Integrating to the max...BizTalk Style

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

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...

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

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...

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...

Are you writing an application that has high performance requirements, are you wondering how Azure Diagnostics works, do you want to write your own logging framework….this might help you out. Not so long ago, the Application Server Group ISV Partner Advisory Team posted an excellent article on how to instrument specifically BizTalk applications, by leveraging the ETW infrastructure. This allowed for significant high performance tracing and was measured against other frameworks as you can see in the diagram below; In the latest EntLib releases, this has been included in the Semantic Logging Application Block (SLAB) . What’s really interesting is that there are 2 patterns which you can implement: 1. In Process, where the Host which performs the log data is written to the ETW Infrastructure and the Listener is subscribed to the ETW data 2. Out of Process, where the Listener can be a Service outside of your application (most suitable for OnPremise usage)   EventSource ...

UPDATE : this post contains a lot of additional great suggestions http://blogs.msdn.com/b/thecolorofazure/archive/2014/05/13/azure-implementation-guidelines.aspx   How to create a consistent DTAP environment, which standards to adhere to, what naming conventions to apply, how to document these….all questions….the answers….a little cloudy. In this post I show how I use the tool Service Bus Explorer to my advantage for some of these questions. ·          Goal: create a consistent environment for DTAP ·          Challenges 1.        Naming conventions on Windows Azure (sb / queues / topics etc) 2.        Isolation of environment and thus billing 3.        Repeatable steps / Configurable using a tool / xml configuration   #1: Naming conventions Are they out there for Azure? This is a future...

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...