Sergio Del Piccolo

   On Monday Microsoft announced the release of the next version of the ESB Toolkit (renamed from the ESB Guidance). The toolkit and it’s documentation is available for download, there is a ESB Toolkit MSDN site as well as a forum.

The ESB Toolkit 2.0 provides key building blocks required for implementing a service-oriented infrastructure (SOI) including:

• Endpoint run-time discovery and virtualization. The service consumer does not need to be aware of the service provider location and endpoint details; a new or modified service provider can be added to the ESB, without interruptions to the service consumer.
• Loosely coupled service composition. The service provider and service consumer do not need to be aware of service interaction style.
• Dynamic message transformation and translation. The mapping definition between distinct message structure and semantics is resolved at run time.
• Dynamic routing. Run-time content-based, itinerary-based, or context-based message routing.
• Centralized exception management. Exception management framework, services, and infrastructure elements that make it possible to create, repair, resubmit, and compensate fault messages that service consumers or BizTalk components submit.
• Quality of service. An asynchronous publish/subscribe engine resolves different levels of service availability and provides high availability, scalability, and message traceability for ESB implementations.
• Protocol transformation. Providing the ability for service provider and service consumer to interact via different protocols including WS-* standards for Web Services. For example, a service provider can send an HTTP Web Service request, which will result in sending a message via Message Queuing.
• Extensibility. Provides multiple extensibility points to extend functionality for endpoint discovery, message routing, and additional BizTalk Server adapters for run time and design time.

For more information, see SOA and Web Services section in the New Features in BizTalk 2009 Web page.

Links:
ESB Toolkit 2.0
Documentation
MSDN ESD Toolkit site
ESB Toolkit Forum

Microsoft, BizTalk, BizTalk Server, BizTalk Server 2009, SOA, Service Oriented Architecture, SOI, Service Oriented Infrastructure, ESB, Enterprise Service Bus

The Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference sessions for 2009 are available for download and viewing. The conference which was held at the end of January contained some interesting sessions on SOA, BizTalk, Oslo and Dublin.

The content can be viewed on Windows Live here: http://soaconference2009.spaces.live.com/default.aspx

One of the best sessions I attended was on the ESB Guidance 2.0 presented by Peter Kelcey. Peter’s session can be found here: http://soaconference2009.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!FA6FC7F5DB1C07!136.entry

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

Microsoft Patterns and Practices announced the CTP release of the Microsoft ESB Guidance 2.0 for Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009. There are several modifications and additions in the new release summarised below:

New Features and Components

• New samples
  • SSO Configuration provider for Enterprise Library 4.0
  • Multiple Web Service Execution Sample
  • Exception Handling Service Sample
• New ESB Web services
  • Generic Itinerary Services (no itinerary header required)
• New core features
  • Alignment with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 (Beta)
  • ESB Configuration tool
  • Centralized itinerary store
  • Itinerary resolver components
  • Itinerary forwarder pipeline component
  • Itinerary selector pipeline component
  • Itinerary designer
  • Centralized configuration uses Enterprise Library 4.0 Configuration Block
  • Centralized caching uses Enterprise Library 4.0 Caching Block
  • Multiple service invocation using both messaging and orchestrations
  • Itinerary BAM tracking
  • Improved ESB Core engine and itinerary execution

Changes to Existing Features and Components

• Resolver and Adapter Provider Framework. The Dispatch and Transform classes have been consolidated to support batch routing of messages within the Dispatch pipeline component using document specification type, and support for itineraries.
• Itinerary caching pipeline component. The Enterprise Library 4.0 is used for configurable cache management.
• UDDI Publisher Utility. UDDI3 support only with publishing endpoints using publisher-defined key.
• General bug fixes.

Unfortunately this this release is only available for Microsoft BizTalk Server TAP customers. If you are fortunate enough to qualify visit the Microsoft Connect site. 

Links
MSDN ESB Site
CodePlex ESB Site

Microsoft, BizTalk, BizTalk Server, BizTalk Server 2009, SOA, Service Oriented Architecture, ESB, Patterns and Practices, Enterprise Service Bus, CodePlex

For those of you attending the Connected Systems Conference in Vancouver, I’m presenting the session on ESB Guidance 2.0 and Service Virtualization with Jim Bowyer from Microsoft Canada. This will be an exciting (geek license invoked) look into the upcoming release of the ESB Guidance v 2.0 and the enhancements it promises to deliver. Also covered in the presentation will be the topic of service virtualization using the Managed Services Engine (MSE). If you haven’t heard of the MSE, it’s worth looking at as a part of a balanced and robust SOA infrastructure.

It’s not too late register. Click here to register for Vancouver and here to find links to the other Canadian conference venues.

If you do plan on coming to the conference, make sure to stop by and say hello.

Microsoft, BizTalk, BizTalk Server, SOA, Connected Systems, Vancouver, Canada, ESB, Enterprise Service Bus, MSE, Managed Services Engine, CodePlex

The annual Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference 2009 will be held in Redmond from January 27th-30th 2009. There have been a couple of changes to the conference that is usually held every October but is being pushed back this year due to PDC 2008 running at the same time.

There are a couple of editions year, one for Partners and the other for Customers. The Partner briefing will be being held on January 26th-27th and the Customer briefing on January 28th-30th.

There are also a couple of tracks offered for the conference:

• SOA & BPM Best Practices – highlighting case studies and technical trends providing guidance and information on how to achieve a robust and sound long-term SOA strategy.
• Technology Offerings – deep dives into existing and future technologies including .Net Framework, BizTalk Server, Visual Studio, Cloud Services and Oslo.

Pricing is $599 for partners and $899 for customers (although customers who register by December 1st, 2008 will only pay $599).

Links:
Partner registration
Customer registration

Microsoft, Microsoft SOA Conference, SOA, Business Process, BizTalk

In a previous post I mentioned that the Canadian Connected Systems Team are planning on hosting a roadshow in three cities across Canada this fall.  I managed to get some information regarding the agenda and registration to the events.

The roadshow dates and registration details are:

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

Agenda

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

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