Really good article on Platform as a service vs. Infrastructure as a service. It is an interview with Tim O’Brien, Sr. Director Platform Strategy, Microsoft.

Microsoft's Windows Azure and Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud tackle two very different cloud computing technology problems today, but are destined to emulate each other over time, Microsoft cloud official Tim O'Brien says.

Microsoft Windows Azure and Amazon EC2 on collision course

Have you checked this sample on codeplex out? Let me know what you think…

Layered Architecture Sample for Azure takes the Expense Sample application that was originally developed in Layered Architecture Sample for .NET and ports it into the Windows Azure platform to demonstrate how a carefully designed layered application can be easily deployed to the cloud. It also illustrates how layering concepts can be applied in the cloud environment.

Layered Architecture Sample for Azure

We have just completed the rollout of SQL Azure Service Update 3 and now available are some exciting new features we have been promising for the past couple months.

• 50 GB Database Support – You can now store even more data in a single SQL Azure database as the database size has been increased to 50 GB. This will provide your applications increased scalability. For detailed pricing information on SQL Azure and how to create or modify your database to take advantage of the new size, see this blog post.

• Spatial Data Support - SQL Azure now offers support for the Geography and Geometry types as well as spatial query support via T-SQL. This is a significant feature and now opens the Windows Azure Platform to support spatial and location aware applications.

• HierarchyID Data Type Support – The HierarchyID is a variable length system data type which provides you the ability to represent tree like structures in the database. We will be following up in the coming days with a blog post on ways to use this data type in your applications.

In addition to these new features, SQL Azure is now also available in two new data centers providing your applications even more flexibility and a wider global reach. These two new data centers are located in the East Asia and the West Europe Region.

As always, your feedback matters. Please keep providing us feedback and we will do our best to prioritize the features you want.

SQL Azure SU3 is Now Live and Available in 6 Datacenters Worldwide - SQL Azure Team Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

There is no better role in Microsoft than working with partners. Therefore, Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference is my favorite event. It gives me an opportunity to meet and connect with various partners. This year again I will be at WPC 2010. You can find more info at http://www.digitalwpc.com

If you are attending lets catch up at WPC in Washington DC.  I am also delivering 3 sessions and would love to see you at the sessions. :) Following are my sessions

1. Server and Cloud Continuum

Session Type: Breakout Session Track: Core Infrastructure, Independent Software Vendor Level: 100 Level: Introductory

As the transformation of the application back-end continues, Microsoft has been innovating both in the data center and in the cloud. Attend this session to hear about the most recent innovations in applications and data platforms along with a discussion of how innovations and solutions you build on the Windows Server System intersect with cloud computing

2. Build Successful Service Line Offerings around the Microsoft Middleware Stack

Session Type: Breakout Session Track: Application Platform Level: 200 Level: Intermediate

This session helps SI partners understand the Microsoft middleware strategy. Microsoft has various middleware assets delivered in various products like SharePoint, SQL Server, AppFabric, Azure and BizTalk Server. This session tells the all-up middleware story of Microsoft. We also share how our SI partners have successfully leveraged the Microsoft middleware stack to deliver real value to their customers.

3. New Business and Application Models with Microsoft SQL Azure Session Type: Expo Theater  Track: Application Platform  Level: 200 Level: Intermediate

SQL Azure enables businesses to increase profitability, realize new revenue streams and expand segment reach. Come to this session to understand how SQL Azure enables first mover advantage by reducing the time required for you to build and deploy to market. Learn about the game-changing opportunities that SQL Azure provides with elastic scalability, a dynamic consumption model, business ready service levels, and web-based accessibility and flexibility.

In the recently released BizTalk Server 2010 Beta, we introduced a new feature “BizTalk + AppFabric”, which allows users to easily develop simple integration applications. With this feature, users can:

· Develop Windows Workflow applications that require connectivity to backend Line of Business (LOB) systems like SAP, Oracle DB, Oracle E-Business Suite, Seibel, and SQL Server without writing custom code for LOB connectivity.

· Develop XML-based data transformation using the easy-to-use and rich user interface of BizTalk Mapper that can be launched and used right within a .NET/WF project

In this blog, I will provide an overview of this feature. A more elaborate whitepaper with a tutorial can be found here.

With this feature, Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) activities are provided to the end user to programmatically access BizTalk’s LOB connectivity and data transformation capabilities. This enables users to easily create new composite applications using the WF model, which can be deployed, hosted, managed in Windows Server AppFabric. This also enables web-based applications to access LOB data. This can help a class of scenarios (such as Web-based queries) that are best effort, short running and don’t require the durability/persistence provided by traditional BizTalk Server. A typical application architecture may look like below:

Figure 1 A workflow service hosted in AppFabric/IIS connecting to a Line-of-Business system

Connecting to a Line of Business System

BizTalk provides a set of WCF based adapters that provide easy connectivity to Line of Business (LoB) systems. To use this, you need to install the WCF LoB Adapter SDK and the BizTalk Adapter Pack, which are available as part of BizTalk Server 2010 Beta release.

To use this feature from a WF project in Visual Studio, click the “Add Adapter Service Reference…” menu item.

This brings up a dialog box (like the one below) which you can use to connect to the LoB system. The dialog box allows you to browse through the artifacts supported by the LoB system and choose the operations you want to use. For example, in the screenshot below, we use the “Select” operation on the SQL Database table “CustomerInfo”.

When you click OK, the plugin will generate WF activities for the operations you have selected. You must build your project to see the activities on the Visual Studio Toolbox (See below). Once that is done, you can simple drag-and-drop the activities to use them in your workflow.

Transforming Data using the BizTalk Mapper

BizTalk provides a rich GUI-based tool for performing data transformations for XML data. We can now use this capability from a WF application through the Mapper activity. You will see this activity on the Toolbox under the “BizTalk” category after you install BizTalk Server (Developer Tools) and the WCF LOB Adapter SDK.

To use this mapper activity, you need to specify the InputDataContractType and the OutputDataContractType. As the name suggests, these are .NET types for the input data and the output data for the activity. You can then create a new map or select an existing map based on these types. If you are creating a new map, the activity will generate the XML schemas for the selected input and output DataContract types and a new BizTalk map (.btm) file.

You can then open and edit the BizTalk map file in the BizTalk Mapper GUI from within the WF project itself. When the map file is saved, it will automatically be compiled and built along with the project.

The mapper activity has an input argument that takes the data to be transformed and an output argument where the transformed data is stored. You can create workflow variables to pass the input and store the output from the activity. At runtime, the input data will first be serialized into XML. It will then be transformed using XSLT generated from the map file and finally de-serialized back into an object of the output type.

Summary

With these features, developing web applications which require access to LoB data will be a lot easier. The ability to use the BizTalk Mapper for data transformation means that different data in different LoB systems can be transformed using an interactive and intuitive GUI-based tool. Windows Server AppFabric provides a hosting service to deploy and manage these applications.

We would be happy to see you try out these features in your workflow applications, and receive your feedback. You can either write to me directly (sameerch @ microsoft . com) or leave a feedback here on this blog.

Sameer Chabungbam
Program Manager, BizTalk Server Team

We are very excited to welcome the public Beta release of BizTalk Server 2010. We have some very interesting enhancements in B2B space in this release. I want to share a brief around the Trading Partner Management feature.

Trading Partner Management(TPM) is increasingly challenging in the exploding global trading economy. A huge heterogeneous mixture of business players are coming in with cost effective options to trade with.

Previous releases of BizTalk provided a functional party management offering that enabled customers to build solutions that needed party management data, but it did come with a few challenges around usability and scalability. To address the growing demand for a scalable TPM, we interviewed a number of customers from different market and sizes and incorporated their valuable feedback. With the new release of BizTalk Server 2010, we have rebuilt the TPM model ground up to meet the tactical and long term needs of the B2B players.

I want to lay out some of the key aspects that are new in TPM for BTS 2010. Detailed blogs would be based on your interest in the specific areas

Functional/Operational

ü Party Model enhanced ground up that would be Business user friendly:

a. Party, Business, Agreement, Protocol Settings: More intuitive model to reflect trading partners, their various businesses, partnerships and agreements between partners. Default Protocol settings to reflect the expectations and abilities of either party getting into an trading partner agreement

b. Inbound, Outbound Settings: Reflective of how business handles inbound messages and sends outbound messages

c. Directional Agreements: Agreements are made two part, one part each for the direction of messages

ü Centralized Business Identities: Identities that are used by the business are centralized without making them protocol-specific. This enhances the productivity as well, as business identities can be set/updated in one place and one time and not repeated across protocol settings

ü Message Type Inclusion/Exclusion: A configurable list of accepted Transaction/Message Types that the business wants to support. Greatly reduces noise of unsupported message types being exchanged and dropped.

ü Productivity around Agreement onboarding:

a. Ability to create protocol settings that are by default expected by a business and reusing them automatically in all agreements created with the business. Ability to override and specific setting as needed in the agreement

b. Ability to save agreements as ‘Agreement Templates’ and applying the same across all similar agreements by a click of a button

ü TransactionSet/Payload validation by Message type: No more validation settings at interchange level; now you set validation (‘leading trailing spaces, ‘extended EDI validation etc) for each message type differently

ü Enhanced Global/FallBack Settings: All the settings possible for an onboarded party can now be set in Fallback settings too(earlier releases didn’t support all settings in Global settings and for some users were forced to use pipeline settings)

Access

ü B2B Operator Role: A new BizTalk role that reduces the onus on the Admins to perform all Party management operations which was also sometimes security risk. The new role allows windows users associated with the role to perform all party management operations.

Upgrade Customers

ü Migration Tool: With all these changes comes a Party Migration tool that helps upgrade customers to easily move from the old PAM based model to the new enhanced TPM of BTS 2010 without having to redo the onboarding of hundreds of parties/agreements

These are the highlights that I wanted to call out and have you all try them out. Any feedback on the feature would be greatly appreciated.

Hoping that the feature excites you as much as it excites me, and looking forward to a great success!!

Until next time

Ravi

*TechEd Alert*

I will be presenting a session at TechEd 2010 North America on this TPM feature with a demo. If you want to see how it really works and hear the story of how this feature got build, do visit the session at TechEd on 9^th June (ASI 304: Building Large B2B Integration Solutions on Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010). See you folks there!!!

Today we’re excited to announce the availability of the BizTalk Server 2010 Beta, which will RTM in the third quarter of calendar year 2010. BizTalk Server 2010 aligns with the latest Microsoft platform releases, including SQL Server 2008 R2, Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010, and will integrate with Windows Server AppFabric. This alignment, along with the availability of a wide array of platform adapters, allows customers to stitch together more flexible and manageable composite applications.

Updates include enhanced trading partner management, a new BizTalk mapper and simplified management through a single dashboard that enables customers to backup and restore BizTalk configurations. Also included in this release are new Business to Business integration capabilities such as rapidly on-board and easy management of trading partners and secure FTP adapter (FTPS) .
Download the beta today and tell us what you think at www.microsoft.com/biztalk.

Today we’re also officially launching Windows Server AppFabric, with the immediate availability of the Windows Server AppFabric Release Candidate (RC) at http://msdn.microsoft.com/appfabric; the final release of the product will be available in June.

Together with the already available Windows Azure AppFabric, Windows Server AppFabric and BizTalk Server 2010 form Microsoft’s application infrastructure technologies. These offerings benefit you by delivering cloud-like elasticity, seamless connectivity, and simplified composition for the most demanding, enterprise applications.

To learn more about Microsoft’s application infrastructure technologies, visit the Microsoft Application Infrastructure virtual launch event at www.appinfrastructure.com!

BizTalk 2010