During the last few months, I’ve been very fortunate to have the opportunity of collaborating closely with the StreamInsight product team. One of the things that impressed the most about that team (in addition to their talent) is their mindset and commitment to produce continuous releases of the technology. You don’t have to be an expert in Microsoft culture to realize that that level of periodical releases is not common among new Microsoft technologies.

This week, just after four months of the first release, Microsoft announced the general availability of StreamInsight 1.1. This version can run side by side with StreamInsight 1.0 and provide several enhancements that I am really excited about:

Observable and Enumerable event sources

In this new release, StreamInsight supports any IObservable or IEnumerable object as event sources or event sinks. Why is this important? Let me give you a few reasons.

Mainstream sources

IEnumerable and IObservable are two of the most predominant mechanisms for representing collections in the .NET framework. This means that now we can use StreamInsight queries against a broader range of event source and, what is more important, against event sources that can be created by non-StreamInsight developers.

Query Testing

Using IEnumerable and/or IObservable event sources drastically improves the ability of testing StreamInsight queries without the need of using specific adapters. This is incredibly important when implementing complex queries which are fairly common in real world CEP scenarios.

Simulation

Simulation is a very common scenario in CEP applications. An important aspect of a correct event simulation is to structure the event sources following the specific patterns we are trying to emulate. The use of IEnumerable or IObservable event sources drastically facilitates this capability on StreamInsight applications.

Let’s take a look at an example.

Suppose that we have a database that stores series of records representing the temperature values produced by different sensors. The following ADO.NET entity framework model abstracts the interaction with our sample database.

The following code uses StreamInsight 1.1 to convert the events recorded in a data into a point event stream.

   1: Server server= Server.Create("My StreamInsight Server");

   2: var cepApplication= server.CreateApplication("SampleApplication");

   3: DemosEntities source= new DemosEntities();

   4: var enumQuery = from s in source.SensorValues

   5:                 select s;

After that we can execute StreamInsight queries that use traditional techniques such as windowing. The following sample query aggregates our events using a tumbling window pattern.

   1: var tempStream= enumQuery.ToPointStream(cepApplication, 

   2:    e => PointEvent.CreateInsert(e.CurrentTime, 

   3:    new {e.Temperature, e.SensorID} ), 

   4:    AdvanceTimeSettings.StrictlyIncreasingStartTime);

   5:  

   6: var streamQuery = from s in tempStream

   7:                   group s by s.SensorID into g

   8:                   from window in g.TumblingWindow(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(2), 

   9:                                  HoppingWindowOutputPolicy.ClipToWindowEnd)

  10:                   select new {Sensor= g.Key,  

  11:                      EventCount = window.Count(), 

  12:                      TempAvg = window.Avg(e => e.Temperature) } into agg

  13:                   select agg;

Finally, we can convert our query to an enumerable or observable sequence.

   1: foreach(var s in streamQuery.ToEnumerable())

   2:          {

   3:              Console.WriteLine("Sensor= {0}, Number of Events= {1}, 

   4:                  Average Temperature= {2}", 

   5:                  s.Sensor, s.EventCount, s.TempAvg);

   6:          }

Other improvements

In addition to the aforementioned capabilities, StreamInsight 1.1 also includes some important performance improvements in areas such as the latency of hoping windows or the throughput of join operations on edge streams.

Kudos to the StreamInsight team for this new release! Keep it up guys!

Based on the great feedback we received from our previous webinar about BizTalk Server and SO-Aware and given that few folks missed it due to some technical challenges, we've decided to repeat the webinar this Thursday. The contents are going to be almost identical although we are going to show a few new tools/demos J

Again here is a summary of what we are planning on covering:

• Centralizing WCF adapters configuration using SO-Aware
• Centralizing WCF-LOB adapters configuration using SO-Aware
• Using the SO-Aware resolver for the BizTalk ESB toolkit
• Dynamically resolving WCF configuration using SO-Aware
• Monitoring BizTalk-hosted WCF services using SO-Aware
• Testing BizTalk-hosted WCF services using SO-Aware
• And more....

You can register for the webinar here:  http://www.regonline.com/Register/Checkin.aspx?EventID=905248

I hope to see you there. Bring your BizTalk/SOA governance questions :)

Installation && Configuration:

How to Setup SO-Aware to run on .Net 4.0:

Listening to customers: A simpler SO-Aware installer: http://tellagostudios.com/listening-customers-simpler-so-aware-installer

Centralized WCF Configuration:

WCF configuration simplification with SO-Aware: http://tellagostudios.com/wcf-configuration-simplification-so-aware

Simplifying BizTalk adapters configuration using SO-Aware: http://tellagostudios.com/simplifying-biztalk-adapters-configuration-using-so-aware

Centralizing and simplifying WCF configuration with SO-Aware part II: Configuration models: http://tellagostudios.com/centralizing-and-simplifying-wcf-configuration-so-aware-part-ii-configuration-models

Centralizing Federated services configuration with SO-Aware: http://tellagostudios.com/centralizing-federated-services-configuration-so-aware

Centralizing Azure AppFabric Service Bus configuration using SO-Aware:

Videos

Web Service Testing:

Testing WCF Services with SO-Aware: the Why, the What and the What the F@#$%!!@#

Videos

Web Service Discovery:

Web Service Discovery in SO-Aware (Part 2): http://tellagostudios.com/web-service-discovery-so-aware-part-2

So-Aware PowerShell Provider:

Managing the SO-Aware repository with PowerShell: http://tellagostudios.com/managing-so-aware-repository-powershell

Using the SO-Aware PowerShell Provider to Register Services: http://tellagostudios.com/using-so-aware-powershell-provider-register-services

Videos

Service dependencies modeling:

SO-Aware integration with BizTalk Server:

Using SO-Aware with BizTalk 2010 and ESB 2.1 part 1 of 2: http://tellagostudios.com/using-so-aware-biztalk-2010-and-esb-21-part-1-2

Using SO-Aware with BizTalk 2010 and ESB 2.1 part 2 of 2: http://tellagostudios.com/using-so-aware-biztalk-2010-and-esb-21-part-2-2

SO-Aware ESB Resolver for Microsoft BizTalk Sever: http://tellagostudios.com/so-aware-esb-resolver-microsoft-biztalk-sever

More BizTalk ESB Samples for SO-Aware ESB Resolver: http://tellagostudios.com/more-biztalk-esb-samples-so-aware-esb-resolver

Simplifying BizTalk adapters configuration using SO-Aware: http://tellagostudios.com/simplifying-biztalk-adapters-configuration-using-so-aware

SO-Aware SDK && Tools:

SO-Aware SDK Samples and Utilities Refresh:

SWUtil - A new tool for generating service proxies from the SO-Aware repository: http://tellagostudios.com/swutil-new-tool-generating-service-proxies-so-aware-repository

SO-Aware integration with Windows Identity Foundation:

Centralizing Federated services configuration with SO-Aware: http://tellagostudios.com/centralizing-federated-services-configuration-so-aware

SO-Aware integration with Windows Azure AppFabric:

Centralizing Azure AppFabric Service Bus configuration using SO-Aware:

SO-Aware integration with Visual Studio:

Add Service Reference from SO-Aware in Visual Studio: http://tellagostudios.com/add-service-reference-so-aware-visual-studio

Events && Publications:

SO-Aware highlighted at the 3rd SOA Symposium: http://tellagostudios.com/so-aware-highlighted-3rd-soa-symposium

Channel9’s Endpoint TV Meet SO-Aware Part I: http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Endpoint/endpointtv-Meet-SO-Aware-Part-1

Channel9’s Endpoint TV Meet SO-Aware Part II: http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Endpoint/endpointtv-Meet-SO-Aware-Part-2

This week I had the pleasure of presenting a session about lightweight, REST-AtomPub-based, collaborative SOA Governance at the 3^rd SOA Symposium in Berlin. The session was based on the principles and techniques behind our SO-Aware product and it was gratifying to see the warm reception our young product received from the attendees.

I had a very enthusiastic audience and a lot of intelligent questions. I was particularly happy to see how well some of our radical ideas that challenge traditional SOA Governance resonate with the audience. This is just another fact that confirms that the big SOA governance vendors are JUST NOT GETTING IT ;)

The slides for my presentation are available for download here

In the afternoon I had the honor of participating in a panel about Cloud Computing principles with some highly recognized industry experts such as David Chou. We had a lot of interesting debates with the audience and even among ourselves.

For being such a young conference, the SOA Symposium organizers have managed to congregate some of the top speakers in the fields of SOA and Cloud Computing. I am enthusiastically looking forward to the next edition of this conference (I heard is in a fun place in South America ;))