Integrating to the max...BizTalk Style

Introducing: ITConnector Cloud integrations are an important part of adopting newer IT technologies in your business. Our Cloud Integration team consists of talented professionals who are committed to delivering value and achieving results for customers and are focused on delivering high-quality services. We do this through support in: Azure Cloud Enterprise Integration Automation and Connections through APIs Fast, Efficient and Smarter Processes and Systems and People Connect Deploy your ERP faster with the right integration strategy You can follow Sander / ITConnector with these links:  https://www.itconnector.eu https://nl.linkedin.com/in/sandernefs Company site:

It's been a long time since my last post. Hereby a partial explanation for that, with the note that this blog will remain active for the purpose of being a resource for historical references. My IT career started with programming, and adventures within holland, as well as overseas. When I realised programming is something you can specify, I figured that providing added value is crucial for a long term career and decided to focus on process centric roles. I started with webservice integration and eventually from that to process integration using BizTalk. The great feeling when discussing high level processes and implementing solutions within days, even highly scalable and interfacing with LOB systems is great. After several years of implementing solutions like these, I started questioning if all of this work was justified by the business case, if the solution was actually contributing, if the choices had been valid. In other words, I needed to understand the choices made. When...

In My post ‘ Service Bus Management ’ I pointed out a way of implementing a DTAP strategy for managing the Service Bus environment. There’s now a great post available from Microsoft which goes into more detail about other aspects of managing the Azure subscriptions and other artefacts which is quite useful when setting up your Azure environments. Follow this link to the ‘Azure Implementation Guidelines’ HTH, Sander

Tags van Technorati: NuGet In my previous post I described a way to use NuGet for packaging libraries, often used in projects. This post is an addendum to my post ‘enter 2014 with NuGet’ look at the additional features possible. In this post i’m looking into Visual Studio features (project templates) and the NuGet package feature PowerShell . I’ve been working on an API (see my next posts, Service Bus Series - ‘the case for service bus’), and during the development I wanted to make sure that explaining the API to another co-worker was a nicer experience than just going through the code. To ensure that the developers could easily connect and understand the usage of the API, I decided to create sample projects using templates. Templates are a great way to provide the user with a sample project from within Visual Studio. I wanted more… and with the features available in NuGet packages, i’ve found a way that worked for my scenario. I’ve been using the principles; Each project in Visu...

The new Azure Portal (in preview) is really great. Bundles a lot of the functionality that is sometimes hard to retrieve Azure Health (e.g. BizTalk Services / Service Bus) Billing information View your resources (at this moment only Resource Groups / WebSites / Team Projects / SQL Databases / MySQL Databases) Notifications (the alert functionality) The concept of ‘Journeys’ (preselection filters you’ve implicitly placed so that you can quickly look at the dashboard the way you want) Some screenshots to show how much more insight this provides… Azure Health   Billing information View your resources (at this moment only Resource Groups / WebSites / Team Projects / SQL Databases / MySQL Databases) Notifications Journeys (preselection filters you’ve implicitly placed so that you can quickly look at the dashboard the way you want)   The portal brings a lot of features together that had to be done using different areas, like the billing portal, which only showed...

  [UPDATE] Sample solution available on OneDrive ( https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=5eaaef40eefdaddb&id=5EAAEF40EEFDADDB%21109 ) A solution consists of projects, projects uses components, components are of a specific version, changing the components thus requires a versioning strategy….which one are you using? All solutions which are architected into several tiers, have a form of layering with (which I hope) an abstraction of re-usable components. A project which is used to implement automated order approvals (AOA), with a requirement to implement logging, and retrieve something out of the database will likely have the minimum of 3 projects Solution AOA Project - AOA.Core Project - AOA.DataProject Project - Common.Logging Let’s assume, that the Logging library is also used by another solution: BOB Solution BOB Project – BOB.Core Project – BOB DataProject Project - Common.Logging When the requirements of logging change, and the project BOB needs a specific change d...

Is this your project approach? Azure Project X == Azure Subscription X Azure Project X Budget == Azure Billing Alert on Azure subscription X Azure Project X Monitoring == setup (SCOM) Azure monitoring Azure Project DEV == prepared to support the application after Go-Live? Azure Subscriptions http://blog.kloud.com.au/2013/07/30/good-practices-for-manag… Azure Billing http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/dn47977… Azure SCOM http://blogs.technet.com/b/dcaro/archive/2012/05/03/how-to-monitor-your-windows-azure-application-with-system-center-2012-part-2.aspx Regards, Sander

There are so many options, and ways of developing a solution that I would like to share some of the guidelines we are developing internally. At this moment, I will do this on the blog you are reading, focusing on the solution architectures. In parallel I’m working for my company on the enterprise architectural guidelines, and I’m trying to follow TOGAF principles to lay down the architecture. I’m hoping to be able to define the architecture context, general architecture, and relate it to the solution architecture. In the perfect world, with all the time to do this….this should result in Architectural concepts, which will be posted on: http://theenterprisecontinuum.blogspot.nl/ focused from the top-down approach of setting architectural requirements such as ‘every project must leverage a monitoring capability’, and this blog: http://snefs.blogspot.com where I will post the solution for this concept. The first post (which is basically the same as this): http://theenterprisecontinuu...

At this moment there are several ways to build exciting new applications. In several projects, we are using a hybrid/cloud architecture, specifically Windows Azure. In my upcoming posts I would like to share some of the guidelines we are developing internally, in this case specifically a way of handling errors in Azure queues/topic-subscriptions. A lot of the Azure (integration) Architectures (and even between web-worker roles) will likely use some elements of the Azure Service Bus, or Azure Queues. Going through the different architectures is not part of this post, so I will suffice with a slide from the Service Bus Deep Dive presentation; Within our company Caesar , several internal systems have been created and where possible purchased. One of them, CRM4.0 was outdated, or not suited for all our requirements (among them Accessibility online). We decided to migrate our CRM system to the Cloud, using Dynamics CRM. As not all systems are migrate and we are in the process of analyzi...