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 experimenting with Azure as more people do, i wanted to know… what am i doing, when i select the region? Is this the same list as a year ago? Are there new locations announced in the future What’s the latency involved etc What’s going on! So my journey started with the magic bing words; ‘additional azure data centers’ The first post was   what i was looking for, however…a little outdated, so ended up going through all the historical blogs . We had the blog windowsazureappfabricannounce in 2010, moved to windowsazureappfabric in mid 2011, to appfabric late 2011 and finally to windowsazure ! However, i still had no answer, so i searched again on the Team blog…and there was the latest announcement regarding the datacenters in Asia . Additionally i found a very cool blogpost with the geographical location visualized and tools how to test the latency which helps you know where you wan’t to host your services (hopefully still filled with working tips as it is sligh...

I’m following the well written course Windows Azure architect ( http://www.windowsazurearchitect.com ), it provides the training as if you’re following the training of a couple of employees at company X. It’s written in a very interactive way. Mostly after each section/explanation, the ‘employees’ have some ‘smart’ comments/questions..…after reading the section on table storage, i couldn’t help laughing when it involved creating table storage by code; client.CreateTable("demoTable"); “Developer” puts on an unhappy face….. “But this is not a real Create Table statement”, he says. “There‟s just the table name and nothing about the column names, the column data types, or column constraints such as null and not null.”? “Trainer” gives him a broad smile; “Welcome to cloud computing!” he says. “It’s called Windows Azure Table Storage!”

My colleagues and I had a brief discussion about the subject ‘Topics’ and what it brings… Do you all agree/disagree with the following statement: topic-based pub-sub messaging doesn’t really exist in BizTalk “In my opinion; I disagree, as BizTalk offers the following 'out-of-the-box' • Message Routing (f.e build in context properties like message type, trading partner, operation etc) • Content Routing (f.e. promoted properties, message inspection in orchestrations/pipelines icw orchestration logic)” My colleague Rene Brauwers Here my 2 cents…. I agree that it exists...however the current offerings in BizTalk are tightly coupled, making the usage far from perfect. When doing content based routing on custom fields (promoted properties), you will be making the solution message-coupled; Your custom message property schema is deployed, and the message filter on these fields have a direct relationship with this property schema. Making any change to this schema will g...

In our project we came to the conclusion that caching would be a nice feature and that a distributed implementation would be best suited. We looked at the various offerings (NCache, MemCached, Custom implementation, App Fabric). As AppFabric is the most compelling, I will elaborate on this one in detail; Architecture Requirements / Concerns Windows Enterprise Server Important Windows Server AppFabric cache hosts should be dedicated to the caching service, which means that those servers are not also used as application, web, or database servers. It is possible to use non-dedicated cache servers in a cluster, but this scenario is not supported . Despite this policy, if you decide to use non-dedicated cache hosts, make sure to properly estimate and test the configuration for each cache host to allow enough memory and network resources for both the caching service and all other services on the machines. Also understand that spikes in processor and network utilization by oth...