I have been working for Microsoft for just over 3 years now and in that time have become deeply involved in sales dealing with BizTalk and SQL Server (as well as Office, Dynamics, Desktop, Server, Hyper-V, System Centre... – go figure). In doing so I have made some great friends in the colleagues here – one of whom is Quoc Bui. Working with Quoc I have gained a very deep knowledge of BizTalk and how it works. This month Quoc and I and another colleague, Ji Young Lee (PFE, Korea), are presenting a session on BizTalk patterns at TechReady 10 (the Microsoft geek-fest held in Seattle). It is said that there are so many propellers spinning at these events they generate more electricity than they consume.

Quoc is the Regional BizTalk CAT (not as in “cool for” but “Customer Advisory Team”) and deals with BizTalk horizontally (no, he does not sleep on the job but looks at BizTalk across industries).  My background has covered integration within Finance, Defence, Social Services, Private companies, Public companies, Hospitals, clinic groups, single clinician practices and others. Working together we have been able to validate and reinforce many of the patterns we and others (mostly others, mind you) have come across when applying parallel process (stateless) engines against order importance (state managed) environments.

The session we are presenting at TechReady 10 is entitled: “APS330 - BizTalk Solution Design Guidance: Leveraging Patterns for a BizTalk Implementation” and takes real life examples of problems that have had to be addressed.

In the next couple of blogs Quoc and I will be co-ordinating our entries to delve deeper into these patterns and their application. I will, of course, be taking a view from the healthcare IT angle. (BTW: I will NOT be dealing with HL7 integration).

We will go through:

·         BizTalk Dynamic Send port Pattern

·         Processing large batch files using the de-batching pattern

·         Multi-batch processing Aggregation (or “Replacing the BizTalk developer Parallel Shape or loop”)

·         Synchronous Front-end Action with backed Asynchronous Backend processing

·         Request-Response Correlation (without Orchestration) << original work done by Paolo Salvatori (Quoc’s EMEA counterpart)

·         Complex Business Decision processing

Please see Quocs’ blog for more technical detail at: Quoc Bui blog