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Showing posts from February, 2014

Exploring the Windows Azure BizTalk Service Explorer Features

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Windows Azure BizTalk Services (WABS) is general available now as a service within Windows Azure. To test or debug your Windows Azure BizTalk Service Bridge you can rely on using the BizTalk Service Explorer. This explorer is similar to another Visual Studio add-in like the Service Bus or Windows Azure Storage. The BizTalk Service explorer offers the following features: Browsing artifacts in you BizTalk Service Explore tracked events within your bridge Upload and download artifacts Restarting the BizTalk service Test and debug bridges Installation and configuration The explorer for WABS can be added within Visual Studio via extensions and updates, where you can search for in the Visual Studio Gallery. To add this explorer you need to go to Tools within Visual Studio. Subsequently you go to Extensions and updates… You then search in the Visual Studio Gallery online. You can now add a BizTalk Service(s) you have provisioned in Windows Azure. By simple right cli

WABS February 2014 - Backup and Restore

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Windows Azure BizTalk Services (WABS) provides capabilities for EAI and B2B in the cloud. This relative new service was made available for customers in November 2013. Microsoft committed to have a release cadence for new features every three months. Currently in February 2014 Microsoft has released new features for WABS. These new features are: EDIFACT Protocol Support and X12 Schema Updates Pulling Messages from Service Bus Queues and Topics Service Bus Shared Access Signatures (SAS) support with Service Bus Queues and Topics BizTalk Adapter Services No Longer Needs SQL On Premises Backup and Restore Support Operation Log Support This blog post will discuss the latter two new features available for WABS. Both features will enhance the ability for operation professional responsible for business continuity of the service. The first release of WABS offered support for backup and restore through a REST API. With the new release the capability is now available through the Win

European Tour 2014–Speaking Engagements

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The beginning of March I will be touring Europe speaking at different user groups and a huge event the BizTalk Summit 2014. The latter is in London on the 3rd and 4th of March. During this event I will be sharing the stage with eleven other Microsoft Integration MVP's and four Microsoft Product Group members. There are still a few tickets left: http://www.biztalk360.com/BizTalk-Summit-2014/index.html My talk during the tour will be on management aspect of Windows Azure BizTalk Services (WABS). WABS is one of the new services on the Windows Azure Cloud platform. It’s a service that offers integration and EDI capabilities in the cloud. An important aspect of any cloud service is the manageability aspect. In this session the focus lies on this aspect for the BizTalk Services. How does one manage a BizTalk Services solution, what are the tools and resources in Azure to leverage to get a good overview of the BizTalk Service and it’s solutions. Those questions will be answered in thi

Sentinet – Service Virtualization Part 3 – REST to SOAP

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In the previous post I have demonstrated part of the Sentinet , its UX and the management side of it that shows how to build SOA solution using the concept of service virtualization. In this post I would like to discuss and highlight some other management aspects like monitoring. I will do this by further modifying my sample and setting up a new virtual service that will expose a REST endpoint instead of SOAP. My actual WCF Service will remain the same SOAP service. So I will share the experience of the leveraging Sentinet ability to perform mediation between REST and SOAP. Subsequently I will also show how messages send to a virtual service can monitored. First step is to create a REST virtual service. You log in the administration console. Subsequently you navigate to virtual services Repository tree element, click add virtual service and select REST . Provide the service with a useful name and click OK. Next step is to design the virtual service. A virtualization structure is