Archives
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SQL Server Service Broker 2008 Conversation Priorities
Lately, I've been spending some time working with SQL Server 2008. There are a lot of innovative features included in the latest CTP on both the DB and BI engines that are worth checking. I plan to keep blogging about it during the next weeks. On this post I want to focus on what is arguably the biggest improvement on Service Broker (SSB) 2008: conversation priorities.
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SharePoint Server 2007 SP1
SharePoint Server 2007 SP1 is now available. Among other features it includes integration with ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 and support for custom HTTP and SOAP headers with Business Data Catalog entity models.
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Composite Services using Oracle ESB Routing Services
Message routing is one of the most used and attractive features of Enterprise Service Buses (ESB). Unfortunately, the traditional view of message routing, most of the times, is reduced exclusively to service orchestration and choreography scenarios. In my opinion, the use of routing is also a fundamental technique for achieving another emerging architecture style of service orientation: service composition. Among the ESBs on the market, Oracle ESB provides a very simple and elegant solution for composing services using routing. The core of this solution is based on one of the fundamental components of Oracle ESB: routing services.
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Announcing Volta
Microsoft Live Labs continues producing amazing things around internet-centric technologies. Yesterday they announced Volta.
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Reg Braithwaite on the optimistic view
I came across Reg Braithwaite’s weblog thru Steve Vinosky’s and I truly recommended it. This is one of the most prolific weblogs I’ve read in a long time. Check out this post about developer’s culture when comes to learn new programming paradigms.
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Dynamic endpoint resolution using the Managed Services Engine
On my previous post I've listed some of the reasons because of which I believe Microsoft's Managed Services Engine (MSE) can be really useful in Enterprise SOA applications. The existing documentation of MSE emphasizes in the role this technology can play in design time governance scenarios but there is very little about its applicability in runtime governance scenarios. However, in this release MSE already includes various features that can serve as the foundation of future runtime governance technologies. It is not a secret that service repositories are at the center of every SOA governance technologies. Normally, these repositories catalog different service components such as contracts, binding, endpoints, etc. The centralized and/or federated (I honestly think that federated repositories are the future of SOA Governance technologies. But that's content for another post J) storage of endpoints is particularly useful to enterprise applications that need to dynamically resolve those components at runtime. The classical example is an application that queries the repository to find the endpoint of a specific service.
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Harry on the importance of idempotence
I had been waiting until my friend Harry Pierson finishes updating his weblog to highlight this fantastic comment about the importance of idempotence.
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VS 2008. .NET Fx 3.5 and SQL Server 2008 CTP are here
Yesterday was a great day for the Microsoft developer community:
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Managed Services Engine
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More about WS-Policy 1.5
The Web Services Policy Working Group has published two Group Notes: Web Services Policy 1.5 - Primer and Web Services Policy 1.5 - Guidelines for Policy Assertion Authors. The former introduces the Web Services Policy language with examples. The latter explains how to use the relevant specifications to maximize interoperability.
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WebLogic 10.1.3
BEA has released a Technical Preview of WebLogic 10.1.3. Some of my favorites features include the JMS .NET API and support for SAML 2.0.
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Demos from the Microsoft SOA&BPM conference
I would like to thanks all the people who attended my session last Friday. It is undeniable that the WCF adapter SDK is gaining some traction out there J . You can download the demos I walked thru the session here.
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Oslo is here
We can finally talk about this; Oslo was officially announced today at the SOA-BPM conference. Oslo is the vision for Microsoft’s next generation of SOA technologies.
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WCF adapters white paper
My friend Aaron Skonnard has published a phenomenal white paper about the WCF adapter in BizTalk Server R2
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Microsoft SOA-BPM conference
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Tim on ROA vs GET and POST
My friend Tim Ewald wrote an interesting reflection about when to use Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA) vs. GET and POST to model RESTful services.
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Some thoughts on ESB vs. REST + Dynamic Languages
I spent some time this weekend thinking on Steve Vinoski comments regarding the REST+Dynamic Languages vs. ESB debate. As much as I've admired Steve over the last years I cannot agree with him on this one. I bought into the REST philosophy a long time ago and I am a big fan of dynamic languages but I think that presenting both as an alternative to ESBs on EAI-BPM scenarios is oversimplifying one of the most interesting challenges on the industry nowadays. In my opinion all this come down to applying the right technology to a specific scenario. I spend a lot of time working with customers on SOA/BPM scenarios and I've seen some very creative solutions both using ESBs as well as using REST and Dynamic languages. One of the main challenges with the ESB adoption, especially for J2EE-J2SE customers, is the high number of vendors (23 last time I counted) that provide very similar solutions in terms of features. I also think that with the increasing adoption of Service Component Architecture (SCA) we are about to see a similar phenomena for service composition and deployment technologies. In .NET environments the best option are a combination of BizTalk Server and the ESB Guidance Toolkit or the very creative Neuron ESB from my friends of Neudesic.
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Steve doesn't like ESBs anymore
Steve Vinoski is back!!! Although we still don’t know much about his new venture. Check out this post that highlights Steve’s opinion about the ESB vs. REST + dynamic languages debate.
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SOA tips
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IBM on ESB
Check out these two interesting papers regarding IBM’s vision ESB’s role in Service Orientation.
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Microsoft's MDM strategy
Check out this new website that contains some references to Microsoft’s MDM strategy including the Product Roadmap.
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Defining service contracts programmatically on .NET Framework 3.5
As I referred on a previous post, one of the most attractive features in the upcoming .NET Framework 3.5 (Orcas) is the combination of Workflow Services and Durable Services to implement long running services combining Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). The main vision behind Workflow Services is to integrate the long running capabilities of WF with the messaging and contract authoring capabilities of WCF. Specifically for contract authoring, Workflow Services provide two main authoring styles:
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Sam gentile joins Neudesic
My friend Sam Gentile has joined Neudesic as a Principal Consultant and Connected Systems Practice Lead. Congrats are in order for Sam and Neudesic.
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WCF behaviors vs. pipelines on BizTalk Server R2
BizTalk Server R2 is close to be released and one of the most attractive features for traditional BizTalk developer is the new set of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) adapters. As of today, this set of adapters represents the best way of leveraging the WCF capabilities into BizTalk Server applications. Arguably, the WCF adapters can be seen as a continuation of the previous SOAP and WSE 2.0-3.0 adapters. However, there are major differences between WCF and its technology predecessors. WCF is fundamentally a messaging framework that offers a lot of capabilities beyond the traditional Web Services frameworks. By this time you might already know that WCF is going to be the core of the future BizTalk messaging engine. However, at this point, there is still some overlapping between WCF and the BizTalk messaging engine capabilities. Why I am writing all this? Well, I decided to start writing a series of posts about how to utilize some of the WCF capabilities that present some overlapping and also complement existing BizTalk Server features. Thinking about that, I don't see a better place to start than with WCF behaviors and BizTalk Server pipelines.
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MOSS and WSS SDKs
Congratulations to the SharePoint team on releasing the new MOSS and WSS SDKs http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/thankyou.aspx?familyId=6d94e307-67d9-41ac-b2d6-0074d6286fa9&displayLang=en. My favorite feature is the BDC application builder.
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Speaking at NYC Connected Systems User Group
Next Monday I will be speaking at the New York Connected Systems User Group in the Microsoft NYC offices http://www.nyccsug.org . The session is going to be focused on Web Services Interoperability. Specifically I am going to be speaking and demonstrating best practices and techniques to achieve interoperability between Windows Communication Foundation and some of the lead J2EE Web Services stacks such as Sun WSIT, WSO2, Oracle, etc. If you are on the Manhattan area and you are interested on SOA topics swing by and we will have a nice chat.
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SCA committees
For more than I disagree with the goals of Service Component Architecture (SCA), it is undeniable that this is going to help.
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WCF LOB adapters SDK is available for download
The WCF Line of Business adapters SDK has been released. Congratulations to Sonu Arora and the team.
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WS-Addressing Metadata 1.0
Web Services Addressing Metadata is now a proposed recommendation!! Congratulations to Martin Gudgin, and all the guys who worked on the spec.
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MTOM interoperability between Oracle App Server and Sun WSIT
A few months ago I wrote a couple of articles (WCF-ORA, ORA-WCF) about Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM) interoperability between Oracle Application Server and Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). Most of the feedback I got from those posts was related with MTOM interoperability scenarios using other Web Service technologies toolkits. Based on that, I decided to post a few more demos that reflect MTOM interoperability scenarios for different vendors. Specifically, this paper shows how to achieve MTOM interoperability between Oracle App Server and Sun Web Service Interoperability Technology (WSIT - Project Tango). Believe it or not, I am sorry .NET developers; there is no .NET code in this paper.
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More on REST vs. WS-*
There is an interesting debate going on between my friends Ted Neward and David Chappell about REST vs. WS-* complexity. Beyond the political analogy (in which I agreed with Ted) I would like to add my own opinion on the topic.
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Christian on Duplex messaging with BizTalk Services
I just realized that my friend Christian Weyer has blogged a fantastic sample about Duplex messaging using BizTalk Services. In fact, Christian details some of the benefits of this approach for real world scenarios. So read Christian article first and then you can complement with mine.
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Implementing duplex messaging with BizTalk Services
It is undeniable that the use of BizTalk Services opens up a new set of possibilities for distributed applications. This post is not intended to provide an overview of BizTalk Services. My friend Clemens Vasters and the BizTalk Services team have been doing a fabulous job in that regard. Instead, I’ve decided to start blogging about different messaging scenarios that I have been implementing using BizTalk Services. Particularly, this post is focused on duplex messaging. As you might already know, duplex contracts are one of the features of WCF that allows implement scenarios on which both WCF endpoints exchange message independently. Duplex messaging becomes difficult to adopt in scenarios on which the two endpoints reside on different organizations (different networks). This is partially given that a real world duplex messaging scenario requires a whole new set of considerations in terms of network resources (opening ports for receiving the callbacks), different security boundaries, etc. This is what makes BizTalk Services an ideal solution for this type of scenario. Now organizations don’t have to spend time and resources implementing the trusting mechanisms with other organizations. Instead they can rely on BizTalk Services for all that. The following picture might help to clarify my point.
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SharePoint BDC, WCF, adapters and more
I really have to thanks Joel Crawford-Smith(our graphic mastermind at TwoConnect) for putting together the the entire online image of Contoso Manufacturing.
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WS-ReliableMessaging interoperability between Microsoft WCF and Sun WSIT part II via Arun Gupta
It looks like I don’t need to post the second part of my WS-ReliableMessaging WCF WSIT interoperability scenario. Check out this great post by Arun Gupta, one of the leaders of WSIT (Project Tango). Also if you are interested on Project Tango, check out this article also from Arun.
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Arvindra on service capsules
Arvindra Sehmi one of the leaders of the Microsoft EMEA Enterprise Architecture Group has started blogging again. Check out his first series of posts about Service Capsules.
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WS-ReliableMessaging interoperability between Microsoft WCF and Sun WSIT
Creating a Web Service using Sun WSIT is very similar to creating a Java class with a few annotations. The following code illustrated the WSIT service used as part of this demo. Just for this time, I’ve decided to give my readers a break and not implement a calculator so I went with the second most popular service contract in history.
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SOAWorld 2007: Slide deck, demos, article ...
Thanks to all the people who attended to my Pragmatic SOA Interoperability session at SOAWorld. The slide deck can be downloaded here. I will be uploading the demos during the next days.
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Speaking at SOAWorld
I am at New York this week. I will be speaking tomorrow at SOAWorld about Web Services interoperability; we have some cool demos showing interoperability between WCF and different J2EE-J2SE technologies. If you are in the area or attending to the conference just swing by and we can have a chat.
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Orcas Durable Services
Long running WCF Services is another great feature of the new Orcas Beta 1. Implementing durable service is always a combination of persisting the message itself as well as the state of the service. The current version of WCF provides stateful WCF services using sessions. However this feature does not address a lot of the most common enterprise stateful services scenarios on which state of an service instance needs to be persisted to a more robust durable store in order to handle unexpected events like host recycling, server shutdown, etc. Other Microsoft technologies such as BizTalk Server and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) do provide support for long running services. Specifically, WF provides an extensible model based on persistence services that allow developers to create their own mechanisms for persisting the state of a WF instance.
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Teched demo
Thanks to all the people who attended to my session at Teched. The sample code and presentation can be downloaded from here. The Before folder contains the template code we used to create the adapter. Similarly, the After folder contains the final code of the adapter.
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Teched Orlando
This year I will be sharing stage again with my friend Sonu Arora who is the Program Manager for the WCF Line of Business Adapters SDK (official name until they change it again). We will be talking about using WCF to build Line of Business Adapters, Architecture principles among other topics. The best part is that we are going to (surprise surprise) build a real adapter as part of one of our demonstrations!! We also are going to show how to consume adapters from .NET apps, BizTalk Server and SharePoint Server Business Data Catalog. I'll be posting the code online soon.
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WF and SSB
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Pat Helland is back
A few weeks ago my good friend Harry Pierson mentioned me that Pat Helland was back at Microsoft working on the Developer Division. For those of you who haven’t heard about him; Pat has been one of the main contributors to transactional programming technologies during the last 20 years. His contributions include technologies such as MTS, COM+ and the recent SQL Server Service Broker. Before returning to Microsoft Pat spent two years working on Amazon.com Web Services. Well, now Pat is not only back at Microsoft but he started blogging again!!!
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Using the Orcas JsonSerializer
One of the really cool features included in the Orcas bits is the integration between Microsoft AJAX 1.0 and WCF. My buddy Steve Maine has been doing an amazing job evangelizing this technology. One of the components that make possible the “WCF-Atlas” magic is the DataContractJsonSerializer. This is the component that serializes .NET objects into a JSON representation and deserializes JSON data back into .NET objects. Using the DataContractJsonSerializer is fairly similar to using other .NET serializers. Let’s take the following WCF Data Contract as an example:
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Web Services Transaction
The Web Services Transaction v1.1 specifications (WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity) have been approved as OASIS Standards.
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Usign the WCF-NetMsmq adapter
I got some interesting comments on my recent post about the differences between the MSMQ and WCF-NetMSMQ BizTalk Server adapters from a developer perspective. As I explained in that post, one of the main reasons for choosing WCF-NetMSMQ adapter over the MSMQ adapter is the possibility of having type information (a.k.a WCF contract) available at design time. Let’s take a look to a practical example.
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Oracle ACE award
If you have been following this blog during last year you know I have been doing a lot of work with J2EE .NET Web Services interoperability. Specifically, a lot of my work and papers have been focused on Oracle .NET interoperability. Well, a few weeks ago Oracle awarded me with an Oracle ACE (the equivalent to a Microsoft MVP). The Oracle ACE program has some fundamental differences with the Microsoft MVP program including the fact that Oracle employees can be awarded too. I am truly honored for receiving this award and I am really looking forward to keep working with the Oracle and Microsoft product teams and the developer community in general.
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New Standards
Two news for the SOA Standards land:
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More on BizTalk Services
Check out Clemens Vasters and Stephen Forte comments about BizTalk Services.
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WCF-NetMsmq vs MSMQ adapter
The upcoming BizTalk Server R2 extends heavily the messaging capabilities of BizTalk Server. Together with the rich messaging engine the WCF adapters and the WCF Line of Business Adapters SDK opens a whole new set of possibilities for developers. However, there is still some overlapping between the messaging features of BizTalk and WCF that developers must understand in order to apply the correct technology to a particular scenario. One of the most interesting scenarios with these characteristics is the interaction with MSMQ for achieving asynchronous and persistent messaging. Since the 2004 release BizTalk Server includes a MSMQ adapter for addressing this type of interaction. Now, with the WCF adapters included in R2 it is possible to use the WCF-NetMsmq and the WCF-Custom adapters for achieving similar scenarios. The question then becomes when to use one option versus the other.
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BizTalk Services
Last August I was invited, with a few other Architects, to a .NET 3.5 Design Review hosted by the Connected Systems Division. That was the first time I saw the prototype of some “services” that the Connected Systems Division is working as part of a Software as a Service initiative. Today, the first CTP of “BizTalk Services” was officially released with two services “BizTalk Identity Service” and “BizTalk Connectivity Service”. Future releases plan to include the “BizTalk ServiceBus Services” and “BizTalk Workflow Services”
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Semantic annotations for WSDL and XML Schema working draft
One of the major challenges in Real World SOA enterprise applications is the lack of semantic information associated with Service Contracts. For a while now the W3C folks have been working in different efforts for relating semantic web Standards (RDF, SPARK, etc) with Web Service basic standards (SOAP, WSDL, etc). One of those efforts Semantic annotations for WSDL and XML Schema has been announced as a W3C working draft.
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SOA Reference model
My friend John Evdemon has been writing about the different components of a SOA Reference model. Check the first two posts here and here. Both articles emphasize in the idea of a SOA model based on capabilities that can evolve independently throughout the system lifetime.
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Message oriented interoperability between WCF channels and Oracle Application Server WSIF
A few weeks ago, in an SOA forum, someone inquired about which technologies to use to achieve untyped interactions with Web Services. Untyped interactions are interactions in which the Service Contract (WSDL, Policies, etc) is not available at design time. This is a classic Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) scenario in which multiple and generic interactions with Web Services are needed and in which generating specific proxies per Web Services is not a practical solution. Going back to my conversation, my response to the question was that the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) channel model in .NET and the Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF) in J2EE are technologies that can address those types of scenarios. Surprisingly, when somebody else asked me about .NET-J2EE interoperability references for those technologies, mainly WSIF, I could not find a good example for them to reference.
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New TwoConnector
Last January 31th my good friends Javier and Carmen Mariscal were blessed with the birth of their second son, Daniel Mariscal. After two months, the baby got his first exposure to the Microsoft world.
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WebLogic 10 is here
BEA WebLogic 10 has been released. I am particularly impressed with the enhancements to the Web Services stack which includes:
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MVP award
Some good news in a middle of a crazy weekend for me.
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W3C on SML and WSDL 2.0
Good news from W3C, SML and WSDL 2.0 are almost out the door:
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JMS based Web Services in Oracle App Server Part 1: WCF Interoperability
This is the first of two articles intended to illustrate Java Messaging Service (JMS)-based Web Services using Oracle Application Server. Specifically, this article focuses on how to achieve JMS .NET interoperability through JMS-based Web Services.
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My session slides
Thanks to all the people who attended to my session Unifying Integration: Building Line of Business Adapters with WCF Deep Dive at the MVP summit. My co-speaker Sonu Arora has uploaded the slides to https://msmvps.team.partners.extranet.microsoft.com/windowsserver/pgsites/default.aspx. Given NDA reasons we can’t share all the content but I’ll be blogging about the demos in the next weeks.
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SCA v1.0 released
Some of the main J2EE vendors released today the first series of SCA specifications. The series includes bindings for integrating some of the main SOA-J2EE technologies
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Database transactions and EBay
Large-scale distributed systems often require the use of non-traditional techniques in order to improve performance. Martin Fowler (Chief Scientist ThougthWorks) explains how EBay avoid the use of database transactions.
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WF and WS-BPEL 1.1
The first CTP of the WS-BPEL 1.1 activities for Windows Workflow Foundation are now available. A later release plans to support WS-BPEL 2.0
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MVPSummit 2007 summary
The MVP Summit finalized yesterday. I had a wonderful time and enjoyed the sessions. Was a good time to catch up with some friends and also the opportunity to finally met people like: Charles Young , Dr Nick among others. At the dinner my friend Harry Pierson and I started bombarding Dr Nick with the necessity to implement durable duplex (a.k,a Service Broker bindings) in WCF.
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MVPSummit 2007
The conference season is starting. I have a few presentations scheduled for the first part of the year including Microsoft Teched and SOAWorld. Next week I am heading towards Redmon for the MVPSummit where I’ll have the pleasure of sharing stage with Sonu Arora (Program Manager BizTalk Server). Our session is going to dive deep into the .NET 3.0 adapter framework components including some of the tips and tricks for building adapters with the new framework. We’ve prepared some cool content and demos. If you are attending to the summit, swing by our session, we promised to keep it excited :D.
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Microsoft will support WS-BPEL 2.0
I know it is been a few days since the announcement but I am really happy to see Microsoft embracing WS-BPEL 1.1 and 2.0.
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BizTalk R2 Adapter Framework: Tools for generating metadata
The new metadata generation is one of the areas that present significant differences between the .NET 3.0 and BizTalk adapter frameworks. In a previous post I covered some of those differences from a conceptual standpoint. Ultimately, those differences are reflected in the tools available for developers for generating metadata at design time. If not, they are not relevant aren’t they?
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SSIS components for Salesforce.com
Mid last year AdapterWorx published its first components for SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). Yesterday we released the first beta version of the Salesforce.com Winter 07 data flow components (source and destination). Using those components developers can create SSIS packages that perform heavy CRUD operations against Salesforce.com. Particularly, the SSIS components represent a natural complement to the AdapterWorx Salesforce.com adapters for BizTalk Server 2006 and R2. Kudos to Alexis Naranjo (dev Lead), Danny and Joel for all the effort getting this version ready for this week. The full RTM package should be available in the next couple of weeks.
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Jon Flanders is joining Pluralsight
My friend Jon Flanders just announced he is joining Pluralsight. Jon will be working together with Aaron Skonnard and Matt Milner in Pluralsight’s BizTalk and WF curriculums. Congrats to Jon and Pluralsight.
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.NET 3.0 adapter for SSB and WCF channel for SSB
I have been working in some really interesting projects lately and we have some new releases coming up. After a few weeks working with the team I am really happy to announce that we will be releasing the first CTP for our .NET 3.0 adapter package for SQL Server Service Broker which includes: .NET 3.0 Service Broker adapter and WCF Service Broker channel. Some of the most interesting features included in the package are:
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Oracle SOA blog
My buddy Matt Wright is one the most prolific bloggers about Oracle technologies. He is currently relocating his blog to a new location. If you want to learn about real world deployments of the Oracle SOA Products and its interoperability with Microsoft technologies you should check out his blog.
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WS-BPEL 2.0
WS-BPEL 2.0 has been finally released. Congrats to my friend John Evdemon who has lead the committee for a few years now
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LitwareHR
My buddies Gianpaolo Carraro and Fred Chong have been working in a prototype of a real world Software as a Service application for a few months. Today they announced the first release of LitwareHR at the MSDN Architecture Developer Center. Congratulations guys, great job!!
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New AdapterWorx site
Last week AdapterWorx launched a new site with a lot of new and enhanced functionalities. This was possible due mainly to the hard work of Danny del Rio (Community Program Manager) and Joel (graphic artist) from our team. We sincerely hope you find this site much easier to use; the team is actively looking for your feedback.
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SuperBowl XLI
I have to admit I am not a big football fan. However, living and working in Miami, FL is impossible to ignore the energy the city has gotten as a result of hosting the SuperBowl tomorrow. No need to say South Beach has enough energy without the SuperBowl.
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Jim Gray missing
This would be a real tragedy. Our thoughts and prays are with Jim and his family.
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Semantic Annotations for WSDL and Xml Schema
The W3C folks are not sleeping. The Semantic Annotations for WSDL and Xml Schema specification is now a W3C candidate recommendation!!
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W3C Publishes Eight New Standards in the XML Family
We have been waiting for this a few years now.
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Architecture Journal #10
The new issue of the Architecture Journal is available in PDF format. The topics: Composite applications. Happy reading!!
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Using the BizTalk Server R2 BAM interceptor for WF
For some time now I have been pushing the use of BizTalk BAM outside of BizTalk Server implementations. BizTalk BAM provides a generic interceptor framework to track relevant data on business processes. BizTalk Server is just one of the many products that can leverage that framework in order to add visibility into Business Processes. Finally, with the release of BizTalk R2, Microsoft provides BAM interceptor implementations for WCF and WF. Using those interceptors we can extend the classic BAM features like aggregation, tracking and alerting into generic foundations like WF and WCF.
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Service Broker Adapter v1.5
After compiling a lot of feedback from Microsoft and customers our team started working in the next version of the Service Broker adapter for BizTalk Server 2006. Yesterday we finally made available the new version in AdapterWorx (Read Joel Post). This is not a major release in terms of new features but includes significant enhancements to existing features like dynamic ports and transactional receiving.
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BizTalk R2 Adapter Framework: Handling Metadata
One of the main differences between .NET 3.0 and BizTalk adapter frameworks is the approach to handle metadata. Metadata is a key component of a message-based adapter framework specially when comes to interact with LOB applications. The use of metadata raises the level of abstraction of untyped send-receive operations with data that has a semantic meaning for the LOB or technology the adapter is abstracting.
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SOA Suite best practices
My friend Clemens Utsching and colleagues has started writing the Oracle SOA Suite best practices. The first three articles of the series are super worth reading.