Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

In my previous post I introduced the follow up of Microsoft Services Engine, Sentinet from Nevatech. I discussed the deployment of Sentinet on a single machine, which I am going to use for further exploration of this product. In this post I like to share the user experience and management side of Sentinet . To discuss the user experience and management of Sentinet I am going to do a walk-through with an example. I will poll data through a runner service from a database containing my running data from races I ran in the past like Berlin Marathon, CPC Half Marathon, 16 and 15K races. I will place a Sentinet Node in front of service to provide multiple ways of providing access to my runner service for different end users. Below you will find an overview of the example. A Sentinet Node is a kind of special Web Application hosted on the IIS Server and depending on your requirements you can create one or more independent nodes within a single IIS Server Instance. Each Node serves

Close to Christmas and the end of the year 2013. It has been quite a year from me. Lots of travelling to the United-States (Seattle, Portland, Bellevue, Renton, Detroit), Canada (Toronto, Trenton, London, Windsor, Brighton), United-Kingdom (London, Orpington), Norway (Bergen, Stavanger, Oslo), Germany (Berlin), France (Paris, Beziers, Narbonne), Spain (Pyrenees), Italy (Milan, Piacenza, Valconasso di Pontenure, Podenzano, Val Trebia), and Portugal (Porto). For one it has been a very busy year like last year 2012 . To summarize all my activity bullet wise: I have had multiple speaking engagements in the Netherlands and abroad (UK, Norway, Portugal, and Italy) Two MVP Summits (February and November) Attended the UK Connected Systems Group: The Hybrid Organization Published a white paper on WCF-BasicHttpRelay Adapter (Deep Dive) Written dozen blog posts on this blog and on the TechNetWiki Blog Continued and finalized the blog post series on BizTalk community members Writte

The BizTalk Community is a fantastic bunch of professionals. During last two years I had the opportunity to meet many of them in person and conduct interviews with them. I interviewed close to 30 BizTalk professionals around the world. End of 2011 I had an idea based on the four interview series from Richard Seroter to do a similar thing focusing solely on the BizTalk Community itself. I asked advice from Richard and started with the first interview in January 2012. The goal was to introduce and bring several active BizTalk Community members to the foreground. For each interview conducted I asked the following questions: Who are you and what do you do for a living? What’s your BizTalk expertise (developing, administration, architecture) and what do like/think about the BizTalk Server product? What do you like to do in your spare time? What sport(s) you like to practice and/or sport team/individual you favor/support (i.e. Ice hockey team, skating, skiing pro, soccer team ...

A team of Microsoft consultants developed Managed Services Engine (MSE) as an open source project a few years ago. End of December 2009 it was the final CTP release. MSE was meant to facilitate service virtualization to support versioning, abstraction, management, routing, and run-time policy enforcement for Services. It used a service repository to provide easier and faster deployment of services, change management, and reuse. MSE was a promising product, yet it has never been released as a complete, mature product and ultimately was discontinued. However there is a product called Sentinet from Nevatech , which implements all of theMSE concept (and many more) in its product. Sentinet services virtualization platform is built on the latest .NET Framework and related technologies like WCF and WIF. The repository supports MS SQL Server. It has matured over the years and currently is in version 3.4. Basically you can view Sentinet as a replacement of the MSE, and even as an evolution o

Windows Azure BizTalk Services (WABS) is general available now as a service within Windows Azure. Nice, so now I can update my local installation in my VM. The upgrade is pretty straight forward. Thanks to pointers I got from Nick Hauenstein in BizTalk Integration Summit 2013 Recap . You download the new SDK(Tools and WindowsAzureBizTalkServicesSetup-x64.exe or WindowsAzureBizTalkServicesSetup-x86.exe) that is available through the Windows Azure Portal. The tools consist of the BTMMigrationTool and TPMMigrationTool. The first can aid in migration of an on-premise BizTalk map to a BizTalk Service map. The second tools can help in the migration of BizTalk Server parties. The WindowsAzureBizTalkServicesSetup-xxx.exe is a zip file. When unzipped you can run the WindowsAzureBizTalkServicesSetup application. This single msi will indicate, which version is installed. I already ran it once and I am on the latest version now. So the update is straightforward. The WindowsAzureBizTal