombies – completed with discarded messages
• Difficult to reprocess message
• limit to 3 convoy properties

For more information regarding convoys see Stephen’s BizTalk Server Convoy Deep Dive whitepaper.

Links: Stephen W. Thomas BizTalk Blog

Building Solutions with the Microsoft ESB Guidance
Marty Waznicky, Principle Program Manager, Connected Systems Division

This presentation seemed like it was part two of the previous presentation that I saw from Marty – see SOA Conference: Day 3 for more. Marty then demonstrated the following:

• Exception Management process
• Management Portal
• Dynamic Routing
• Uddi services
• Dynamic Resolution
• Dynamic Transformations
• Itinerary Processing
• Scatter Gather pattern

Finally he mentioned that the new release should be posted to the MSDN patterns and practices site next week.

Links:

ESB Guidance Toolkit
Marty Wasznicky – Regional BizTalk Rants

Robust Error Handling for BizTalk Solutions
Matt Meleski, MVP / Senior Consultant, Objectsharp Consulting

Matt’s presentation covered planning and designing to handle exceptions that occur in pipelines and orchestrations. He covered the following techniques:

• Central Exception Handling using the Exception Management Framework in the ESB Toolkit
• Using Compensation in Orchestrations
• Pipeline and Orchestration Retry Patterns leveraging built in Message Box persistence

Matt broke exceptions into the following two types (with their origins):

1. .Net Exceptions
   • Receive Adapter
   • Receive Pipeline
   • Maps
   • Orchestration
   • Send Pipeline
   • Send Adapter
2. Messaging Failures
   • Publish to Message Box
   • Subscribe from Message Box
   • Orchestration not enlisted/started

BizTalk exception can then be handled in the following two ways:

1. Rely on BTS MessageBox & BizTalk framework
   • Suspend/retry using console
   • Handle errors in pipe comps (Try/Catch)
   • Failed message routing
   • Use MOM or custom technique to be alerted and resend the error messages
2. Route to file share, database, SharePoint
   • Custom processing for failed messages
   • Failed messages not in MessageBox

Matt did a couple of demos covering the following topics:

• Looking at MOM for notification of errors
• Making use of “Enabled Routing” flag for Failed Messages
• Dead letter drops – resume pattern
• ESB Exception Management Framework
• Compensation shape
• Distributed transaction (System.Transactions with Atomic Scope shapes)
• ESB Exception Management Framework
• Resume pattern

The presentation was very interesting especially the part around using the Exception Management Framework in the ESB Toolkit which can be installed separately from the rest of the ESB Toolkit – a great idea for firms not interested in the developing an ESB but wanting to take advantage of a centralized error handling process.

Link:
The ABCs of .Net – Matt Meleski
ESB Guidance Toolkit

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 for SOA & BPM
Ofer Ashkenazi, Senior Technical Product Manager, Connected Systems Division

Ofer’s presented a structured tour of the BizTalk capabilities and their benefits in implementing complex SOA and BPM solutions. He used the BizTalk Capabilities Categorization poster as the starting point for the discussion.

Links to the posters:
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Capabilities Poster
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Runtime Architecture Poster
BizTalk Server 2006 Legacy Modernization with HIS 2006 Poster

It was a good high level overview of all of BizTalk’s capabilities. His slide deck would be very useful in some of the pre-sales presentations that I have had to make in the past. I may have to get my hands on them for future use – watch this space.

Architecture of the Microsoft Enterprise Service Bus Guidance
Marty Waznicky, Principle Program Manager, Connected Systems

Marty led the presentation on the ESB Guidance toolkit. He started by giving his preferred defintion of SOA:
SOA enables loose coupling interoperability, management of change, operation of business services, in a governable environment. Business Services operating in a well run SOA can be complesed into business process that align IT with business.

He then summarized a few of the capabilities of the toolkit:

1. Messaging Infrastructure
   • Supports WS*
   • Supports existing applications
   • Supports partner 3rd party vendors
   • Supports B2B
   • Pub-Sub infrastructure
2. End point management
   • Decouple consumer from service
   • Registry/repository integration
   • Integration with SOA governance solutions
3. Operation support
   • End-to-end visibility
   • Exception mediations
   • Quality of service
4. Invocation patterns
• Itinerary process
• Common Messaging patterns
• Route, transform, validate, route and mediate on exception

Benefits of the ESB Guidance Tookit include:

• Loosely coupled message environment
• Policy driven level routing and mediation
• Itinerary based routing
• Code reuse

Top 5 Features of the ESB Guidance:

1. Dynamic Service Invocation
2. Unified Exception Management
3. ESB Management Portal
4. Itinerary Processing
5. SOA Governance Integration

Following the introduction there was a demo of the AmberPoint SOA Governance product which seemed impressive to say the least.

The final part of the presentation was Marty installing the ESB Guidance toolkit and showing what was coming in the new release slated for later this week.

Links:
ESB Guidance Toolkit
Marty Wasznicky – Regional BizTalk Rants

Microsoft, Microsoft SOA Conference, BizTalk,  Enterprise Service Bus Guidance, ESB Guidance Toolkit

BizTalkAdapters for WCF: Deep Dive
Aaron Skonnard, Pluralsight

This session was very good, with Aaron having only a couple of slides on the WCF adapters that come with BizTalk Server 2006 R2. The first slide showing the WCF Runtime Architecture as shown below:
 

Aaron spoke about the runtime architecture and then went on to speak about the WCF Adapters, as shown in the following diagram:

Following the short PowerPoint presentation Aaron showed a few code demos of the adapters being used in BizTalk calling a WCF service. Most of the demos covered the whitepaper written him and available from MSDN – WCF Adapters in BizTalk Server 2006 R2.

In my view this was by far the best presentation that I’ve seen so far in this years conference.

Links: Service Station – Aaron Skonnard

Mission Critical BizTalk in Telecoms
Bruno Rodrigues, Oi/Telemar – Brazil

Bruno spoke about the integration challenges faced when integrating multiple Billing, CRM and network platforms while trying to provision services like land lines, mobile phones and data products. From a technical standpoint there wasn’t much in terms of design and code, but from a business value view, the presentation clearly identified the benefits of the solution – reducing operating costs and improving productivity.

Healthcare Enterprise Integration: SOA Solutions
Simon Chester & Jason Shantz, Senior Consultants, Knowledge Tech

I was looking forward to seeing Simon and Jason speak about this topic for a while. Both are past colleagues of mine while working at Sunaptic Solutions and then Visiphor. Their presentation covered a Healthcare BizTalk – HL7 implementation in British Columbia while working at Sunaptic Solutions. Simon led the first half of the presentation speaking about the implementation and issues that they ran into during the implementation, viz. issues with ordered delivery, using the canonical model and the number of artifacts created by the model, the challenges of the dependencies between these, deployment, scalability. He then came up with a wishlist of capabilities that would have made the solution design simpler and the implementation more manageable. Jason (a BizTalk Server Virtual Technical Specialist) then stepped up and addressed Simon’s wishlist and explained how with BizTalk Server 2006 R2 would help to meet these challenges.

Links: Simon Chester

Connections in the Cloud – BizTalk Services and WCF
Justin Smith, Technical Evangelist, Microsoft

The presentation covered the Internet Service Bus hosted by Microsoft which has the following benefits:

• Firewall friendly messaging
• Scalability pub/sub engine for internet
• Standards based security
• Http/REST transformations
• Discoverability

Currently it is available in CTP (Community Technology Preview) at http://labs.biztalk.net. To get started download and install BizTalk Services SDK. Justin went on and spoke about getting started with samples.

The Internet Service Bus is integral to the “Oslo” vision of having composite applications spanning systems, evolving into Software + Services.

Microsoft, Microsoft SOA Conference, BizTalk,  Oslo, Software + Services, Internet Service Bus,  Windows Communication Foundation, WCF