BizTalk RFID at Tech.Ed 2008 IT Pro
I participated, as a co-speaker, in the TechEd IT Pro conference at Orlando during June this year. Our team had a few sessions here:
1) Deep Dive Into BizTalk RFID: This was a one hour interactive theater style presentation. Here, we started with a general overview of the BizTalk RFID, and then explained the concepts in BizTalk RFID using a shipping/receiving scenario. We used a fixed RFID reader and did a complete end to end demo on how a RFID business process could be set up that can get events from this device and store them into a SQL Server database. The attendees were really excited by the fact that events could go all the way to SQL database without writing even a single line of code. During the demo, we also added the Contoso provider (the simulated provider that ships with BizTalk RFID) and simulated five Contoso devices and showed them how they can use this to do their application development even if they don’t have a physical device. We also did some chalk talk on the general concepts.
2) Building rich RFID enabled applications for Windows CE/Mobile devices using "BizTalk RFID Mobile": This was a 75 minute breakout session. Here we spoke about the evolving mobile scenarios and form factors and the need for a mobile platform. We also went into the features and architecture of the platform. We had tagged some real products and demonstrated a picklist scenario on a mobile RFID reader running BizTalk RFID Mobile Beta and the corresponding device provider. We also did a RFID application development demo using the Windows Mobile emulators and attendees were able to appreciate how they can use this to do application development and testing without requiring to have a physical mobile reader.
There was lot of excitement about how simple it was to connect to a radio module, get notified about events, and post events to a server.
3) Tech Talk on BizTalk RFID: This was a 20 minute interview style video recording. Here, Sudhir and I talked about three main topics:
a) Application development with BizTalk RFID:
- Event Handler development
- Design vs. Deployment,
- Integration with BRE/BizTalk Server, and
- Mobile application development using BizTalk RFID Mobile.
b) Manageability: how RFID Manager, Client Console can be used to manage BizTalk RFID, and how System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) can also help in managing RFID devices.
c) How can a RFID application developer get started using emulators, Contoso provider / Contoso device simulator / MyFirstCEProvider etc.
This video will soon be posted to http://www.microsoft.com/teched.
Our booth:
We had a booth for BizTalk RFID in the SOA theme. Cathexis Innovations had an event management solution that they ran in the booth: for every attendee to the booth, we registered them and printed out a RFID tag for them using BizTalk RFID. This was affixed on their badges, and attendees could come back and get this scanned (in order to increase their chances of winning a Zune) using BizTalk RFID Mobile.
