YEAR 2008

Well in some places now in the world it is New Year. Year 2008; what will it bring us? For starters Visual Studio 2008, it’s already out there and I have seen a couple of books already about VS 2008. I have bought a couple of eBooks at APRESS to have some new reading material and something to learn. Next is BizTalk 2006 R2 for me. A couple of customers will migrate to this new version of BizTalk

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My MOSS 2007 Experience

Last week I received a new laptop from my employer Inter Access. It’s Lenovo T61 with a dual core processor, 4Gb and 160 Gb Disk. It has Vista Enterprise installed on it, so I can finally work with Vista with a performing laptop. Focus today at Inter Access is SOA and High Performance Workplace. I am more involved in the SOA part than the other and have done a lot inside this area if you look at

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Universal SOA

Today I got another mail from SOAWorld in my mailbox with a couple of links to some sessions held at SOAWorld Conference held this year. I looked at session David Linthicum's calles 'Web 2.0' - It's the Universal SOA. You have to register to watch it. It's a nice overview session around SOA and Web 2.0.Technorati:Web 2.0SOA

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Last Mile of SOA with Enterprise Web 2.0

SOAWorld states: Enterprises continue to look for return on investment of their service-orientated architectures, and it is Enterprise Web 2.0 that makes this possible by connecting the last mile of SOA to end-users. So Web 2.0 enables IT to connect people with services. This will be a win-win solution for the enterprise; where not only IT, and end-users benefit but businesses benefits as well,

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Web 2.0 Applications, where have I been ...

Steef-Jan Wiggershttp://SteefJanW.bebo.com/I must say I like this web 2.0. In a previous post I mentioned Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. As you have noticed I use Technorati and LinkedIn. Now I also have started using Plaxo, Bebo, Last.fm, and Fickr. Nice to see what you can do on the web compared to what you could do a couple of years ago, when most things were static. What I really like is last.fm

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Enterprise BizTalk Solution Case

This year I architected, designed, developed and supported (still do actually) an enterprise BizTalk solution. It involves integration between eBusiness Suite from Oracle an ERP product for in this case Human Resource Management, Logistics, and Financials and Corporate SharePoint Portal. Applications inside this portal need data from Oracle eBusiness Apps. This data for this case was employee

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Web and Enterprise 2.0

Yesterday LEAP 2008 Master classes in Holland ended. Next stop will be Redmond in January 2008. I liked this last master class around the knowledge worker, new way of work and collaboration. I heard some new terminology like enterprise 2.0. So I wondered what that is. So I used a web 2.0 technology like wiki, in this case Wikipedia to look it up. So I found this:Enterprise 2.0 is a new

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SOA with BizTalk

Well as you all will know is that basic components in a SOA are services that provide a service. Other components in my humble view are orchestration (composition of services) and a communication infrastructure to provide in messaging between services. Optional components like Business Activity Monitoring, Business Intelligence, Business Rule Evaluators or Security and so can provide in more

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Last Master class Leap : Knowledge Worker

This week the last LEAP master class in Holland, before all LEAP attendees will go to Microsoft campus in Redmond for the final master classes. Coming master class is about the knowledge worker, hot topic. People Ready BusinessFrom day one Microsoft has put the user, the people at the center of IT. More specifically software is supposed to support people in garner insight, make decisions, close

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Buzz Words

Two weeks ago the Microsoft SOA and BP Conference took place in Redmond. During this Conference a lot of buzz words and concepts were spread around. A couple of speakers from this Conference have done an interview one can find at channel 9, where they explain a couple of these words and concepts like SOA, Software as a service, Sofware + services, Enterprise Service Bus, Internet Service Bus,

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New Visual Studio Mangazine Site Online

I have been a subscriber for a long time now for Visual Studio Magazine, even when they were Visual Basic Programmers Journal. In March I visited VSLive in San Francisco, where I had the pleasure to meet Patrick Meader the Editor in Chief. The Magazine is all around Visual Studio .NET and related technologies. So if you have not heard of this magazine. Check it out or go to their site.Technorati:

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Everything you want to know about Microsoft OSLO and beyond

Today I got an email from Enterprise Architect Insight with yet another article around Microsoft’s OSLO. Since its announcement it has gotten a lot of attention and will have in the near future. So where can you find this information and buzz about OSLO. Well here is a list if you like to let you consume al this information:Microsoft Directions PDF by Rob Helm;Microsoft's Oslo: Putting SOA on the

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Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference 2007 Recap

I am home after a good week of conference in Redmond and some sightseeing. This year’s Microsoft and BP Conference was a good one with a focus on BizTalk, but more on SOA itself like Governance, Business & IT agility, Anti-Patterns and business cases. Conference kicked off with keynote session, where OSLO was announced. Since it was announced a lot of attention in blogosphere was noticeable. I

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Final day Microsoft SOA and BP Conference 2007

Last day here at the Microsoft SOA and BP Conference in Redmond I attended Modeling & Composition of Applications by Steve Swartz & Clemens Vasters. It was a cool session and there demo was great. It will be available later this year on their blogs (probably Clemens). They will also release a white paper about this topic. Next session BizTalk Advanced Orchestration Concepts and best practices

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SOA Anti-Patterns

Final session of today is about identifying and avoiding common anti-patterns in your service oriented architecture solution. It is presented by John Callaway (Quicklearn). AgendaAnti-patterns defined Common anti-patterns and solutionsPatternsA pattern is something which is documented to a common problem that produces beneficial results, there everywhere and SO ones adhere to tenets of Service

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Microsoft ESB

One of the last talks today at Microsoft SOA and BP Conference I attended is one from Marty Waszinicky about the architecture of the Microsoft ESB. Session objectives and takeaways are • Why what of an ESB (SOA Terminology)• Microsoft ESB guidance capabilities (messaging infrastructure, End point management, Operational Support, Invocation patterns)• Governed service platform with ESB guidance

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Building Workflow Powered Services

This afternoon I attended the ‘Building Workflow Powered Services in .NET 3.5’ talk by Matt Winkler. He talked about WF,WCF combination, why combining them, the architecture Workflow Services, when/how to do combinations, implicit/explicit context management, and messaging patterns and application protocols implemented workflow services. There is a video on channel 9 where a demo of combining WF

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Robust Error Handling in BizTalk Server Solutions

Third day of Microsoft SOA and BP Conference stared off for me with a session about robust error handling for BizTalk Server solutions by Matt Meleski. He did a general discussion first before he started some demos around error handling relying on Message Box and BizTalk framework or failed message routing to file share or SharePoint. These first demos involved error handling in BizTalk server

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Connection in the cloud : BizTalk Services & WCF

Last session of today was around BizTalk Services aka Internet Service Bus as I learned today. Justin Smith did his talk with the following objectives:- Intro BizTalk Services- Service messaging options- Introduce BizTalk APIAnd takeaways from this session are:- Provide generic, secure connection- Lowers bar for next gen development- Incubation technology in this pointCTP is here nowSome of my

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BizTalk Testing

Next session after service virtualization was about BizTalk testing. This session was done by Darren Jefford one of the author of Professional BizTalk Book, see one of my previous post. Some of the highlights (practices) or blurts from this session:- test, do not forget that- think about test overload scenarios- test early, often- look at performance- identiy bottlenecks- know patterns or

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Service virtualization with .NET and BizTalk Server

This afternoon today at Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference I went to a session about service virtualization with .NET and BizTalk Server done by William Oellermann and Raul Camacho. Both work for SOA Solutions Team at Microsoft Corporation. Their objective was to establish significance service virtualization in SOA implementation and demonstrate roles of .NET 3.0, SQL Server and

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BizTalk WCF Adapters

Yesterday I enjoyed sunset in Kirkland near Redmond. It was good scenic view of Seattle at dusk. Today the first session is a deep dive into BizTalk Adapters for WCF by Aaron Skonnard. And recently wrote a white paper about WCF Adapters in BizTalk Server R2. More you will find on his blog site. In this session he went into WCF Runtime and how in fits into BizTalk, port architecture actually.

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Microsoft SOA Governance

Last session for me today at Microsoft SOA and BP Conference was on flexible SOA Governance. Frank Martinez from SOA Software was presenting this topic with his software portfolio. So this was a kind of product session. His company is a Microsoft Partner and has products in - SOA Governance- SOA Policy Management- SOA Security- SOA Mediation- SOA ManagementAnd has customers like jetBlue, Verizon,

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Microsoft OSLO Project

During Microsoft SOA and Business Conference Oslo project is announced. This project is about updating Microsoft technologies for service-oriented architectures, and for composite applications build on top of it. See Tim Rayburn blog post for more detail or my keynote post.Technorati: Microsoft OSLO project

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Increasing Business and IT agility with SOA and Microsoft

Increasing Business and IT agility with SOA and Microsoft by Kris Horrocks, who went into offerings by Microsoft on SOA. Here are some blurts from this session. Focus business and technology model and its friction points. These points are:Focus document exchange in the business and inward technology driven view like EAI (contract and messages by different systems) that deliver solutions that

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Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference 2007 Keynote

My fifth day here in Redmond starts with Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference first day. I arrived a little earlier before conference starts, so I could enjoy scenery in Washington State. I went to Mount Rainer, Mount St. Helens, Seattle Needle, Pike Market, and Snoqualmie Falls and so on. This is definitely the ever green state. Rainer and St. Helens are room name in the Microsoft

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IDesign WCF Samples

Today I came across IDesign a consulting and training company, where I found out one can download a bunch of WCF samples. I mentioned them before in a previous post. They have WCF samples categorized as follows: Essentials Contracts Data Contracts Instance Management Operations Faults Transactions Concurrency Management Queuing Security I have not given one of them a try yet in my VS2008

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WCF Contracts

In previous post I talked about my exploration (and/or study) of WCF. I have started with building WCF services and so on (see list below).Defining service contracts and servicesHosting of services in a console app or IISExposing of endpoints for services using various standard bindingsWorking with VS templates and tools (SvcUtil, Service Configuration Editor)Service metadata (browsing)

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Microsoft 2007 SOA and BP Conference coming up

Anybody saw Rugby final yesterday evening, it was a great outcome. South Africa won and deserved to be world champions, since they won every game. Montgomery did his best with penalty kicks and England was just disappointing. But it’s over now and I will have to wait until RWC 2011 in New Zealand. Well in a few days I am somewhere else in world attending something different: the Microsoft 2007

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Creating some more WCF Services

I have advanced a bit more now in my study of WCF. After going through some of the basics and using channel factory to manually creating a proxy or svcutil to generate it. Now I am going into exploring tools that generate services, access metadata, create configuration settings and generating proxies. I first started with a lab where one creates a service and then configures service endpoints

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Creating WCF Services Experience

I have started with my study of Windows Communication Foundation. As you can read in my previous post I have decided to learn it myself. There are possibilities of learning it form recommended training and consulting companies like IDesign, Developmentor, Wintellect, newtellingence, thinktecture or Pluralsight. I kicked off with a book called learning WCF written by Michele Leroux Bustamante, who

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Learning WCF

As you already probably know Visual Studio 2008 is heading our way. One of things you can do is build WCF services. This year I followed some sessions about WCF during VS Live in San Francisco. After those sessions I bought a book Windows Communication Foundation Unleashed and hoped to read it and start working and learning WCF. But no I did not come around to doing just that. Coming week before

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LEAP 2008 Master class 3

Yesterday I attended the third LEAP master class. I was a bit tired, because the evening before I went to a RUSH concert in Rotterdam. It’s very good, but loud performance by these old geezers. Ok back to LEAP stuff; this master class was all about infrastructure. Documentation material and so, you can find in my previous post. It started off with a presentation from Martin Sih, a Technology

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LEAP 2008 Master class 3 preparation

Yesterday evening witnessed one of the best performances of Dream Theater. If I had to summarize the show in one word it would be amazing. Now back to reality, LEAP master class 3 is coming up next Thursday I there is allot of reading to be done for preparation. The first session was focused on the (de)coupling of information systems something Microsoft calls “Connected Systems”, which is in

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SOA legacy friendly

Right now I am listening to the new Alter Bridge album blackbird. While listening I am reviewing a whitepaper created by our architect team (I’m one of them) at Inter Access about SOA. In a previous post I mentioned that we are busy creating a SOA Framework. In this whitepaper we start with what we think SOA is by means of a definition. This definition will be explained in the paper and SOA

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Second LEAP Master class

After surviving the ‘Oktoberfest’ in Munich I yesterday attended the second master class of LEAP, see previous post. I was not really excited about this master class, since I not very keen on user interface or experience. After the master class was finished I had a different feeling, I was actually excited having gained more insight in user experience.The master class was around Enterprise

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Software plus Services

In my last post I mentioned Software and Services as a new initiative this year from Microsoft. It is a vision outlined by Microsoft's Chief Architect, Ray Ozzie during his keynote at MIX07. In the coming issue of Microsoft Architect Journal issue 13 an interview is placed, which elaborates on his vision around Software and services. The world slowly transforms from software to services, but both

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First LEAP Masterclass

This week I had my first master class with the LEAP 2008 Program (see my previous posts). Subject was (de)coupling of enterprise systems. For preparation of this master class we had to read a couple of things, which I mentioned also in my previous post. First we had a presentation from Dik Bijl concerning LEAP introduction, goals, means and vision/mission/strategy from Microsoft for the coming

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My SOA Library Grows

Number of SOA literature is growing and this also accounts for my own personal library of computer books. I have added yet another book called ‘SOA Principles of Service Design’ by Thomas Erl. He is according to his own site a top selling SOA author and specialized in giving training and strategic consulting services.Taken from his site is the following about his books:His first SOA book "

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Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference 2007

Today I have registered for Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference being held October 29 – November 2 this year in Redmond. I am looking forward to it. There are a number of tracks again like tools (BizTalk), Solution Architecture, Infrastructure Architecture and Business value (read here). It is intendend for customers and partners who can learn about Microsoft’s current and long-term

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Back to work

This week I started working again after a nice holiday in Spain and France (see picture, where me and my colleague Joost are behind a laptop, still working!!!). I have begun on a new assignment (project) for a health insurance company. It involves evaluating BizTalk environment they set up together with solutions that were developed. Besides this I will lead a research project to see if the

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Blogging so far

Well almost a year of blogging. Must say it is a very joyful effort to share knowledge, opinions and so on. This will be the last post for now, because I am going on holiday for a couple of weeks to Spain and France. Will be back begin September and start posting again on this blog and a new one in Dutch. Have a nice holiday!

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SOA Framework

My company inter access is working hard on a SOA framework. I mentioned this in one of previous posts. We have found a more or less good defintion for SOA, which is (freely translated):A Service Oriented Architecture is a structural style to establish information needs of a organisation based on servicesTook a while for us architects to come to this one, but it takes usually a lot of time to get

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BizTalk and Configuration Files

In one of my previous post I mentioned Log4Net. Configuration of log4net is done through a registry pointing to a configuration file, where one can determine how configuration of logging inside BizTalk for instance can be done. So using a config file for configuration purposes in BizTalk is also possible in another way. One can create an environmental variable by going to control panel --> system

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LEAP 2008

This year I and another colleague of my organization (Inter Access) will be participating in LEAP (Lead Enterprise Architect Program). This is a program organized by Microsoft Netherlands and initiated by Dik Bijl for Lead enterprise Architects. The program starts in the Netherlands with four afternoon sessions of presentations, discussions and cases and ends with one week in Redmond (January

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My first experience with SSIS

Last week I had my first experience with SQL Server Integration Services. Customer I am working now needed a data transfer from Oracle to SQL Server. The reason they wanted this was because availability of Oracle was not guaranteed. Data needed to be available at all times and Oracle databases were hosted by a third-party and SQL Server database were in house and we control over them. If one has

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New BizTalk Server book

I received a new BizTalk book today. In some of my previous posts I mentioned a BizTalk book from APRESS, this one is published in May and from WROX. The authors are Darren Jefford, Kevin B. Smith and Ewan Fairweather. It’s a programmer to programmer book that will teach you:How the BizTalk Engine works and how to develop effective pipeline components;How to develop BizTalk orchestrations that

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BizTalk Server 2006 R2 WCF Adapter

In a previous post I described my experience with installing and configuring BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Beta2. This time I wanted to try out one of the features of R2, WCF Adapter. I found an example of Stephen W. Thomas together with a video demoing WCF Adapter on BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Beta 1. Demo still applies for beta 2 with some differences in screens (wizard) when publishing the WCF Service.

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CDATA Mapping Experience inside BizTalk

XML CDATA is something I was not really familiar with before. Xml parsers normally parse all text in an xml document. Text inside a CDATA section is ignored. This week I stumbled over CDATA sections inside a message. This message I had to map to another message with a different structure and later on had to be passed to a web service. During mapping I seem to have lost the CDATA Section. I

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Microsoft ESB Guidance

I received an email today from Marty Wasznicky, Regional Program Manager BizTalk Server Microsoft. His email announces a community release of Microsoft ESB Guidance. Microsoft ESB was demoed during SOA & BPM Conference in Redmond last year in October (see previous post). ESB Guidance consisted of the following which enabled Microsoft partners and customers to build large and small-scale ESB

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BizTalk SIG Experience

Yesterday I led a Special Interest Group BizTalk Meeting. We discussed some customer scenarios, where we created BizTalk solutions for. It was a very successful exchange of knowledge and experiences. Solutions involved connections to legacy systems like AS/400, LOB like SAP and Oracle eBusiness suite, webservices (WSE) and SQL Server. Solutions were demoed to each other on VPC or through VPN to

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Second Day at DevDays 2007 Amsterdam

Second day at the DevDays. I had to work in the morning so I missed first two sessions I wanted to attend. I went to three sessions in the afternoon:Realizing SaaS with .Net 3.0 by Adam MageeWindows CardSpace and your digital identity on the web by Erik van de VenLego Mindstorm NXT, Visual Studio & Microsoft Robotics by Alex Thissen and Anko DuizerAdam Magee did his session around Software as a

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First Day at DevDays 2007 Amsterdam

Today I went to the first day of DevDays 2007 in Amsterdam. It was a fun day and met a lot of people, old colleagues, people I worked with, speakers, trainers from companies like class-a, Microsoft people like Arie Leeuwensteijn (organizer DevDays). It was just awesome. I started the day with a keynote from Scott Guthrie, who talked about Silverlight. Most of you probably already heard about this

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Business Process Conference 2007 Netherlands

Today I went to Microsoft Business Conference 2007 with subjects SOA, BPM and Microsoft. Location was a castle in a town called Putten. Speakers were Dik Bijl (Architect Advisor from Microsoft Netherlands), David Chappell, Chris Dial. I had to pleasure of speaking Dik and David during breaks.Meeting Dik:I asked Dik about his presentation if it can be used to explain SOA to the business. He agreed

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Installing and configuring BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Beta2

I started with a sysprep vpc Windows 2003 SP1. After setting it up through VPC console I started with patching and SP2 (this may take a while, depending on your host system). Next step is installing some prerequisites like IIS 6.0, Office Excel/InfoPath 2003 SP2, Visual Studio 2005, SharePoint Services 2.0, SQL Server 2005 SP1. This needs to be done to use HTTP, SOAP Adapter, WSS Adapter, SSL

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Software Developer Event - Software as a Service

Day before yesterday I went to a Software Development Event in my hometown Ede. It was organized by the Software Development Network. I went to the following sessions:SOA in high performance, high availability systemsWeb client software factory: ASP.NET 2.0, Ajax en workflowSOA: Implementation now and laterIn between there was lunch and I met Paul Gielens an old colleague, buddy I worked with at

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BizTalk Challenge add namespace to message

Today I faced a new challenge with BizTalk Server, where I needed to add a namespace to an incoming message. Through Google I found an excellent post by Richard Seroter. If you had installed the BizTalk Adapters for Enterprise Applications, you’d find a Visual Studio.NET project located at:C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Adapters for Enterprise Applications\Pipeline Component.For me this is

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SOA Principles

Coming Wednesday I have another discussion with a couple of architects of Inter Access (my company) about SOA. We will discuss the principles of SOA. Some of the principles to be discussed are published by Stefan Tilkov in InfoQ and SOAWorld magazine April 2007. It is a good written piece and very useful in our discussion. In a previous post What is SOA? I also mentioned a discussion with the

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BizTalk Hotrod Magazine

Today I found out there is a new magazine for BizTalk. Thanks to a site called BizTalk 24 * 7 from Saravana Kumar. Great site I can recommend it if you want to find more BizTalk resources and so on. It out for a couple of weeks now and can be downloaded here. There some posting out there from a number of people like Bundy's .NET and BizTalk Server Blog, Tim Rayburn and Saravana himself. Have a

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Working with BizTalk Adapters for Enterprise Applications on Windows 2003 R2 64-bit

Yesterday I was configuring a BizTalk production environment for a customer which involved the BizTalk Enterprise Adapters. In a previous post I mentioned how to set up an environment where one can integrate between Oracle eBusiness Suite and BizTalk. This environment was 32-bit and now I was facing 64-bit. This is a bit different in a way of configuring, so I did some googeling and found a very

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Services everywhere

Here you see me at gravity bar at 7th floor of the Guinness storehouse in Dublin. I spent a weekend with my wife and friends in Ireland (see other picture below). Besides Dublin I have been in Malahide, Lusk, Rush, Howth, Powercourt Waterfall and Glendaloch. I visited a couple of bars including the gravity bar and drank a lot of Guinness (one of my favorite's stouts). Yesterday evening I returned

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SOA Readings

Lately I have read some new SOA material like books and articles. Yesterday I finished reading a book from Sandy Carter about new business language. The book reads like a journey from innovation to don'ts of SOA. It contains a lot of case studies from companies around the world applying SOA and plenty of information collated from years of research done at IBM labs. Chapter 3 on Component business

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SOA and Host Systems

Microsoft recently released a white paper about leveraging value of host systems with real world SOA. The paper can be downloaded here. We from Microsoft Unit at Inter Access are now doing some researched based on this paper. We are trying for instance to call RPG code on AS/400. In a previous posts I mentioned I have been able to extract data from DB2 on AS/400, so connecting to AS/400 was easy.

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Integration Challenge: BizTalk Functoid Blues

Recently I was facing an integration challenge by creating a custom functiod to use in a mapping. How do I create a custom functiod? Well one can look at a sample on a machine, where a BizTalk instance is present (usually C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\SDK\Samples\XmlTools\CustomFunctoid). Important is to import the BizTalk assembly: Microsoft.BizTalk.BaseFunctoids. This one can

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SOA Deployments will grow !

Today received an email containing article stating the SOA deployments will grow. So I googled around and found some more promising signs that SOA will be become big. It will be important for BI, click here. Gartner says it will grow more than fifty percent, nice. InfoWorld brings the same good news.. SOA World is very postive. The lists goes on, so happy times ahead for SOA. Good for us !!! Hype

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Integration with Oracle eBusiness Suite and BizTalk 2006

In this post I will give some pointers how to set up a couple of things so you are able to integrate Oracle database/Oracle eBusiness Suite with BizTalk Server 2006. The adapters can be downloaded here. To install and configure them Microsoft also released documentation. The adapter uses databases through ODBC and runs on W2K, W2K3 and XP. And Oracle client 9.2 at least is required which includes

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SOA Overhyped!

This year I became member of Software Developer Network, which is mostly Dutch group (network) of developers. As a member one receives their magazine called SDN Magazine and is legible for attending a couple of conference they organize through the year in Holland. Yesterday I received their 93th issue of the magazine. It contained a nice article of SOA called: Semantic Coupling; the Elephant in

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BizTalk Tips and Tricks and more ...

Marty Wasznicky and Scott Zimmerman wrote an article in MSDN, where they lined out a couple tips and tricks for programming in BizTalk (best practices).In the article they write about:· Always Use Multi-Part Message Types;· Always Try to Design Orchestrations with Direct-Bound Ports;· Always Use Separate Internal and External Schemas;· Never Expose Your Internal Schemas Directly in WSDL;· Always

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Training Sharepoint Services 3.0 and MOSS 2007

Today attended a SharePoint training. The speaker was Bart Gunneman and he spoke about SharePoint, explaining the free part SharePoint Services 3.0 in the morning and the licensed MOSS 2007 in the afternoon. SharePoint Services provide in document collaboration, information sharing and enhancing productivity in for instance software developer teams (at least I used SharePoint Services a lot in

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WCF Messaging

Excellent article about WCF messaging by Aaron Skonnard. I stumbled over it today. It's about some key messaging features in WCF:XML Representation;Message Class;Message Versions;Reading and Writing Messages;Typed Message Bodies;Message lifetime;Message Headers and Properties;Mapping Messages to Methods;Endpoint and bindings.Good stuff....

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What is SOA?

Day before yesterday I was participating in a discussion about SOA in a meeting with architects with different technology backgrounds. These backgrounds include Oracle, Microsoft, IT Infrastructure (Windows, UNIX and Linux), IBM and SAP. Generally the discussion was about what is SOA, or what worked and did not work design, implementing a SOA. Questions were raised like does SOA fulfill promises

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VS Live San Francisco 2007 Resumé

Here you can see me with Bird Rock in the background. VS Live has come to an end and before I went home I enjoyed one more day in sunny northern California. I went on a daytrip from San Francisco to Monterey Bay, 17-mile drive with a stop at the Bird Rock. This stately landmark is home to countless shorebirds and groups of harbor seals and sea lions. It ended in an hour stop at Carmel by the sea;

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VS Live San Francisco 2007 Workshop: Windows Workflow a Gentile Intro Day 5

Final day at VS Live in San Francisco. I following today the post conference about introduction (gentle) into workflow by Ken Getz and Robert Green. This lasted all day and went through what workflow is, creating one for the first time (this was demoed already a couple of times during conference, so nothing new here), and how to host one (see my previous post with WF Runtime Architecture). Next

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VS Live San Francisco 2007 .NET 3.0 Day 4

Day 4 at VS Live in San Francisco. Today I went to a WPF talk done by Billis Hollis, a great speaker who I have seen a couple of times of the years. He showed some cool demo's and I am amazed what one can do with WPF. Notes about this one I refer again to Jan van de Pol, who is more a UI expert than I am and does a very good job of making notes of this one on the technical side of things. Next

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VS Live San Francisco 2007 .NET 3.0 Day 3

Oke third day here at VS Live in San Francisco. Today went to a couple of .Net 3.0 talks. To start things of I went to Rob Daigneau's talk about Implementing SOA design Patterns with WCF. Well it was more on SOA and little about WCF. He wanted to show the web service softeware factory in the end, but it didn't work. Talk about SOA was good though. He kicked off with SOA myths, where he claims

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VS Live San Francisco 2007 .NET Focus Day 2

Well second day at VS Live in San-Francisco. Today met some interesting guys from my home country Holland working for Bergson. So that's nice and there are excellent people, so I am not lonely. Oke .Net Focus day bringing us a chat from Prashant Sridharan about Vista, 2007 Office system and Asp.net AJAX with a great demo about Fabrikam (haven't we heard or seen that one before) using Exhange 2007

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VS Live San Francisco 2007 Pre-Conference Workshop Day 1

First day at VS Live San Francisco with a couple of workshops to start things up. I attended the workshop for a whole about building distributed object oriented apps in .net 3.0 from Rockford Lhotka. In this workshop started with designing Windows, Web and Web-Service-based apps that have a reusable business layer composed of objects. Rocky believes it’s all about layering your app in least

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Integration Master Class Experience

Bit late to share my experience during the integration master class given by Microsoft consultants, but here it is. The master class took two days and the information shared was good. Three Microsoft consultants went through integration in general with their pallet of products and technologies like SQL Server Integration Service, BizTalk, WCF, WinWF, SQL Broker, WSE, ASMX, .Net Remoting and Host

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Exclusive Integration Master class

8 and 9 march I will be attending the exclusive integration master class with some of my colleagues at Microsoft near Schiphol Airport. This master class will be about a number of technologies concerning integration like BizTalk Server, SQL Server Integration Server, Host Integration Server and Microsoft Windows Foundation. Besides technology architectural scenarios will be discussed taking

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Adaption to the world

This post is about adapters delivered by BizTalk. Through adapters of this toolset of Microsoft heterogeneous connectivity can be achieved. In a previous post I mentioned the adapters delivered by Host Integration Server 2006, the article about it will be published in June edition of the Dutch .NET Magazine. These adapters can be found here. Adapters for Oracle, SAP, Siebel can be found here as a

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Blogging for half a year !!!!

I have been blogging for almost half a year now. Did I say (blog) allot about SOA, not really actually. I am going to, well that depends a little on the projects I am getting. I am working for my current company for a year now and I only got integration projects so far; letting system A or application A talk to system B or application B. These jobs were fun to do and had some interesting

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Passed BizTalk 2006 exam

Today I passed the TS: Developing Business Process and Integration Solutions by Using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006. Was it hard? Well I did the Beta last year and I failed by 651 score, because I was not quite strong on BAM and BRE. BRE was no problem this time and I strongly improved on BAM, so the score was 957 this time. So for an experienced BizTalk professional it is not a difficult exam.

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Foundations of BizTalk Server 2006

APRESS Released another BizTalk 2006 book. Their third after Pro BizTalk Server and BizTalk 2006 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach. This book Foundations of BizTalk Server 2006 is for a novice to get understanding of BizTalk basics. From installation to deployment, the reader will grow increasingly more comfortable with the product as one can work through a multitude of hands-on examples and

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VS Live! San Francisco 2007

I will be attending VS Live Conference end of march in San Francisco.VSLive! returns to San Francisco's Moscone Convention Center West March 25-29, 2007 with more than 160 hours of hard-hitting technical content. Over five action-packed days, VSLive! San Francisco will provide a depth of resources and perspectives to help you be productive now and prepare for the near future.Attend sessions

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Host Integration Server 2006 BizTalk Adapters

Last year I have done an integration project for slaughterhouse in Holland. This slaughterhouse had a logistic program running on AS/400 with a DB2 database. I was asked to extract data out of the database concerning planning of vehicle’s to arrive at the slaughterhouse with livestock to be slaughtered. This data was displayed (consumed) by an ASP.NET application. When vehicles arrived this was

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