Sergio Del Piccolo

The Canadian Connected Systems Team are planning on putting on a roadshow in three cities across Canada this fall. This would be a great opportunity to hear more about BizTalk and how it relates to broader SOA initiatives. The roadshow dates are as follows:

Vancouver - 30th October 2008
Toronto - 4th November 2008
Montreal - 6th November 2008

Watch this space for more information regarding the agenda and registration details.

Microsoft, BizTalk, BizTalk Server, SOA, Connected Systems, Vancouver, Canada

On March 4th of this year the Heroes Happen {Here} passed through Vancouver. The day proved to be quite interesting from a technical point of view with different tracks for different audiences. A few items I wanted to bring to your attention were:

1. Mohammed Akif led a great presentation on Implementing Service Oriented Architecture in your organization. He mentioned that he would post his slides when he got a chance. Let’s hope he does it soon. In the meantime, he has a recording about Service Orientation on his blog (No Spin Architecture) that is worth viewing.
2. It was good to see Richard Baumet as a SQL Server Expert at the event. The experts were answering questions posed to them by some of the attendees. Richard is the Vancouver PASS chapter leader. VanPASS have arranged for Donald Farmer to present this month (March 26th) on Predictive Analytics with SQL Server Analysis Services and Excel 2007 Data Mining Add-ins. Make sure that you attend the event if you can or view their live meeting.
3. Finally, I was amused to find a link to a comic section on the Heroes Happen {Here} site.
   - http://www.microsoft.com/canada/heroeshappenhere/cool-stuff/default.mspx
   - http://www.itdevcomics.com/
   Talk about stereotyping people working in the IT industry! Ok, I do like comics, but still - the nerve! My personal favourite reaction to this is a post by Justice Gray entitled Microsoft: Heroes Happen Here…well, fat and ugly heroes anyway.

Heroes Happen Here, VanPASS, Mohammed Akif, SOA, Service Orientation

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

Keynote: Microsoft’s Vision for the Next Generation Application Platform
Robert Wahbe, Corporate Vice President, Connected Systems Division
Don Ferguson, Technical Fellow
Steve Martin, Director, Connected Systems Division

During the keynote speech Robert Wahbe announced Microsoft’s vision, roadmap and next wave of products regarding SOA and the ability to make it available to firms of all sizes, codenamed “Oslo”. For more information see Microsoft’s press release. It comprises of a group of products and services that Microsoft intends to deliver over the next few years. This forms part of the vision of Software + Services that has been a Microsoft focus recently.

As part of reaching the goals set out by “Oslo” Microsoft will be enhancing the current technology available today, focusing on the following five areas:

• Server - Microsoft BizTalk Server “6” will provide a core foundation for distributed and highly scalable SOA and BPM solutions, and deliver the capability to develop, manage and deploy composite applications.
• Services - BizTalk Services “1” will offer a commercially supported release of Web-based services enabling hosted composite applications that cross organizational boundaries. Of note is that this release will include advanced messaging, identity and workflow capabilities.
• Framework - The Microsoft .NET Framework “4” release will further enable model-driven development with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF).
• Tools - New technology planned for Visual Studio “10” will make significant strides in end-to-end application life-cycle management through new tools for model-driven design of distributed applications.
• Repository - There will also be investments in aligning the metadata repositories across the Server and Tools product sets. Microsoft System Center “5,” Visual Studio “10” and BizTalk Server “6” will utilize a repository technology for managing, versioning and deploying models.

“Oslo in a nutshell” will comprise of Services which will extended from the client to cloud and hosted by Microsoft, (e.g. www.biztalk.net) and Models and making them a mainstream part of development.

The keynote also delved further into these two concepts.

• Model Driven Development (Models) - Microsoft aims to create new tools and a model that takes models across domains (Business Analysts, Architects, IT Professionals, and Developers).
• Internet Service Bus (Services ) - The services will be hosted on the cloud, allowing for the ability to take small enterprises and allow them to build customizable and simple connected Business Processes. The goal being to make it simple to connect people to applications they need. See the Architecture Journal - Journal 13 for a great article on this topic by Donald Ferguson, Dennis Pilarinos and John Schwchuk.

The final thing that stood out to me was the announcement of a SOA & BP Pack - which is a discounted software package including BizTalk Server 2006 R2, SharePoint Server, Visual Studio Team System and SQL Server 2005. I’m not sure how much this will cost, but it will need to be a reasonable cost if the aim to have firms of all sizes have the ability to deal with Software + Services.

Links:
www.microsoft.com/soa

People_Ready Processes with SP Workflows & Forms Services
Christian Stark, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft

This presentation was an introductory level presentation about using Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Office 2007. There were a few demos around the way Office products have built-in support for workflows and around creating simple worklfows with Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer. It touched on the following Microsoft products:

• Visio 2007 - the modeling tool, used to design and analyze processes.
• InfoPath 2007 - used to create forms for UI.
• Outlook 2007 - used to receive notifications.
• SharePoint Designer 2007 - used to create/customize simple to intermediate workflows.
• Word 2007, PowerPoint 2007, Excel 2007 - used to interact with workflows processes.
• Visual Studio 2005 - used to create workflows, extending templates, etc.

Also mentioned was the creation of the Microsoft Business Process Alliance which provides a technological alliance of business process partner, including Ascentn, K2.net, Global 360 and Metastorm. Finally, the final point made was that Microsoft would continue to provide the Business Process platform and that it would be relying on the partners to provide the business (product) solutions required by organizations.

Flexible Governance Infrastructure
Frank Martinez, Executive Vice President of Product Strategy, SOA

Frank presented a great vision of creating a governance infrastructure for SOA in the enterprise. He touched on the main goals of SOA governance to reduce cost through reuse, increase agility to better align IT and the business and to reduce the risk, fragility and complexity of integration by improving interoperability through standards.

He covered the top 5 fallacies regarding SOA governance:

1. We have good IT and application lifecycle governance, thus we have good SOA governance
2. We don’t have an SOA program, thus we don’t need SOA governance
3. We don’t have any services, thus we don’t need SOA governance
4. We already have run-time SOA management capabilities, thus we already have SOA governance
5. We already have an SOA registry/repository, thus we already have SOA governance

He covered a couple of SOA products, viz. Workbench SOA Governance (lifecycle related) and Service Manager SOA Management and Security (operations related).

He ended with the following take away’s

• There is No “one size fits all” governance model
• Effective SOA has to address people, policy, process and technology… in that order
• Governance automating delivers economies of scale …when it supports your governance model and structures
• Early cycle governance model (that is collaborative) can act as an accelerator for enterprise SOA goals and objectives
• Closed-loop policy definition, enforcement, auditing, compliance reporting is a must have for effective governance automation

For more information regarding governance and SOA see The Business Benefits of Shared Services in an SOA by Frank.

Panel Discussion

The final session of the day was a Microsoft panel discussion. The most notable piece of news there for me was that Visual Studio 2008 will ship by the end of this year.

The evening ended with an Ask the Experts Reception and Sponsor Expo where I managed to run into a few partners from K2.Net. It was a full first day for me with more to come tomorrow.

Microsoft, Microsoft SOA Conference, BizTalk, Oslo, Software + Services, Internet Service Bus, Windows Workflow Foundation, WF

This year I will be attending the Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference 2007 conference in Redmond again. I went to the conference last year and found it to be informative and a great place to network with some of the Microsoft MVP’s, partners, and customers. I am particularly looking forward to seeing a couple of friends (and ex-colleagues, but I won’t hold that against them) Simon Chester and Jason Shantz present on Healthcare Enterprise Integration: SOA Solutions. For those interested, their presentation will be on Wednesday, October 31st, from 2.30-3.30pm in the Hood room.

Let me know if you will be attending and we can arrange to meet!

Day 4 at the conference and there are some bleary eyed attendees. While the conference has been great so far, I think people are tired and ready to go home. Today’s presentations were all good in my opinion:

Aaron Skonnard, Cofounder, Pluralsight
Gruia Pitigoi-Aron, Microsoft
BizTalk Web Services: The Next Generation

Aaron pointed out that Service Orientation defines an architectural paradigm for software federation, with federation being the unification of self-governing entities.

• SOA is focused on unifying autonomous services, providing architectural governance, reducing dependencies and minimizing assumptions.
• SOA tenets help achieve loose coupling.
• Benefits of SOA are :
• Cost reductions, increased agility
• Business & software alignment
• Technology freedom
• Independent evolution
• Longer-term reuse
• Web Services provide a way to implement the SO design principles:
• XML reduces format complexities
• WS-* reduces transport complexities
• Web Services is not a silver bullet
• Not everything can use XML, SOAP, WS-*
• Can’t throw away existing investments
• Many web service stacks only support HTTP
• SOA must plan for disagreement on the following fronts
• Transport/application adapters
• Message format translators
• Message schema transformations
• Combining BizTalk Server 2006 with web services provides the complete solution:
• BTS fills various messaging integration gaps
• BTS embraces we technologies
• BTS 2006 R2 ship with WCF adapters
• New adapters for each mainstream binding
• A WCF-Custom adapter for extensibility
• WCF Adapters use cases
• Transaction message send/receive
• Using WS-* headers for routing/processing
• Using custom bindings (binding elements)
• Numerous security scenarios
• In-proc hosting of non-HTTP endpoints

Gruia then demonstrated using the WCF adapters to enable transactions and showed some security features using BizTalk Server, including single sign-on capability.

Aaron’s final point was that BTS 2006 R2 will provide full WS-* support, custom bindings, flexible hosting & communications.

Aaron Skonnard, Cofounder, Pluralsight
Gruia Pitigoi-Aron, Microsoft
BizTalk WCF Adapters: In-Depth

In this session Aaron and Gruia continued showing demos of the new WCF Adapters. There were no slides only the a dive into some real code (I found this refreshing).

The first demonstration showed a client sending a message to BTS through a web service with option to select separate XML versions for the message structure. BizTalk then routed the message to separate versions of the backend application. Version 1 used transport security (which resulted in a smaller message) and version 2 used message security. The BizTalk receive location was a WCF-NetTcp adapter using a custom pipeline to add a custom header to the message header that contains the version (it can also look for differences in actions, namespace, etc). The pipeline promotes the value (needs a property schema), the send port filters on the custom operation and then routes it to the service depending on the version number. It provided a model for versioning using web services.

The second demonstration showed how to build a custom WCF adapter. The binding tab on the adapter allows to pick different binding types (you can install other bindings or even create a custom binding element).

Don Smith, Product Manager, Patterns & Practices, Microsoft
Web Services Software Factory

Don started by speaking about how software factories help you build a specific kind of application (smart client, service, etc). He then went on to speak about the Software Factory that can be downloaded from the Patterns and Practices website. He mentioned that the software factory incorporates a variety of guidance content types and form factors:

• Architecture & design guidance, patterns, and how-to’s (readable/printable)
• Reference implementations (executable) - sample applications
• Application blocks (reusable)
• Guidance packages (actionable)

Guidance packages provided are:

• Open - documentation describes manual and automated tasks, the result of the automation is exposed
• Configurable - key configuration settings can be captured within Visual Studios, automated guidance is defined using XML
• Extensible - guidance can be tailored to meet specific requirements
• Verifiable - generated code can be verified for compliance within a standard

Don demonstrated the Software Factory by setting up a wine rating service for a winery.

The benefits of using the factory are:

• Increased quality
• Better consistency of projects/services
• Better performance of developer

According to Don the next version of the Software Factory with WCF support is set to be released in December 2006. It will include:

• Versioning
• ASMX/WCF Interop
• WF
• Message validation
• Security

Links:
Blog: Don Smith
Patterns & Practices
Web Service Software Factory
Service Factory Community Workspace
The LINQ Project

Microsoft, Microsoft SOA Conference, BizTalk, WCF, Windows Communication Foundation, Web Services Software Factory

It’s day 3 at the conference and the presentations were good, especially the one by Chandramouli Venkatesh on the Biztalk Server 2006 R2 Adapter Framework. It provided some interesting insight into the upcoming release slated for the 1^st quarter of 2007. It was mentioned that beta 1 should be out by the end of the year.

Paul Andrew, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft
Windows Workflow Foundation: Creating Custom Activities for Workflows

The level of the presentation was at an introductory level, covering topics from “What is workflow” to speaking about workflow runtime, and the Base Activity Library (BAL). I’ve listed some points that Paul mentioned:

• A workflow is a software implementation of business process or business logic.
• Workflows are transparent, flexible and extensible.
• WF is not for end users or business people but for developers. It does not have any administration tools or a reporting interface and provides no direct business value without development.
• WF is a framework for building workflow-enabled applications.
• Workflows are modeled as a tree of activities.
• Custom application logic should be modeled using activities
  Activities are all of the steps within a workflow or reusable components for composing workflows. He had a good analogy where he compared workflows to UI forms and controls, where Workflows are like Forms and Activities like Controls.
• Build custom activities when they are composite activities (multiple basic activities merged into one activity), it is anticipated that they will be reused or there is a high level of business logic within one

The demo was a simple console workflow that showed how to build custom activities. Paul added a Validator and a Designer to the activity. What I had not seen before was the effect of the designer which changed the way that the workflow was presented in the Visual Studio workflow designer. It is a great way to develop a set of activities that are going to be used by your organization and providing a different look for them. In fact you can go as far as categorizing activities by their function and giving a different look to each one, similar to the way that functoids are colour coded in BizTalk. Different information can be added to the activity as well.

Blog: Paul Andrew

Eilene Hao, Program Manager, Office Shared Services, Microsoft
Windows Workflow Foundation: Developing Office 2007 Workflows in Visual Studio 2005

Eilene’s presentation was mostly a walkthrough demonstration of how to build a workflow for SharePoint using Visual Studio and InfoPath 2007.

Recommended downloads for developing workflows:

• SharePoint Server 2007: Software Development Kit
• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: Software Development Kit
• 2007 Office System Starter Kit: Enterprise Content Management Starter Kit

The five steps used to build these workflows are:

1. Model workflow in Visual Studio
2. Design InfoPath forms
3. Bind form data & code logic
4. Deploy the workflow
5. Debug on running server

Her development recommendation was that to develop on the server, either virtual machine environment or on an actual server box.

Steve Swartz, Architect, Connected Systems Division, Microsoft
Clemens Vasters, Program Manager, Connected Systems Division, Microsoft
Presentation

This was the least beneficial presentation that I have attended so far. This is by no means a reference on the presentation or the presenters; in fact they managed to keep me interested even though I am in not interested in presentation much. That being said, my notes are frugal at best. They spoke mostly about design patterns for rich clients, and covered the following patterns in more detail:

There main objectives for the presentation were:

• Connected client technologies open opportunities
• Have more options that you probably take advantage of
• Choose the right option for each task

Chandramouli Venkatesh, Group Manager, Connected Systems Division, Microsoft
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Adapter Framework - Walkthrough

This was, in my opinion, the best presentation yet. Chandramouli provided a walkthrough of the Adapter Framework (AF). The main points were that there is no unified adapter development framework for .Net and that adapters today are built to be specific to each of the consuming hosts like BTS, MIIS.

The goal of the AF is to enable easy development of high quality, metadata driven, host-agnostic, custom adpapters to LOBs. The idea is for them to extend WCF and to make the adapters consumption exactly same as other WCF adapters.

The benefits will be that it will:

• Enable reaching multiple programming models e.g. ADO.net, WCF channel, etc.
• Enable exposing a web service face to the system being adapted automatically (via adapter host)
• WCF channel architecture extensibility points enable easy customization of adapter behaviors
• Development tools

Chandramouli went on to demonstrate using the SAP adapter from Visual Studio 2005 and from a BizTalk Orchestration. He also demonstrated using the “.Net 3.0 Adapter Development Wizard” to develop a custom adapter. Note: he mentioned that the wizard name may still change prior to release.

Microsoft, Microsoft SOA Conference, BizTalk, BizTalk R2 2006, Adapter Framework, WF, Windows Workflow Foundation, WCF, Windows Communication Foundation