Service Bus

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.

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.

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.

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.

During my past BizTalk engagements, I have had the opportunity to work closely with my clients in developing flexible and maintainable applications. One of the most common issues that I come across is the misuse of some of the shapes available within the Orchestration Designer. By misuse, I simply mean to say that many BizTalk developers will drag and drop shapes into an orchestration to implement the business process, but do not take into account the implications of doing so.