As promised in my first post of this series (Day 1) I will try to give an overview of all the sessions from both days at the London BizTalk Summit and point out the key takeaways from all the sessions.
Below you will find the list of all the sessions of day 2. When slides and video’s come online I will update this post to point you to the right location of all that amazing content..
Exposing Operational data to Mobile devices using Windows Azure (Kent Weare)
In the first session of the day Kent took us to the magical world of mobile services and how we can benefit from these unique challenges as an integration person.
For mobile developers integration is not the primary target and bridging the gap is a challenge we as integration people need to tackle.
This is where BizTalk Server / Services and Azure Mobile Services come in to play.
Enterprise Application Integration challenges did not disappear with mobility, they just got bigger and bigger.
Kent took a real world business scenario from the Power Generation industry and showed us how we can use Mobile Services, Service Bus, SQL Azure and BizTalk Services to glue it all together in a very nice hybrid application.
Another important thing to mention is that both the Mobile and BizTalk team are working together to create a tighter integration between both platforms.
(The video of this session can be found here)
Managebility of Windows Azure BizTalk Services (Steef-Jan Wiggers)
After Kent it was the Steef-Jans turn to take the stage to talk about Managebility of Windows Azure BizTalk Services.
Fully dressed – in suit and tie – Steef-Jan started giving a very good overview of all key components and benefits of WABS, demo’ing them one by one.
The talk was primaly focused on tools that are available for WABS and all the possibilities that the current Windows Azure portal is offering for Windows Azure BizTalk Services.
Be sure to check out the entire session when the video comes online because this was an excellent overview of what is currently out there….
(The video of this session can be found here)
Real world Business Activity Monitoring (Dan Rosanova)
How do you take a lesser popular topic like BAM and bring it to the next level? You just invite Dan to speak at your event.
As we all know, BizTalk is a black box for users and it’s our task to inform them about what has happened on the system or in their business processes. People care about what they can see, we have never seen bussiness people getting impressed with an integration project, have we?
Dan showed us how we can overcome this painpoint and give people what they want to see and where they want to see.
This talk gave us a general overview of all the key features and possibilities of BAM, he made a demo available on his website for you to play with (http://danrosanova.wordpress.com/rwb).
Last, but not least, was a very small demo of how we can use BAM tracking data in amazing tools like Powerview and Powermap; This might open up all new possibilities to get rid of the ‘sexy’ BizTalk 2004 BAM portal.
(The video of this session can be found here)
Examining Master Data integration using BizTalk Server and SQL Server Master Data Services (Johan Hedberg)
This session of Johan gave us an introduction on how to use BizTalk Server together with SQL Server Master Data Services.
First giving us an overview of all aspects and architecture of SQL Server Master Data Services he quickly started demonstrating all features of this service.
Showing off the portal, excel tools and how to create models and views we received a good, high level overview of the power of MDS.
The recommendations of Johan is to start small with some own business data and use BizTalk as the “enabler”.
However we have to be a bit sceptical about the future, since last year there has been no new announcements of features so that makes the future a bit unclear.
(The video of this session can be found here)
Thinking like an Integration Person (Nino Crudele)
It’s hard to find the correct words to describe the session of Nino.
It was probably one of the most interactive and animating sessions of this entire summit. As an integration person this is a must see session.
Nino gave us a quick overview of the perception, challenges and strategies we as BizTalk developers need to overcome on a daily basis.
Next came the most important topic of his talk: ‘BTSG NoS Addon’ for Visual Studio.
This is an adding to Visual Studio that Nino has been working on for over 4 months (!!). I will not dive into deep details of the tools because there is limited space on this blog… but here are some key features:
- Register/Unregister from GAC
- Jackhammering artifacts
- Dependencies checking
- Reflection
- Pipeline testing
- Pipeline component testing
- ….
And all this from Visual Studio! A must have tool for all our BizTalk developers. Nino will release this tool soon, so be sure to keep an eye on his blog (http://ninocrudele.me).
(The video of this session can be found here)
BizTalk Mapping Patterns and an Introduction to WABS maps (Sandro Pereira)
Maps and transformations are one of the most common components in an integration process and who else than Sandro do you invite to talk about this topic?
Since a couple of months Sandro is working on a free eBook about ‘BizTalk Mapping Patterns and Best Practices’, which will be released to the community very soon.
The BizTalk Summit was an excellent opportunity for Sandro to come and promote his (probably) amazing book.
In his session he showed us some of the most important mapping patterns and tricks. What approach do you use for what type of messages and how can I increase my mapping performance. All these topics where tackled by Sandro.
Be sure to check out his book when it’s released. Sandro also has a set of custom functoids available on codeplex, free to use for the community!
(The video of this session can be found here)
Workflow manager: Running durable workflows in the cloud and on prem (Sam Vanhoutte)
It’s always a bit ungraceful to give the last session on a major event, but Sam managed to amuse the crowd with an amazing hybrid demo application using Twilio.
Talking about workflow history and a prediction what will happen with workflow on the Windows Azure Platform.
In workflow 4.5 some new features where introduced like support for C#, state machines, side by side versioning and performance enhancements.
Workflow Manager is a workflow that uses on-premise service bus and uses the Workflow 4 programming model, it’s installed in IIS and has it’s own management site and several windows services.
After guiding us through the theoretical stuff, a cloud-based workflow solution was demonstrated, showing integration between Windows Azure Service Bus, Workflow Manager, Windows Azure BizTalk Services and on-premises systems.
If you want to play around with Workflow Manager, it is available through the web-platform installer, so be sure to check it out.
(The video of this session can be found here)
Thank you all for reading both blog posts and be sure to keep an eye on them in the coming days because they will get updated will all the videos from the event.
Cheers,
Glenn Colpaert
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