Integrating to the max...BizTalk Style

For a project i’ve been developing a Pilot using Azure VM’s. The VM was all nicely configured, IIS/network/TFS integration/all running smoothly. 2 weeks ago, i could see i would hit spending limit, within a couple of days. I created a support ticket, with questions about the spending limit, where i found out that removing it could only be done by the account owner (on holiday), resetting it was not possible, and that hitting your limit (what i did), would remove the Virtual machine, disable access to the subscription, so that you are effectively…toast… The good news…this won’t happen to you! Scott Guthrie announced a number of Windows Azure Improvements today, which would have solved my scenario, and prevents this from happening again, so really nice updates, however in my case….with a disabled subscription….this does not help… ….for me it meant i had to find a workaround…my plan was to create a new dedicated project subscription, and migrate my VM to that subscription….there was o...

After attending the UKCSUG and BTUG I have some answered questions to some challenges I faced during my implementation with BizTalk Services. Hereby my findings; Challenges I'm wondering how to cope with some of the following challenges in this scenario, and would like to know resource information available which addresses some of these challenges; Validating / Signing of messages A requirement is to validate the incoming message by inspecting an signature in the message body, and signing the outgoing message. I now that a custom inspector would help, however, i have no idea where to store these certificates as these would be used inside the BizTalk Service. Q: Is this functionality possible within BizTalk Services? A: In the custom inspector this functionality can be added, this however means that the certificate must be stored somewhere. This cannot be stored within the BizTalk Service, however could be stored in a BLOB storage container.   Handling errors when connect...

This Wednesday I’m attending the CSUG – The Hybrid Organisation (sold out!). During my evaluation of several Integration products (BizTalk / BizTalk Services / Neuron ESB / MuleESB) I had some concerns/questions on BizTalk Services. My goal is to get answers on the following scenario a) I receive a HTTP Post with an Xml Body payload b) This contains a signature which i need to validate c) Transform the Xml body payload to another Xml message d) Perform a HTTP Post with the new Xml message to an external HTTP url and sign the message e) Route the response back, similar to the aforementioned steps, where an error needs to be mapped to a dedicated error response Challenges I'm wondering how to cope with some of the following challenges in this scenario, and would like to know resource information available which addresses some of these challenges; Validating / Signing of messages A requirement is to validate the incoming message by inspecting an signature in the message ...

Update (12-09-2013): slides can be found here http://www.slideshare.net/SanderNefs/biz-talk-deployment-framework-stripped As a consultant, my role is to give advice, work on projects and help out customers. As I don’t want to be the Single Point of Truth, my approach is to  transfer my knowledge in workshops/sessions with the internal developers or people who I think should know about certain technologies. In the past i’ve used the BizTalk Deployment Framework (BTDF) quite often. I have experienced that getting to know the concepts and working with it, is a developers choice , however this choice  impacts the way administrators need to work. This post summarizes my experiences and contains some of the slides i used when having workshops on the BTDF, with some caveats, and thinks to think about. First of all, why? Why would i need a new framework, what is wrong with the way i do my deployments right now? Nothing , however, in certain cases, you might run into some limita...