SOA Conference: Day 4

Nov 05

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: