When you're following the hashtag #msbts on Twitter, you might have noticed that there
was suddenly a lot going on about the BizTalk Summit in London, organised by
BizTalk360. I8C was present at this event to find out about all the latest and greatest that
our integration world has to offer.
In
this overview, I’ll try to point out all of the things I remembered being the
most important from those two days, so that when you weren’t able to make it,
you still can have the feeling you haven’t been missing out.
BizTalk Server 2013 R2
Guru
Venkataraman took the stage as first speaker to talk about the upcoming release
of BizTalk Server 2013 R2. The guys at Microsoft have been working hard to put
new stuff in there for us to discover and have tried to make it as much
“error-less” as possible. This results in over 78.000 test which take a
whopping 4 months to run! Guess we’ll have a pretty stable release coming up!
One
constant during the two days was the following abbreviation: JSON. In BizTalk
2013 R2, JSON support will be present.
So
in short, following elements will be there in the new release:
- JSON support
- Proxy support for SFTP
- Healthcare accelerator
improvements
à HL7 2.6
à 64 bit MLLP
à Dynamic Send Port support for
MLLP
à ETW Tracking
- Connectivity to on-prem ServiceBus
- Authentication improvements for
ServiceBus
And
maybe most importantly, BizTalk 2013 R2 will be released in H2 2014!
Updates in WABS
Also
WABS (Windows Azure BizTalk Services) is getting an upgrade, although this
upgrade is quarterly, so more frequent than the upgrades in BizTalk on-prem
versions. Harish Kumar Agarwal gave us a nice overview of all new updates in
the following release.
Here’s
what to expect:
- Adapter extensibility
- JSON support (yup!)
- Pulling from LOB’s
- AAD integration
- BPM!
BPM
is in fact coming SOON to WABS, using workflow, a rules engine and process-
& rules designers.
Tools for moving to WABS
In
his session, Jon Fancey showed us some interesting tools on how to make the
move to WABS much easier.
MAPS à
MAPS
Maps in WABS have been rewritten, but there is still a
possibility to convert old maps into the ‘new’ version. These maps can be
converted using the BTMtoTRFMConvertor.exe tool.
The tool still contains some errors
but it’s a work in progress.
PIPELINES à BRIDGES
Pipelines don’t exist in WABS. Bridges though can be seen as
the new replacement for a combination of pipelines and processing. Bridges can
also be paired to enable more complex processing.
TRADING PARTNERS à TRADING PARTNERS
TPMDataMigrationTool can be used to convert trading partner
configuration from on premise to Azure.
ORCHESTRATIONS & MESSAGING à
WORKFLOW
Workflow will be coming, but a release date is still unclear. There
should be also a tool available to convert XLANG orchs to WF (generating xamlx,
cs & dll files). The conversion will be possible, but it won’t be without
errors.
Jon
Fancey also pointed out that not always everything needs to be moved. When
connecting on prem to on prem, there’s no need to pass through the cloud. We
need to think wisely on what to convert and what not.
Decision Framework
Richard
Seroter has clearly succeeded during his session to make clear to all attendees
that there are more options to do integration than just using BizTalk. He gave
us insight into his own “Decision Framework” which he uses to determine which
integration tools to use. Basic concepts of this framework are:
·
Functional Requirements: What is directly
needed?
·
Non-functional Requirements: What is indirectly
needed?
·
Derived Requirements: What is expected to be
needed?
·
Organisational Strategy: What does the business
want it to be?
On
top of those concepts, there also need to be discussions about:
Design: Datavolumes, guaranteed delivery, sources &
destinations, authentication, failure handling, etc.
Developers: Developer availability, learning curves, dev
setup, IDE & tools, support community, etc.
Operations: Event logging, performance tuning, backup &
restore, scriptability, etc.
Organisational strategy: Long term solution, vendor support,
budget impact, build vs buy, risk tolerance, etc.
Only
when all these decisions and discussions have formed a conclusion, an
integration technology can be choses.
Mobile Services
During
a session on Windows Azure Mobile Services, Kent Weare really pointed out the
(future) importance of Mobile Services. It’s something that all CIO’s, CFO’s
and CEO’s in current companies are looking at, therefore it’s important not to
deny the existence. And for us, even more important, BizTalk Services can play
a huge role in this progression towards mobility.
The
enterprise mobility stack will consist of following building blocks on Azure:
·
BizTalk Services
·
Mobile Services
·
SQL
·
Service Bus
·
Active Directory
Using
all these blocks together, corporate apps can be built to enhance integration
on a more mobile scale.
BizTalk Mapping Patterns
Some
great news from Sandro Pereira during his session: He’s currently writing a
book about different mapping patterns that can be used as a reference when
building maps in BizTalk. The ebook will be available for free and is a
whopping 200 pages! Great!
Sessions worth viewing
There
were also two sessions which were really fun to watch and both informative as well.
First
of all, the session of Nino Crudele was absolutely awesome. Not only was it fun
to see and listen, also the things he has been building over the last four
months are absolutely insane. He created plugins for Visual Studio which make
your life as a developer so much more easy. He packed so much info in his
presentation, that you just need to see it to believe it. Check it out as soon
as the videos come online on the website of BizTalk360!
Second,
Tord Glad Nordahl gave a great overview of what things that can go wrong or are
being messed up as an administrator or developer. Well, the title doesn’t says
it all, since he pulled up so many real-life situations that it was very hard
NOT to feel like he was talking about your own daily frustrations. Want to have
a laugh? Check out his session on www.biztalk360.com
as soon as they are online.
That’s
about it! If you want more info, I’m referring to all the slides and videos
that will be shared later next week by BizTalk360. It was great to see so much
interest in integration, and the community surely is growing bigger and bigger.
I hope to see more future events like this one since it’s extremely interesting
to hear and see the evolution in the field we’re working in.
Thanks
to Saravana Kumar and his team to host this awesome event, and hope to see you
again next year!
Andrew
De Bruyne (@draitnn)
