Integrating to the max...BizTalk Style

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 One of them, CRM4.0 was outdated, or not suited for all our requirements (among them Accessibility online).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...

After following the IASA Architecture Core course, I like to continue with my personal learning and improvement, and focus on my architectural skills, among others. This year, by following a course on the Theory of Constraints , which is a really interesting theory which will help analyze the core issue behind a problem, and have followed the MetaPlan training which allows for a structured goal oriented brainstorm. For next year, I enrolled in a training on TOGAF. In my preparation for this, I stumbled upon the Open2Study website, where you can follow a lot of courses for free. I enrolled this weekend into the EntrArch course, which includes TOGAF. In one of the additional resources, it referred to a lot of very useful articles. So after diving into a lot of them, for learning more about architectural styles, frameworks and more. I can recommend the following; TOGAF A Comparison of the Top Four Enterprise-Architecture Methodologies Survey of Architecture Frameworks    ...

On 28-11-2013 the BizTalk User Group ( LinkedIn group BTUG NL ) meeting took place in Amsterdam, which was organized by Estreme . The purpose of the BizTalk User Group is to have regular meetings with members in the community on the topic of integration. Since Azure provides more and more integration capabilities, by means of the Azure Service Bus, and the Go-Live of Windows Azure BizTalk Services (WABS), the meetings are diverse and very interesting. As Azure is very broad, the BTUG focuses on the following elements of the Microsoft Integration stack: On Premise (WCF/SSIS/BizTalk/Windows Server Service Bus etc) Cloud - Windows Azure (Windows Azure BizTalk Services / Service Bus etc). Announcements An upcoming event in January is the BizTalk Saturday, focused on Windows Azure BizTalk Services Next year, a BTUG Beach event is organized, an informal community event The next upcoming meeting will be held in March Feedback BizTalk Summit - Steef - Jan Wiggers Steef - Jan Wiggers pr...

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 ...

One of the best tech-ed sessions in 2013 was from Haishi Bai who was discussing Patterns & Practices for Composing Cloud Services and was explaining a design pattern he was working on; As of now he is posting details on his pattern, and builds on concepts that already are highly recommended, but combined with cloud technologies allows you to prepare your applications for the future; VVM - Part1 VVM - Part2 One of the key components is that you should prepare for scale (scale-up, scale-out). As some companies already faced that challenge, i’ve posted some links where you can find their approach and experiences; NetFlix http://advance.blackducksoftware.com/content/WRNetflix DropBox http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/11/how-did-dropbox-scale-to-175m-users-a-former-engineer-details-the-early-days/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=409881258919 Kind regards, Sander Tags van Technorati: Azure , Scale , VVM

If we consider the BizTalk architecture; from the 'BizTalk Server: Presentations Gallery' We can see that there are 3 possible places where your maps are executed (in classic BizTalk); Inbound (on the receive port) Outbound (on the send port) Business Process (within an orchestration) So if there any problems, which approach should we follow, which options do we have…I hope to answer this in the following section, and these are things to think about, it’s not enforced, or defined in a book, it just a good thing, to be aware of your options and have a strategy. Solving an BizTalk map issue in a live environment ; We have an issue, we know it is in the map (analysis of the exception, output) We let the team from ‘fixoursystem-land’ solve the issue in their dev, they test it before usage We deploy it to the test environment, they test it before usage (deployed by a dev/admin) We deploy it to the critical/live environment….(deployed by an admin) We need to ensure t...

This time we will follow up on the Service Virtualization concept I mentioned in my previous post. Service redesign Apply security Monitoring Service redesign Why? A webservice might not have been developed by your team, a changes in the web service should not break your existing implementation, it might not meet certain standards, resulting for example as shown in the figure below, in a ‘large’ wsdl which contains a lot of methods, of which you only need one. Consider the port in BizTalk generated based on a web service, it is generated with every method defined in the webservice, if one of the methods changes, it will lead to a broken solution, although we only needed to implement a single method.      http://abdulrafaysbiztalk.wordpress.com/ We can change this by defining a Virtual Service layer around the webservice, for this, we will use the public Geoipservice which (unfortunately) only exposes 2 methods (but I think the example provides a good ...