Microsoft

Following up from the previous blog post, it is time to exercise the Azure Storage Account to check out some of the basic features.

[Read more]

This is the first entry in what will be an ongoing series of posts related to various components and service offerings within Microsoft Azure. The landscape of cloud computing is immense and can be overwhelming to those unfamiliar with the concepts. Through the Azure Facts series, I hope to digest smaller fragments of the overall landscape and briefly examine how they can be utilized. The first topic in the Azure Facts series will focus on Blob Storage within the Azure Storage Account.

[Read more]

During my evaluation of BizTalk Server 2013 and the ESB Toolkit 2.2, I ran into an issue running one of my favorite components, the ESB Management Portal. I followed the set of instructions for installing and configuring the portal which were essentially the same as the ESB Toolkit 2.1 instructions. When I tried to navigate to the home page, I received a number of errors:

[Read more]

Microsoft unveiled a major release of Windows Azure on Thursday, June 7 at the “Meet Windows Azure” event. Windows Azure has been out for quite some time, but some in the industry are describing this as Windows Azure 2.0. The amount of new functionality is really impressive and is the culmination of more than a year of work. If you were unable to attend, the full event was recorded which can be seen at http://www. [Read more]

Picking up where we left off in the Service Bus Introduction, this post will walk through a Relayed Messaging sample in order to highlight how the AppFabric Service Bus could be utilized to build Hybrid applications. In addition to the basic sample, I will also demonstrate how to provision a BizTalk Server 2010 Receive Location on the Service Bus.

[Read more]

Before I publish the next post on Relayed Messaging, I thought I would take this opportunity to share some lessons learned yesterday about the AppFabric Service Bus billing.

[Read more]

I recently had the honor of delivering a presentation entitled ‘Build Hybrid Applications Using the Azure AppFabric Service Bus’ at the Richmond and Philly.NET Code Camps. Virtually no one in either of the sessions had any previous experience with Windows Azure or the components of the AppFabric. In this series of blog posts, I will expand upon the presentation in an effort to introduce the AppFabric and take a deeper dive into the code and practical application of the Service Bus messaging patterns.

[Read more]

Earlier this week I participated in a discussion thread on LinkedIn regarding the usage of the WCF SQL Adapter in BizTalk Server and I wanted to summarize some of my thoughts and the recommended best practices regarding this particular scenario.

[Read more]

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. ~Mark Twain (or BizTalk Server)

For the past 5 years or so, various technologists have been predicting or even proclaiming the untimely demise of Microsoft BizTalk Server. Usually these predictions come in the form of blog posts espousing the new hotness whether it was a new product from Microsoft or a competing product claiming it was a better middleware solution than BizTalk. Oddly enough, the chatter ramps up the loudest shortly after Microsoft releases a new CTP of technology X that may be tangentially related to an existing product like BizTalk.

[Read more]

In an effort to maintain control over the proliferation of application servers and data, many organizations have undertaken projects to consolidate and integrate systems. One of the first hurdles in undertaking an integration project is determining the most efficient integration technology. Unfortunately, just within the Microsoft stack, there are technologies that consistently cause confusion and are often misused.

[Read more]