Wednesday, October 31, 2007

BizTalk Services - Internet Service Bus

Channel 9 has just published some videos on BizTalk Services, a.k.a the Internet Service Bus (ISB), providing services (S+S/SaaS) for your mashups. This is an ARCast.TV episode with Ron Jacobs: part I and part II.

Absolutely worth watching, BizTalk Services is a central part of the "Oslo" initiative.

Tools and platform for providing SOA and mashups

This week at the Microsoft SOA and BPM conference, two announcements were made that support the predictions of my last post (SOA: Top Two Tech Topics for 2008):
"Oslo" is based on the BizTalk concept (BizTalk Server + BizTalk Services) supported by the .NET framework (WCF, WF), model-driven design tools, and of course a repository for service life-cycle management.

Read more about "Oslo" in the Directions on Microsoft article provided on Christian Weyer's blog.

Friday, October 26, 2007

SOA: Top Two Tech Topics for 2008

As Gartner has published their 'Top 10 Strategic Technology Areas for 2008', of which several are related to SOA; this is my two cents about two more specific topics that are important for you as an architect and developer of service-oriented systems:

Read the relevant articles to learn more about these indeed very technical topics, you really cannot manage a complex set of hundreds and thousands of services without such SOA operations and lifecycle governance technologies. Microsoft is on the ball with the BizTalk ESB Guidance and the partnership with AmberPoint (in use at Vital Forsikring in Norway) and SOA Software.

Also check out the Connected Services Framework being used at telecos around the world (watch video). You can play with aggregated services and managed network mashups at the Connected Services Sandbox.

Sunday, October 21, 2007

BizTalk Services SDK, RelayBinding: Firewall Issue

I recommend that you download and try the samples of the BizTalk Services SDK (identity & access control, connectivity, web-style stuff) to get a deeper understanding of what the "internet service bus" concept provides to service-oriented solutions - both for the SaaS approach and for the Software+Service approach.

An error that you might run into when trying any of the connectivity samples is the "No DNS entries exist for host connect.biztalk.net" exception when calling host.Open() from e.g. the EchoSample server. You'll get a really lost feeling when googling for this error gives no hits:

System.ServiceModel.EndpointNotFoundException was unhandled
Message="No DNS entries exist for host connect.biztalk.net."
Source="System.ServiceBus"

StackTrace: at System.ServiceBus.RelayedOnewayClient.Connect()

The cause of this problem is that the RelayBinding uses an outbound TCP connection to connect to sb://connect.biztalk.net/ to set up your hosted endpoint; and if you're behind a firewall, this will fail unless permitted by the firewall. Refer to the ReadMe file of the SDK for more details.