BizTalk
BizTalk
I'm a big fan of iterative development, and during the last few weeks as I've scrambled wheezily up the BizTalk 2004 learning curve I've been wondering exactly how I'm going to iterate BizTalk projects.
I didn't conclude anything yet, except perhaps that it's a very good idea to keep schemas and orchestrations in separate assemblies. Hold the press indeed.
Fortunately greater minds than mine have already been bent to the task, so I direct you good people to Charles Young's post "Is Orchestration RAD?", in which he demonstrates that yes, it can be, but not on Day 1. I'm glad to see that Charles and others agree about separating schemas and orchestrations.
Scott Woodgate says "training is coming" so there's something in the pipeline (no pun intended). He also tells me that there are a bunch of labs on msn (http://groups.msn.com/BizTalkServerStuff) that are worth checking out. I can't check them out myself yet because my company (in their wisdom) has blocked the entire msn domain. Apparently it falls into category 'chat', and by that definition chat is bad. I mean, let's not talk to each other or anything...something bad might happen...
Also, I've spoken with UK training company Pygmalion. They reckon they can set up a BizTalk course and are currently preparing a quote for me. If it looks half decent I'll share it with you.
If we end up running an in-house BizTalk 2004 course here in the West End I'll auction spare seats in our training room to the highest bidders...
No, the BizTalk Coalface isn't a VS Add-in, it's just a euphemism. Darren Jefford is an App Dev Consultant at Microsoft UK and he's been working at the sharp end with BizTalk 2004 over the last few weeks. Check out his blog here.
His most recent post shows how to implement orchestration-based preprocessing on all messages coming into a specific port - something that strikes me as particularly useful.
Has anyone seen hide nor hair of an official Microsoft BizTalk 2004 training course? I've enquired with MS here in the UK, and with one of the big MS-certified training suppliers (QA) but to no avail. I've got two or three guys here who want to leap from DTS to BizTalk and really need a course to help them get there.
Update: QA are going to get in touch with the BizTalk guys at Microsoft UK to see if there's any internal training material that they'd be willing to share.
Scott Woodgate has posted the BizTalk 2004 Tutorial (blog, download).
I downloaded it. It's the real thing this time, folks!
You get several Word documents plus associated folders containing XML files, solutions, supporting material etc. The tutorial is split into three modules: (1) Fundamentals for EAI within the enterprise, (2) Extending the concept outside the company into b2b territory and (3) Supplier-side b2b issues, Business Activity Services and Business Activity Monitoring.
I've had a browse through Module 1. The format is good: each section is headed up with a summary of Objectives and Tasks, an overview of the concepts and tools that will be used and then step-by-step guidance to achieve the objectives.
There aren't shedloads of screenshots - they're just used when needed - but the tidy format of the lessons means that hopefully they won't be needed.
Back when I was a VB programmer (from Version 1, folks!) variable and control naming conventions were bread and butter to me. It somehow legitimised my programming work. Those beany-head C programmers with their semi-colons and overloaded operators could just go and take a running jump! My code was hardcore and readable...
I've always held a torch for naming conventions. Calling a variable i, x or foo just makes me feel dirty.
Therefore I invite you all to read and comment on Scott Colestock's proposed naming conventions for BizTalk Orchestrations. If we're programming in pictures we don't want those nasty C++ programmers sniggering at us.
Of course, Microsoft recommend that you have shedloads of memory when running BizTalk 2004. I'm not surprised. It's a big, beefy server. However, many developers - myself included - like to install servers on their own PC in order to muck around with them big time.
As I may have mentioned in earlier postings, I have installed BizTalk 2004 on my laptop. It's got 256Mb of RAM. This is 50% of Microsoft's recommended minimum.
Did the install program complain? No it did not.
Does BizTalk run? Yes it does.
Does it run fast? No. But it's acceptable, and once a deployed orchestration is cached up and had one or two transactions piped through it, BizTalk runs just fine.
I have ordered more memory, though. 638Mb here we come.
I do development work on a laptop; sometimes I'm connected to the network, sometimes I'm not. I installed BizTalk 2004 on my little laptop and quickly discovered an irritation with the Enterprise Single Sign-on service while working offline: after boot-up it remains 'starting...' but never actually starts.
After much rummaging around I discovered that the service was waiting for the BizTalk SQL Server Agent jobs to run. Why weren't they running? Because BizTalk config had helpfully set them up with my Windows username - which doesn't resolve when I'm working offline.
I created a SQL login with dbo permissions to the messagebox database and changed the Agent jobs to run under that instead. SQL Agent is happy, so Enterprise Single Sign-on is happy.
Figuring this out took my entire commute-to-work time this morning. I just want you all to know that.
...at least, not until Good Friday! Following the link in Darrell Norton's recent post led to a downloadable exe at microsoft.com which turned out to contain a 17k HTML file. The message contained therein was: "The Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2004 Tutorial[...]will be available for download on April 9, 2004."
Is this Microsoft's idea of an Easter Egg?
Update: of course, Darrell did say (available April 9th) in his post, but I was too excited to read it properly.
Interestingly, links to the BizTalk tutorial from the latest version of the online documentation (the 'April' version) just lead to the normal BizTalk documents page on microsoft.com. I'm going around in circles here.
In the meantime, the BizTalk-ignorant amongst us will have to rely on Scott Woodgate's excellent webcasts.
Noticed some comments about Microsoft needing to get some useful developer-oriented information out there about BizTalk 2004. Well, I was at the BizTalk UK launch a couple of days ago and spoke briefly with Tom Casey (Product Unit Manager for BizTalk) on this subject. The poor soul was suffering with a cold he picked up on the way over, but promised to look into my request for a stronger developer community for BizTalk - meaning a 'proper' Developer Center on msdn and more blogs from Microsoft BizTalk developers on his return to the US the week after next.
We'll see.
MS UK application development consultant, Darren Jefford, is blogging again on BizTalk 2004 and related subjects. Recent posts regard detection and management of suspended messages and exposing orchestrations as web services.
Ahead of the UK BizTalk 2004 launch on Monday, I've convinced the team here to set up a Windows Server 2003 box for me to install a copy on - for 'development' purposes.
BT2004 looks streets ahead of BT2000 and BT2002 - particularly the full integration with Visual Studio .net
I have told family and friends that from now on they must refer to me as 'Billy BizTalk'.
Full reports on Installation Fun and The Secret Life of Messages to follow.