Connected Systems in the Great White North : General Microsoft Topics

Canadian BizTalk 2006-R2/SOA Conference

pkelcey — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 17:17:00 GMT

Microsoft Canada is host a R2 launch conference in conjunction with a SOA conference. The conference will be held Calgary, Toronto and Montreal. The details and registration links are below.

2007 Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference

Microsoft Canada is pleased to announce the 2007 Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference to be held in Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal. Be the first to hear about the new wave of innovation included in BizTalk Server 2006 R2, with enhanced capabilities such as native support for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and AS2 as well as RFID. During these 2 days you will learn about both Microsoft’s current portfolio and long-term strategy for SOA & Business Process initiatives. Whether you are a developer, architect, or business decision maker we will have something for you with tracks spanning the full spectrum of technology, architecture, and business value topics.

What You Can Expect

• Keynote Sessions

Business Value Track
The Business Value track will have multiple sessions that will focus on issues such as establishing a SOA roadmap. We will provide case studies and guidance to help your SOA and business process initiatives demonstrate value quickly and stay focused on business goals. Whether you are a partner practice manager evaluating the business opportunity of SOA and business process or an enterprise decision maker evaluating the potential return on investment of your SOA and BPM initiatives, the Business Value track is for you.

Technical Track
The Technical track will have multiple sessions that will focus on the design and implementation of service oriented and business process solutions. We will provide best practices and proven patterns for handling challenges with many aspects of solution architecture such as; data, identity, messaging, workflow, and rules.

• “Ask the Expert” Sessions *
• Technical Partner Business Planning Sessions *
• Evening Reception

The Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference is the event for customers and technology partners to get detailed guidance for planning and delivering solutions for Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management. Guidance will be provided across 2 tracks focused on Technical and Business Value topics.

**Session agendas will be provided shortly.

***Please join us on Day 1 of this 2 Day event for a social reception***

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Microsoft Canada a le plaisir d’annoncer le Congrès de Microsoft sur l'architecture orientée sur les services et sur les processus d'affaires 2007 qui se tiendra à Calgary, à Toronto et à Montréal. Soyez les premiers à découvrir les toutes dernières innovations de BizTalk Server 2006 R2 , incluant des fonctionnalités plus performantes telles que (native support) pour EDI et AS2, ainsi que pour le RFID. D’une durée de deux jours, le congrès vous offrira l’occasion de vous informer sur le portefeuille de produits actuel de Microsoft et sur sa stratégie à long terme en matière d’architecture orientée sur les services et de processus d’affaires. Que vous soyez un développeur, un spécialiste en architecture ou un décideur gestionnaire, nos ateliers qui couvrent le champ complet de la technologie, de l’architecture et de la valeur commerciale sauront vous intéresser.

Programme

• Discours d’ouverture

Atelier sur la valeur commerciale

L’atelier sur la valeur commerciale portera notamment sur l’établissement d’un guide relatif à l’architecture orientée sur les services. Nous présenterons des études de cas et donnerons des conseils pour que vos projets d’architecture orientée sur les services et de processus d’affaires génèrent rapidement de la valeur tout en respectant les objectifs de l’entreprise. Que vous soyez un directeur des services-conseils aux partenaires évaluant le potentiel commercial de l’architecture orientée sur les services ou un décideur-gestionnaire évaluant le rendement du capital investi potentiel de ses projets d’architecture orientée sur les services et de processus d’affaires, cet atelier s’adresse à vous.

Atelier technique

L’atelier technique portera sur la création et la mise en œuvre de solutions axées sur les services et les processus d’affaires. Nous parlerons des meilleures pratiques et des modèles éprouvés permettant d’affronter les difficultés en faisant appel à de nombreux aspects de l’architecture de solutions, tels que les données, la messagerie, le flux de travaux et les règles.

• Ateliers « Demandez à l’expert »*
• Ateliers sur la planification des affaires à l’intention des partenaires techniques*
• Réception

Le Congrès de Microsoft sur l'architecture orientée sur les services et sur les processus d'affaires est l’événement par excellence destiné aux clients et aux partenaires technologiques qui désirent obtenir de l’information détaillée en vue de planifier et d’offrir des solutions orientées sur les services et la gestion des processus administratifs. Cette information sera transmise dans le cadre d’un atelier technique et d’un atelier sur la valeur commerciale.

**Les agendas des différentes sessions seront disponibles sous peu

*** Joignez-vous à nous le premier jour de cet événement de deux jours pour une réception ***

	Date	Time	Location	Address	EventID
A	September 25 - 26, 2007	7:30 am - 6:30pm	The Westin Calgary	320 4th Avenue SW Calgary, AB, T2P 2S6	1032350673	A
	A	A	A	A	A

	Date	Time	Location	Address	EventID
A	October 3 - 4 , 2007	7:30 am - 6:30pm	Microsoft Canada Head Office	1950 Meadowvale Blvd Mississauga, Ontario, L5N 8L9	1032351073	A
	A	A	A	A	A

	Date	Time	Location	Address	EventID
A	October 24 - 25, 2007	7:30 am - 6:30pm	Hotel Place D'Armes	55 Saint-Jacques West Montreal, Quebec, H2Y 3X2	1032351086	A
	A	A	A	A	A

©2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft is either a registered trademark or trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

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BizTalk and WinFX (oh, I mean .NET 3.0!)

pkelcey — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 23:04:00 GMT

There certainly been a lot going on around here. We've renamed WinFX to .NET 3.0, we've announced the R2 version of BizTalk 2006 and we've had one of our founders announce plans to transition out of his fulltime role. I had planned to drill down a bit into the first two items. With regards to the last item, I'll simply wish Bill all the luck in the world with a very noble cause.

So, WinFX is from now on going to be known as .NET 3.0. There's been a small firestorm of debate around this to a certain extent and I can understand why. However, I really believe that it's just a name and our time will be better spent in by trying to understand who the technologies contained within .NET 3.0 are going to be able to help development teams businesses.

So with that in mind, what is .NET 3.0 going to mean to BizTalk and BizTalk developers? Well, this question allows me to segway nicely into the recent release about BizTalk 2006 R2. The major changes that you're going to be seeing with R2 (slated for the first half of 2007!) are:

New capabilities for addressing concerns in the manufacturing and retail verticals. I'll talk about this in a later post.
Close alignment with Office 2007 and .NET 3.0. Let’s take a closer look at this one.

You'll need to be aware of three key areas of BizTalk that are going to be affected by this "alignment"

The thing is that R2 is going to be shipping with a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) adapter included out of the box. This will allow BizTalk to connect to any WCF enabled application.

The second thing you should be aware of is that we're going to be releasing an extension to the WCF called the WinFX Adapter Framework (AF). This is a new framework that will allow for easier and simpler developer of WCF based adapters. You're probably asking, "What's the different between this and the BizTalk Adapter Framework". We'll, adapters built using the BAF can only be used by BizTalk whereas adapters built using AF can be used by any Windows application. Your adapters are no longer going to be limited to a single product. Some of you might now be asking, "If BizTalk has it's own adapter framework, how will it be able to use these new AF based adapters?" We'll that new WCF adapter that I spoke of in the last paragraph is going to let you tie these new adapters into your BizTalk project. Please note, these new AF adapters aren't there to replace BizTalk, they will only provide simple point to point connectivity. You're still going to need BizTalk for handling complex scenarios like process orchestration, long running transactions, business activity monitoring, business rules deployment etc...

The third thing that you should be aware of is Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and its impact on BizTalk. WF is our new technology for creating and running any and all types of workflow. Human level workflow, document-centric workflow, user interface page flow and even workflow across a Service Oriented Architecture can all be developed using WF. The key thing for you to understand is that WF is certainly not here to kill or replace BizTalk! In fact, it will allow BizTalk developers to create even richer applications as they will be able to integrate their enterprise level orchestrations with workflow contained in other Microsoft products such as Office 2007 and SharePoint. BizTalk will still be the tool for implementing workflows and orchestrations across applications while WF will be for creating workflows within applications. You might be wondering if BizTalk is going to use WF to power its orchestrations. For the short term, no, BizTalk 2006 R2 is going to continue to use the architecture unveiled with BizTalk 2004. The next version (not R2, the next full release) will introduce WF as its workflow technology.

I know there are going to be an insane number of questions out there from developers, architects and business decision makers. We'll do our best to answer them and I'm planning on addressing as many as I can here. We’ll likely be seeing the usual questions about whether or not WCF + WF can be used to replace BizTalk, but we’ll deal with those as they come. The key things to focus on right now is that .NET 3.0 is going to be delivery new features and capabilities for BizTalk developers. Lets dive into these and make sure we can get the most from them.

Cheers for now

Peter

Consolidate to a single BizTalk database? Yes you can!

pkelcey — Mon, 01 May 2006 23:15:00 GMT

I ran into a interesting and undocumented feature of BizTalk 2006 a couple weeks ago that I thought I'd share. A colleague of mine, Jim Bowyer, had found out that with BizTalk 2006, you can consolidate most of your BizTalk database into a single one.

For those of you that aren't completely familiar with the internals of BizTalk, the following SQL Server databases are used to power a BizTalk environment (Note: some may not appear in your environment if you chose not to install all available BizTalk features)

MessageBox Databases
SSO Credential Database
BizTalk Analysis Database
BizTalk Configuration Database
Human Workflow Services Admin Database
BizTalk Rules Engine Database
BizTalk Base EDI Database
BizTalk Tracking Database
Notification Service
Windows SharePoint Services Configuration
Windows SharePoint Services Content
BAM Star Schema
BAM Primary Import
BAM Archive
BAM Analysis (OLAP)
BAM Notification

(For a more complete outline of these DB's (and what they are used for) check out this page )

Now that's quite a number of databases to maintain and manage, so it's natural that smaller organizations might be slightly intimidated about having to install, manage and support so many. I found out last week that a new feature has been introduced to BTS 2006 that will allow smaller customers to consolidate nearly all of these databases into single one. (The exceptions being the BAM Notification and EDI DBs).

Now since this feature was introduced post Beta 2, the documentation surrounding it is pretty weak. Additionally, the guidance around this concept is still almost non-existent. So here's what I've been able to find out from our product team.

Reasons for:

You are looking for a simplified install
You are looking for simplified management post install
You are looking for new variations of disaster recovery beyond the standard ones recommended with a multi-DB installation (i.e. you might be able to use database mirroring instead of having to rely on log shipping. Note: our product team has fully tested this and therefore doesn't support it yet)

Reason against:

You are really going to limit your ability to scale out your DB tier. Under a normal install, you would be able to place different DBs on different machines. You lose that ability under this type of set
The testing that has been done for this type of install is admittedly very small. I haven't seen any real numbers around potential performance impacts that this might have.
The lack of documentation, testing and formal support for this feature

It should be noted that this feature is included for small BTS installations and shouldn't be considered for larger enterprises.

If you do decide that you do want to go ahead with this, here's how:

During the configuration stage of your install, you can specify that you would like to install all features into the same database. (All except for the EDI and BAMAlertsNSMain databases - as stated above). When you fire up the BizTalk Server Configuration tool, and you're at the stage where you can select the features you want to install. This is where you can specific the consolidation. You'll need to specify the same database name for each feature (except EDI and BAM Alerts). After you do this, remember to adjust the connection settings when you use the BizTalk Server 2006 Administration MMC Snap-in. By default, it will want to connect to a database called BizTalkMgmtDb. If you consolidate your databases into a one new database then you need to specify that new one in the MMC. You do this by right-clicking the BizTalk Server 2006 Administration node and selecting “Connect To Existing Group“. This gives you the option to select a SQL Server and Database that the management db lives on.

Hope that helps and keep on BizTalking...