Hi folks, we’ve set a cracking pace into 2012 and are in need of an additional team member.

If you love technology, we love technology and I’d love to hear from you to be part of my team.

You will be stimulated, constantly thinking and challenged – azure, integration, biztlak, sql, windows phone 7 and many other technology areas you’ll be exposed to. Integration is all about the glue we use to achieve the result.

If you’re keen for a chat check out the blurb - http://www.breeze.net/about/jobs.aspx

Cheers,

Mick.

Thought I’d start off the year with a bang around Azure and what’s been happening in the land of Integration.

So I contacted a Conor Brady to see what was cooking.

The user group is meeting next Thursday 19th Jan 2012.

Here’s the blurb…..

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'Integration using Windows Azure Application Integration Services'

Local Integration & Training guru Mick Badran CTO at Breeze Training & Consulting and veteran BizTalk Server MVP will present on 'Integration using Windows Azure Application Integration Services'

The presentation will show how to use Microsoft Windows Azure to be the cornerstone of your integration strategy, whether it’s a small piece or larger deployment. Find out what new tools you can use to extend your existing toolbox and the best way to use them.

This session will cover:

- Strategies on complementing your on-premise <-> cloud integration and what tool to use when.

- High availability solutions with a demo of fault tolerance.

- Casting an eye what’s around the corner to new features coming out of Azure Labs such as EAI, EAI Bridges, EDI – azure style and new XML over HTTP endpoints.

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Here’s the link to REGISTER - http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2739308345

See you there!

Mick.

Well folks – the appfabric labs have come out with a real gem recently.

In CTP we have:

• EDI + EAI processing
• AS2 http/s endpoints
• ‘Bridges’
• Transforms

and of course the latest version of

• ServcieBus, Queues and Topics.

To get the real benefit from this ‘sneak peek’ there’s a bit of setup required. To those familiar with BizTalk there’s a few EDI screens declaring parties/partners and agreements you’ll have seen before.

To get cracking:

1. Update your local bits with the latest and greatest - Installing the Windows Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs - December 2011
   Part of this install is to install the Service Bus Connect component, which installs the BizTalk 2010 LOB Adapter pack.
   
   
   So this is really quite interesting. As the WCF LOB Adapter SDK provides a framework for developers to build out ‘adapters’ to connect systems/endpoints through a sync/async messaging pattern.
   
   The BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010 is the BizTalk Team set of adapters built on top of the WCF Adapter Framework. The BizTalk Adapter pack includes:
   - SQL Server Adapter. Hi performance sql work, notifications, async reads, writes etc.
   - SAP Adapter – uses the SAP Client APIs (under the hood) to talk directly to SAP. Very powerful
   - SIEBEL Adapter
   - Oracle DB Adapter
   - Oracle ES Adapter
   
   These adapters are exposed as ‘WCF Bindings’ with BizTalk or a small amount of code, allows you to expose these adapters as callable WCF Services.
   
   What does this mean in our case here?
   If you think about your on-premise Oracle system, we now have a local means of accessing Oracle and we can then push the message processing (e.g. a new order arrived) into our ‘cloud’ bridge where we have the immediate benefit of HA + Scale. Do some work there, and spit the result out any which way you want. Maybe back down to on-premise, or in a Queue or to Azure Storage.
   
   
2. Sign up to AppFabricLabs – http://portal.appfabriclabs.com and provision your ‘servicebus’ service.
   This provides your EDI/EAI relay endpoints and also provides a way for you to listen/send requests to/from the cloud.
   
3. Here I have used mickservices as my ServiceBus namespace.
   
   (I created a Queue and a couple of Topics for later use – not really needed here)
   Note: grab your HIDDEN KEY details from here – owner + <key#>
   
4. From within the Portal Create a Queue called samples/gettingstarted/queueorders
   
   
   
5. Register at the EDI Portal – http://edi.appfabriclabs.com
   Even though this says ‘EDI’ think of it as your sandpit. It’s where all your ‘widgets’ live that are to run in Azure Integration Services.
   
   The registration form had me stumped for a little bit. Here’s the details that work.
   
   
   
   Notice my servicebus namespace – just the first word. I previously had the whole thing, then variations of it.
   Issuer Name: owner
   Issuer secret: <the hidden key from above>
   
   Click save/register and you should be good here.
   
6. Once this is done – click on Settings –> AS2 and Enable AS2 message processing (which is EDI/HTTP – you might be lucky enough to get the msgs as XML, but most times no). This will create some endpoints for you b2bgateway… style endpoints.
   
   
   
7. At this stage, have a look under Resources and you’ll notice that it’s empty. But…they have Schemas, Transforms and Certificates. We’ll come back to that later.
   
8. Let’s head to Visual Studio 2010 with the updates installed and open up the Sample Order Processing project.
   
   I installed my samples under c:\samples
   
   
   If all opens well you should see:
   
   
   Note: there’s a couple of new items here: (expand out artifacts)
   *.bcs – Bridge. There’s a MSDN Article describing these – I was like ‘what???’. Basically these are a ‘processing pipe’ of which various operations can be performed on a message in stages. These stages are ‘atomic’ and they also have ‘conditions’ as to whether they *need* to be applied to the said message. So a bridge could take a message, convert it to XML and broadcast the message out to a Topic.
   
   Opening up the designer – it gets pretty cool I must say!!!
   
   
   Note the ‘operations’ on the LHS. I must have a play with these guys  
   Another thought – how extensible is this? I’d bet we could write our own widgets to throw on the design surface as well.
   
   By double clicking on the BridgeOrders component, you can see the designer surface come up with the ‘stage processing’.
   
   
   
   Here you can see the ‘bridge’ (I wonder if that term will last till the release) will accept only 2 types of message schemas – PO1 + PO2. Maps them out to a more generic PO format.
   The map – XMLTransform from my initial testing only applies one map, the first one that matches the source schema (this is the same as BizTalk).
   
   Close the bridge view down and leave the BridgeConfiguration open.
   
9. Click anywhere on the white surface of the BridgeConfiguration and set your Service Namespace property from the Properties window (this guy was hard to find!!)
   Put <your service namespace> you created originally.
   
   
10. Save and click Deploy and a Deployment window comes up – put your details in from above.
    
    
    After deployment completes, keep an eye on the Output window as this has all the URLs you’ll need for the next step. In particular the BridgeOrders.
    
    Feel free to go back to your Azure Portal –> Resources and see your deployed bits in there, Schemas, Transforms etc.
    
    
11. Running what you’ve built – sending a message to the ‘bridge’ (here I’ve borrowed info from the ‘Readme.html’ in the sample project folder)
    We don’t need to setup the whole EDI Trading partner piece. – just send messages to a restful endpoint – aka the bridge.
    
1. From the samples folder locate the Tools\MessageSender project. (you may have to build it in VS.NET first)
2. from a command prompt run messagesender.exe
   
   
   In my case it looks like this:
   
   
   
   Took me a little to get this originally, make sure all your VS.NET stuff is deployed properly.
   
   So effectively we have sent PO1.xml to our ‘Bridge’ and it’s been accepted, validated and transformed into ‘something else’ and popped onto a Queue called Samples/gettingstarted/QueueOrders.
   
   We will now get the message Reader to Read it.
   
12. From under the Samples\Tools folder locate the MessageReceiver project and build if required.
13. From a command prompt at that location, run the following to Listen to the queue
    
    

Wrapping up -

Here is obviously a quick walk through of what’s possible, performance, scale and throughput are other measures that we haven’t got here – given it’s CTP/Labs we’re not quite ready for that conversation.

BizTalk adapter pack will expose out for e.g. your SAP system to a wider audience and imagine having restful WCF services to call that provide you customer data in the format you want…or better still…deliver it straight to you!
(currently in BTS 2010, the adapter pack is licensed separately, it’s part of BTS standard or enterprise. BTS2009 it *was* licensed separately for RRP $5K. Maybe we’ll see this as a separate component again.)
Or you could do like the SharePoint team and write a brand new WCF Adapter (‘connector’ in their terms) – ‘Duet’ and spend 18 months doing so.

Some things I’d like to see here is a Rules Processor or Engine – being a long long BizTalk fan, the rules engine is a massive strength of any loosely coupled solution. The majority of BizTalk solutions I come across don’t employ any rules engines…or better still, Windows Workflow 2,3+ (but not 4 or 4.5) has a rules ‘executor’ which is very powerful in it’s own right. Who’s heard or used the Policy shape?

Given that this is a sneak peak at what is on the horizon, this is definitely a space not to miss.

Get those trial accounts going and enjoy!

In particular I’d like to call out Rick’s Article (well done Rick!) for a great read on this space also.

Mick.

Hi folks, as you may/may not have been aware these are the core corner stone technologies of the MS Integration Stack.

The teams have been busily plugging away and coming up with the new versions – 4.5 corresponding to .NET 4.5 framework.

Here’s some links that describe what’s new from MS Santa & his elves:

1. What's New in Windows Communication Foundation 4.5
1. New Items I found of note are:
• New Service Transport Default values – keep an eye on these.
• Improvements from VS.NET 2011 – validation , better intellisence support.
• Streaming improved – true async (yay!)
• WebSocket support – through NetHttp(s)Binding
• Single WSDL file generation with ‘?singleWSDL’ (which is pretty handy)
• Self hosted + II hosted allow you to get to ServiceHost from code for dynamic configuration.
• Binary Encoder supports compression!! – this is generally gzip compression.
• My personal favourite – UDP support
  
2. What's New in Windows Workflow Foundation in .NET 4.5
1. New Items of note are:
• New Activites – NoPersistScope (possible previously but we needed to write code)
• WF Designer improvements – several here, but the ‘Outline view’ looks to be easier to work with.
• C# Expressions – where’s the F# ones ??
• Designer Annotations – add your own comments to keep control of the jungle that is built.
• WF Versioning – use WorkflowIdentity & DefinitionIdentity to define the version. WorkflowServiceHost supports multiple versions of the same WF. All pretty cool.
• WF Designers can still be rehosted – I’ve used that many a place.
• Contract First Development – ticks the boxes.
  
2. WF Rules – still didn’t make the cut. There is a sample for WF4 using a custom Activity calling back to WF 3.5 Policy4 it’s called. It uses ‘interop’ back to WF3.5 and is found here - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd797584(v=VS.100).aspx
1. Will have to check out perf in this new land on these rules.
   
3. Async CTP – while this didn’t make the ‘whats new’ list, it certainly does deserve a mention here.
   Over the last year I’ve built some pretty serious F# projects, and F# has the async support through and through the language. After over coming the challenge of learning it, the Async functionality is absolutely brilliant!!! F# does a great job in being able to turn a non-async chunk of code/method/class into an async one with by using the keyword async and a !. It’s straight forward from that aspect.
   
   It’s great to see the C# & VB.NETs being able to use the same fundamentals (albeit not as slick IMO ). – see a previous POST - http://blogs.breezetraining.com.au/mickb/2011/04/26/EasierAsyncProgrammingComingToCVBSoon.aspx
   
   As developers we sit here and say – what do I need this for? My code runs fine as it….and yes for the most part of what we do on our machine it does. This technology really comes into it’s own when you want consistent throughput from a solution with 1 person or 10000 concurrent people using it. That’s the difference.
   
   To use it:
1. Get VSNET 2011 (as it requires a new compiler)
2. Use ASYNC CTP (refresh3) with VSNET2010 SP1
   
4. Check it out from here - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/gg316360

Did this just sneak up on you too???

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/biztalk_server_team_blog/archive/2011/12/08/biztalk-server-2010-r2.aspx

Well folks it’s week 5 of a 12 week program where the great Can Too swim coaches train you and put you through a challenge.

I signed up for a ‘2.5km’ ocean swim – Palm beach to whale beach. Which for me is well off my map and out of my comfort zone – so it’s a challenge for me mentally and physically, but really only a small price to pay for the challenges that cancer sufferers.

My endeavor is raise money for cancer research – you have the chance to make a tax deductible donation through my page - http://cantoosydneyswimprogram.gofundraise.com.au/page/Mick_Badran
(my target is $1250 in total)

My pledge is that I will swim 4 times a week, rain hail or shine (just so I don’t drown in this swim) – feel free to come and join me if you’re in the area. Early week – at Wileys Baths (near Coogee), later in the week Clovelly laps.

So what can I offer you as incentive – as an MVP each year I get a MSDN Subscription “Microsoft Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN” (many thanks Microsoft).
Check out the versions - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/subscriptionschart.aspx

To whomever donates the most I will give you this! I’d also really like to put this subscription to good use.

You maybe starting out, starting up, or whatever – you will have all MS Products at your development disposal.

I challenge you for cancer research, good luck and Merry Christmas!!!

Important: You can contact me on twitter on - @mickba

So your SQL 2012 is US$6.8K/core which roughly equates to 4 cores = a SQL 2008 Ent license.

How many DB servers have 4 cores? I wonder if there’s a way now to limit the cores then that SQL 2012 will use on for e.g. an 8 or 12 core machine.

Will this change by RTM?? I wonder.

(on a side note – way back when ‘hyper threading’ originally came out, when 1 CPU looked liked ‘2’ to the O/S, MS wanted to license per visible CPU. Intel & AMD at the time said if you do that we’ll take the feature out…nowadays we call them ‘CORES’ and looks like the discussion has come full circle)

The Azure team has been busy and what a nice email for a Friday.

So that means no inbound charges (ServiceBus could be the exception) and they’ve just dropped the outbound charges.

Bewdy!

----- snip -----

While wrestling with SharePoint 2007 SP2 today, I got a great error message.

“SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wiza” – Wizzzzzaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!
(this sits nicely with Shazza, Mappa, Timmy, Kimmy, and on it goes…”)

Now to sort the problem out…