Archives
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Implementing a SAML sender-vouches scenario with WIF
Sender-vouches is one of the two subject confirmation methods included in the SAML security token profile specification. Essentially, the sender-vouches scenario enables an attesting entity to vouch for the identity of a subject to a relying party. The following figure illustrates this scenario:
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Microsoft and Oracle showcase WS Interoperability at Gartner’s AADI summit
As you might have noticed, I haven't been actively blogging during the last month. The reason is that I have been hands on working on a very ambitious project to showcase Web Services interoperability between Microsoft and Oracle platforms. This experiment allowed us to explore the interoperability of WCF 4.0 and WIF RTM with the upcoming release of Oracle WebLogic within the context of a real world application. As a result, we were able to implement various complex WS interoperability scenarios encompassing diverse areas such as security, trust, federation, asynchronous reliable messaging, transactions, etc. We had the opportunity to experience firsthand the interop capabilities of both stacks as well as identify some of the areas that require improvement in order to achieve better levels of interoperability.
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DonXml is speaking at PDC
PDC is here again!
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South Florida BizTalk User Group: Improving agility with the ESB 2.0 toolkit
Next Tuesday (November 10th) my colleague Uri Katsir will be presenting a session at the South Florida BizTalk Users Group about improving agility in large BizTalk environments using the ESB toolkit. If you are a BizTalk developer or operations architect working on complex BizTalk deployments you MUST attend Uri's session. In order to keep things in perspective, Uri has prepared a series of interesting demos that illustrate the techniques used to improve the development and management experience of BizTalk solutions by leveraging the ESB toolkit. The presentation is 100% focused on real world scenarios including some of the lessons Uri has learned while working on one of the most complex BizTalk environments in the world.
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Uri Katsir is blogging!
My friend and colleague Uri Katsir just joined the blogosphere. Uri is a BizTalk wizard who is currently working on one of the biggest BizTalk implementations in the world. We are extremely proud to have him as part of our technical staff at Tellago. Uri has already posted a couple of interesting write-ups about ESB itineraries troubleshooting and deployment techniques.
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The WCF Extensibility Guidance is now on MSDN!
As the WCF team already announced, the first chapter of the WCF Extensibility Guidance is now available on MSDN . This paper is the result of an effort I started a few months ago with my colleague and friend Pablo Cibraro. Our goal was to provide a detailed guidance of the major extensibility points of the WCF runtime. In that sense, we decided to cover major areas of the WCF extensibility programming model such as channels, client-dispatcher, security, hosting, metadata, RESTful service and even the new extensions on WCF 4.0.
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Implementing a custom RSS/Atom adapter with Microsoft StreamInsight
In a previous post we explained the programming model of Microsoft's StreamInsight adapter framework. The fundamental capability of this framework is to streamline the flow of events in and out of the StreamInsight hosting application. One of the main advantages of this model is that enables developers to create their own adapters that can be leveraged on StreamInsight-based solutions. On this post we will explore the details of implementing an RSS/Atom adapter using StreamInsight's adapter framework.
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Exploring StreamInsight's adapter model
Adapters are a fundamental component of Complex Event Processing (CEP) applications. In a nutshell, adapters provide the interfaces that abstracts how events are produced or consumed by the CEP infrastructure. Most CEP frameworks leverage the concept of an adapter as the fundamental mechanism for interacting with heterogeneous systems. Following the same principles, Microsoft's StreamInsight uses adapters to model the flow of events in or out of the CEP host. Furthermore, StreamInsight enables a flexible programming model that allows developers to extend the core infrastructure by implementing custom adapters. From a programming model standpoint, StreamInsight classifies adapters based on the direction of event flow and on the event model used.
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Looking for an ASP.NET/AJAX developer
My company Tellago, Inc is looking to hire an experience ASP.NET/AJAX developer for a six months contract gig in Florida. Candidates should also have knowledge of WCF, ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services. You will be working in a highly dynamic team lead by some of our top architects. If you are interested please drop me a line at jesus dot rodriguez at tellago dot com.
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Processing events from multiple sources using Microsoft StreamInsight
One of the fundamental patterns of Complex Event Processing (CEP) applications is the ability of process events from various input sources and distribute to multiple output sources. These operations require high degrees of coordination what makes it particularly difficult to implement in real world scenarios. Why is that? Well, for starters, continuously querying data from multiple sources entails implementing certain degrees of parallelisms on the CEP application. As we all know, parallel processing techniques typically introduces challenges from the error handling and availability perspective. These complexity is increased on CEP scenarios that need to create queries that combines events from multiple sources that are being produced in parallel. The following figure helps to illustrate that scenario.
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Microsoft’s StreamInsight first thoughts
I spent this weekend toying with Microsoft StreamInsight bits. I have a few blog posts planned for the next few days that tackle very specific CEP patterns but I figure it might make sense to start by highlighting some of the features I think differentiate Microsoft's StreamInsight from other CEP technologies in the market. Here is a n initial summary of the features I really like about Microsoft's StreamInsight:
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Speaking at ArcSig User Group tomorrrow
I will be speaking tomorrow at the South Florida Architecture User Group (ArcSig). The session is titled From SOA to WOA: Introducing Web Oriented Architectures and touches upon the fundamental principles and architecture techniques that can help developers to implement distributed systems that leverage the principles of REST.
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My thoughts about RETRO: A RESTful Transactions Model
Transactions has typically been one of the aspects that the WS-* followers continuously point out as one of the weaknesses of the REST model. Even though we all agree that atomic transactions in distributed systems are JUST A BAD IDEA and everybody that follows Werner Vogels's lectures knows that the eventually consistent model is the way to go, we can't deny that transactions (conceptually) are an important part of everyday's business processes. However, let's just all be on an agreement that conceptual transactions don't necessarily have to be implemented as atomic transactions and there are simpler and more scalable models that have been successfully adopted by the industry. The RESTful model is not an exception to that rule and consequently we need an efficient way to model transactions without violating the principles of REST.
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Using WCF 4.0 XAML Services in the real world: Activating WCF Services from a central repository
Declarative Services is one of the new features included in the .NET framework 4.0. In a nutshell, declarative services are WCF services modeled and implemented entirely in XAML. This feature is fundamentally enabled by extending Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) 4.0 with the capability of modeling WCF contracts using XAML. You can read more details about declarative services on the MSDN documentation. Even if you are not entirely familiar with WF as a technology, I am sure you can see the advantages of implementing services in a declarative languages.
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SOAWorld 2009 session
Thanks to all the folks who attended to my session about WOA at SOAWorld 2009. I got a lot of interesting questions from an always sharp New York audience :). You can get the slide deck here…
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Speaking at SOAWorld 2009
This afternoon I will be presenting a session about Web Oriented Architectures (WOA) at SOAWorld. The session explores the concepts behind real world architectures based on the principles of REST and how they represent an interesting alternative to traditional SOA.
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We are still hiring...
As you might be aware, Tellago (my new venture ) has been steadily growing during last year. We are still looking for talented architects that would like to join our team. Specifically, we are have a few openings for BizTalk Architects and developers. If you are skilful with BizTalk technologies and you are crazy enough to join our team please drop me a line at jesus dot rodriguez at tellago dot com or at jobs at tellago dot com.
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Speaking about WCF and WF 4.0 at VSLive
Next Monday I will be presenting two sessions at VSLive Las Vegas. The first session is about the WCF 4.0 extensibility model and it covers almost all the major extensibility points of the different WCF subsystems such as messaging, security, instancing, etc.
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Using WCF Services with Axum: A load generation sample
Following my previous post, I’ve decided to start blogging some examples of the use of Axum on distributed programming scenarios. The purpose of these samples is not to detail the specific features of the Axum language but rather to highlight some practical scenarios that can be improved by the combination of Axum and other technologies.
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Pablo does security
My good friend and colleague Pablo Cibraro will be presenting a MSDN WebCast tomorrow about the capabilities, relationships and differences of emerging security standards such as OpenID, OAuth and LiveID. The WebCast is targeting Microsoft’s Latinoamerica developer community and will be conducted in Spanish :(
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Why is Axum relevant to distributed systems?
Last week Microsoft announced the first version of Axum. In a nutshell, Axum is a domain specific language (DSL) for modeling coordination and concurrency scenarios in .NET applications. Although Axum is still an incubation project and there is no final word on whether it will be productized, we should all agree that this represents a remarkable effort to enhance the .NET language ecosystem to embrace the next generation of applications based on multi-core architectures.
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Dwight Goins joins Tellago
I am happy to announce another top architect that has recently joined out team. Dwight Goins joined Tellago as a Sr. Solutions Architect and is currently working in one of the biggest BTS Server deployments in the world.
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Pablo Cibraro joins Tellago
Continuing the list of recent additions to our team, we are thrilled to announce that Pablo Cibraro has joined Tellago as a Sr. Solutions Architect. Pablo is a phenomenal programmer and one of the authorities in Microsoft Connected Systems technologies. He is a Microsoft Connected Systems MVP and a member of the prestigious Connected Systems Advisors group. He regularly blogs at http://weblogs.asp.net/cibrax about WCF, Geneva, Web Services Security and many other topics.
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DonXml joins Tellago
For the last few months I have been planning to start blogging about the new addition to our Architecture team at Tellago. One of our goals when we started Tellago, around a year ago, was to hire the best and the brightest and provide them with an environment on which they can take their talent to the next level. I know it sounds like a cliché but we have been steadily working towards that goal and we have hired a group of very talented architects that are going to be leading various of our top projects and other future initiatives.
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The future of SOA governance looks RESTful
During the last few years, UDDI has been at the center of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Governance platforms. Specifically, UDDI has been the main mechanism used to implement service registry and repositories which we all know are the fundamental component of SOA governance frameworks such as HP-Systinet, SOASoftware or SoftwareAG-Infravio. At this point, I believe the majority of the SOA community has already added UDDI to the list of "irrelevant" Web Services specifications. Although we can attribute different causes to the failure of UDDI, all of them have their roots on the limitations of the UDDI data model. Attempting to model the highly diverse characteristics of SOA environments with standards like UDDI is proven to be a great recipe for failure.
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Speaking at Microsoft's Connections Spring Symposium
Tomorrow and Thursday I will be speaking at the Microsoft's Connections Spring events hosted in Fort Lauderdale and Tampa respectively. The session focuses on real world ESB patterns and the Microsoft's ESB value proposition. We are going to cover technologies such as the ESB Guidance 2.0, BizTalk Server 2009, WCF 4.0 and even Windows Azure. This time, I have the honor to share the stage with Toya Lofton who is a Microsoft's SOA Technology specialists with tons of experience in real world projects.
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MVP 2009!
Yesterday I received the notification that Microsoft has awarded me as a BizTalk Server MVP for fifth year in a row. Thanks a lot to my MVP lead Mark Clagett and all the other folks involved in the process. I am really looking forward to continue collaborating with the .NET communities during 2009.
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Extending Dublin’s tracking service by implementing a custom tracking participant
In a previous post we've explored how to extend Dublin's forwarding service by implementing a custom message filter. This post continues the series by illustrating the extensibility model of Dublin's tracking service.
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Demos from SDWest
Apparently I forgot to blog my demos from my WCF extensibility session at SDWest. You can find them here. Thanks again to all the people who attended my session.
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New WS-* specs published
The Web Services Resource Access Working Group published five First Public Working Drafts: Web Services Enumeration (WS-Enumeration), Web Services Eventing (WS-Eventing), Web Services Resource Transfer (WS-RT), Web Services Transfer (WS-Transfer), and Web Services Metadata Exchange (WS-MetadataExchange). The first describes a general SOAP-based protocol for enumerating a sequence of XML elements that is suitable for traversing logs, message queues, or other linear information models. The second describes a protocol that allows Web services to subscribe to or accept subscriptions for event notification. The third defines extensions to WS-Transfer that deal primarily with fragment-based access to resources to satisfy the common requirements of WS-ResourceFramework and WS-Management. The fourth describes a general SOAP-based protocol for accessing XML representations of Web service-based resources. The fifth defines how metadata associated with a Web service endpoint can be represented as resources, how metadata can be embedded in endpoint references, and how metadata could be retrieved from a Web service endpoint.
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Speaking at SDWest about WCF extensibility
This Friday I will be presenting a session about WCF extensibility at SDWest . I plan to go deep into a lot of the WCF internals aspects such as the channels, client-dispatcher runtime, metadata, hosting, instancing, etc. My goal is to give you as much information as possible about the different extensibility points of the WCF runtime. We are going to spend the bulk of the sessions looking at code and showing real world scenarios of the applicability of the WCF extensibility model. If you are attending SDWest and you are interested in WCF and Service Orientation in general please swing by my session and feel free to introduce yourself.
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Extending Dublin's forwarding service with a custom WCF message filter
In a previous post we showed how to implement a basic WCF content based routing solution using the Windows Application Server (Dublin) forwarding service together with XPath message filters and filter tables. Even though XPath filters are a very appealing mechanism for implementing service brokering or composition solutions, there are a large variety of scenarios that can be addressed more efficiently using other filtering techniques. Trying to tackle this large spectrum of scenarios using a fixed set of filtering mechanisms such as XPath or XQuery is precisely one of the main challenges faced by traditional message brokering frameworks such as the infamous Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs).
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We are hiring
Tellago, Inc (my new venture) is aggressively expanding its services in the U.S. East Coast and particularly in the South East. We are looking for developers and architects skillful with Microsoft Connected Systems technologies such as BizTalk Server, WCF, WF, CardSpace as well as SharePoint Server and SQL Server.
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Using WS-Discovery in WCF 4.0
Runtime endpoint discovery is one of the most challenging capabilities to implement in service oriented systems. Dynamically resolving service’s endpoints based on predefined criteria is a necessary functionality to interact with services which endpoint addresses change frequently. WS-Discovery is an OASIS Standard that defines a lightweight discovery mechanism for discovering services based on multicast messages. Essentially, WS-Discovery enables a service to send a Hello announcement message when it is initialized and a Bye message when is removed from the network. Clients can discover services by multicasting a Probe message to which a service can reply with a ProbeMatch message containing the information necessary to contact the service. Additionally, clients can find services that have changed endpoint by issuing a Resolve message to which respond with a ResolveMatch message.
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WSO2 releases Carbon
WSO2 just announced the debut of Carbon SOA Framework which extends some of their award winning products with componentization capabilities based on the OSGI specifications. Additionally, they have also announced the first wave of products based on the Carbon framework which includes WSO2 Web Services Application Server (WSAS) 3.0, WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB 2.0), and WSO2 Registry 2.0, as well as the new WSO2 Business Process Server (BPS).
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Microsoft's StockTrade is now part of Apache's Stonehenge
Last week, Microsoft showed their commitment to promote best practices around Web Services interoperability by donating a version of the famous StockTrader application to the Apache Stonehenge project. For those of you not familiar with Stonehenge, it is an Apache incubator project focused on fomenting Web Services interoperability best practices. Following Microsoft's initiative, my friends at WSO2 has also donated their version of StockTrader which was highlighted at last year Teched US keynote. Kudos to the Microsoft team, specially to my buddy Greg Leake who has championed the StockTrader implementation for the last few years.
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BAM whitepaper available on MSDN
After presenting our session about BizTalk Server Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) at Teched 2008, my partner in crime and CTO of Tellago Joe Klug and I decided to coauthor a paper that highlighted the capabilities and architecture of BAM from a developer perspective. The final result is an 87 pages paper that is now available both for download and online on MSDN.
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The "death" of SOA