BizTalk 101 - Back to Basics

I’ve just published version 1.0 of “Bloggers Guide to Connected Systems”, which will be covering the Oslo, WCF/WF 4.0, Dublin and Azure technologies. The first version has 24 articles from some of the leading developers working with Connected Systems technologies, including members of the “Oslo” team.

It is expected that the guide will grow on a monthly basis as more people start working and blogging about the new technologies, and should be a valuable resource for newbies and experienced developers.

The bloggers that are included so far are Darren Jefford, Charles Young, Andreas Erben, Imran Shafqat, Don Box, Brian Losegen, Aaron Skonnard, Jeff "Pinkey" Pinkston and Martin Fowler. If you have been blogging about Connected Systems technologies, and would like to be included, feel free to contact me via the blog. There’s no additional work involved form your part, and all contributions are acknowledged.

Switching MVP tracks form “BizTalk Server” to “Connected Systems” doesn’t mean I will stop working with BizTalk. BizTalk Server is still my favourite server product by a long way and, apart from the messaging and orchestration engines, my favourite feature is BAM.

Last week I taught the QuickLean “BizTalk Expert Series BAM” course for the first time in Stockholm, it was actually the first delivery ever. As usual, I have taken a couple of the demos that I run in the class, and recorded them as webcasts, they are available at BloggersGuides.net. The first one looks at creating a simple BAM activity, and viewing the data in real time using a WPF application. The second one looks at creating a view and using the BAM portal to query the business data. The sample application I use is the “Sequential Convoy Sushi Server”, which has its own webcast if you want to see how it works.

If you really want to get into BAM, you could attend the QuickLean “BizTalk Expert Series BAM” course. In the US, the best location is the QuickLean training centre in Redmond. If you are in Europe, I will be delivering the course (in English) at Informator in Stockholm in January. The course is also available for onsite deliveries.

I’ve just posted article reviewing the deliverables from the Microsoft Connected Systems Division (CSD) on BloggersGuides.net. The article gives a high level overview of the technology present on the image, and provides tips on getting the image running efficiently.

The article is a complement to the webcast I posted on Tuesday.

The article is here.

The webcast is here.

13:00 Tuesday saw the public availability of the virtual image congaing the “Bits” from the Microsoft Connected Systems Division (CSD). The image contains early builds of a lot of the technology that is being demoed at the PDC, and also a set of hands-on labs that will walk you through some examples of using the technology.

The “Oslo PDC-08 CSD Bits Review” webcast will take a quick tour of what is available, and give you some tips on learning about all the new goodies.

The main components that are installed on the image are as follows:

·         The preliminary release of software for code name “Oslo” and code name “Dublin”, including:

o   “Oslo” repository

o   “Oslo” SDK

o   “Quadrant”

o   “Dublin”

o   XAML Import/Export tool

·         Documentation for code name “Oslo” and code name “Dublin”, including:

o   Help

o   Hand-On Labs

·         Windows Server® 2008 Standard operating system without Hyper-V, including:

o   Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0

o   .NET Framework 3.0 (includes ASP.NET)

o   Windows® Communication Foundation

o   Windows Communication Foundation Test tools

o   Windows Workflow Foundation

·         Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Workflow Designer

·         Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0

·         Microsoft SQL Server® 2008 Enterprise Evaluation

·         Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 with Service Pack 1 (SP1)

·         Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Team System

·         Administration Pack for IIS 7.0 CTP2

You will need a pretty fast box to run the image as it’s based on Server 2008 and really needs about 4G ram, a fast proc, and fast drives to run efficiently. If you are stuck with an old laptop you can always download the ”Oslo” SDK and run that on bare metal. “M” and “Mg” will keep you busy for a few days.

I hope you guys can download it in less time that it took me to upload it.

They should have called it “Stockholm” instead of “Oslo”; they really should.

“08”, pronounced “nollåtta”, or “jävla nollåtta” in the north of Sweden, is the nickname for Stockholmers (08 is the area code for Stockholm), so “PDC 08” would mean “PDC Stockholm” in Swedish.

As always, David Chappell has been following the development of “Oslo” and realted technologies from the early days. He has just had an article published on MSDN “Workflows, Services, and Models – A First Look at WF 4.0, Dublin, and Oslo”, which will be well worth reading.

BizTalk Services is now .net Services, a part of the “Windows Azure” cloud based operating system. “But why is it called BizTalk Services?” has been a common question for a while. I’ve never really understood the logic of applying the “BizTalk” brand to a set of cloud based WCF services. Changing the name to “.net Services” makes a lot of sense. There is a good section of articles in “The Bloggers Guide to Oslo” on this technology, in the BizTalk Services section (this will be renamed in the next version) and also a webcast on using the services here. It will be interesting to see how the cloud based workflow has evolved as there was quite a limitation on what could be built in the BizTalk labs workflow hosting.

The “Oslo” SDK has been released and is available for download. To install the SDK you will need to have Windows Server 2008 installed, as the repository database is dependent on some of the SQL 2008 features. The SDK will allow you to explore the “M” declarative programming language and create data models declaratively. The “M” language is the brainchild of Don Box, the self declared “Chief Modeling Officer” in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft.

The SDK contains the following components:

·         Repository Database

·         “M” Modeling Language

·         “Mg” Domain Specific Language Creation language

·         IntelliPad Editing Tool

I’ve taken a quick tour of the “Oslo” SDK and looked at the key features.

The Oslo repository database is used to store models. To view the database, open the SQL Server 2008 Management Studio and select it. If you expand the table structure, you will see a large number of tables relating to the various models that are present in the repository.

The schema names feature of SQL has been used to create a storage structure that reflects some of the net class library namespace. If you are a WCF developer you should take a look at the System.ServiceModel section and check out the tables used to store WCF related information. These tables will be used by the Quadrant editing toolbox to allow users to model service contracts and persist the models to the repository database.

The information in the repository database is intended to be “transparent”, meaning it should be easy to query and modify with custom tools. This is a welcome change, as the BizTalk databases were “owned” by Microsoft, it seems like the Repository will be more open both in terms of data content and structure. There seems to be quite a number of models present in the database, but it is designed to be extensible by using the “M” modeling language to design data models that can then be imported to the repository.

IntelliPad is a text editor targeted at "curly brace" programmers allowing them to define the schemas for data that will be stored in the repository in a productive manner. There were a lot of rumors sating that IntelliPad would be “Emacs.net”, but as I’ve never used Emacs, i could not make the comparison.

IntelliPad provides a good environment for prototyping “M” and “Mg” scenarios, providing quick feedback on what the developer is typing. The experience falls somewhere between Notepad and Visual Studio, resulting in a lightweight application that provides features like syntax color encoding, and basic IntelliSense.

My favorite feature of IntelliPad is the “Dynamic Parsing”, which will show the SQL output that is created from you “M” instantly as you edit the code. This is a really nice way to learn “M” as you see the results of code immediately, allowing you to experiment freely with the language.

 “M” is a text based declarative data modeling language aimed at “curly brace” programmers. It initially started out being called “D”, but was changes to “M” shortly before PDC. “M” was originally created for building the models that are present in the repository database. There is a project in the samples folder that appears to be the “M” source files that have been used to create the repository, but I have not confirmed this.

The best way to start learning “M” is to use IntelliPad to declare a model, and then see the representation of that model in SQL. The “M” compiler can currently create two forms of SQL.

·         Rich – For importing models into the repository

·         Reach – Standard SQL for using in a regular databases

My immediate thoughts when using “M” were that it would be a great way of modeling regular relational databases in SQL Server. This view has been echoed by others that have worked with “M”. One of the reasons for using a text based language for modeling is that most programmers find that code is much more productive that working with graphical tools, and this is certainly the case with “M”. It took me about 30 minutes to get the basics of “M”, and a few hours to explore a few of the language features, and start creating simple models. I would imagine most developers will pick it up very quickly.

I’ve added links to some of the best news articles relating to Azure on the Bloggers Guide.net front page. I’ll be updating this daily for the next couple of weeks.

Alternatively, you can follow the story on Slashdot for jokes about “Azure Screens of Death”, Soviet Russia, hot grits and chair throwing. Imagine a Beowulf Cluster in the cloud…

PDC is a bit like Glastonbury without the mud. You get tired of walking, your diet is not too healthy, you lose your mates in the crowd, and you never get enough sleep. It’s also similar in that there are the big headline events on the main stages, the smaller minority stuff that you really have to see, and also all kinds of cool things going on that are never in the program. The Expo is like the Green Fields, there’s a lot to see, it’s good for meeting people, there’s some great unannounced events going on, and you can always score some swag.

I skipped one of the main sessions and took a break and to head down there, and was rewarded with some very cool “Dublin” and “Oslo” t-shirts, a signed copy of first “M” language programming book. I also caught a demo of the “M” language in an unannounced spontaneous chalk-talk session by Don Box in front of 20 people. This was very cool to see, as the official public unveiling of the “M” language is not until the keynote tomorrow, it was great to see Don presenting “M” to such a small audience, much better than seeing it in front of 5000 people.

There is an “MVP & Influencers” event at most conferences, and the one at PDC was scheduled for 10pm Monday to 1am Tuesday. I was thinking of trying to get an early night, but Marjan Kalantar said attendance was compulsory. It was a good bash; I met Kris Horroks and Mark Berman outside, and got chatting to Ofer Ashkenazi, who is the PM for BizTalk, as well as some of the other MVPs and CDS team. More Oslo, Dublin and WCF WF t-shirts to be had, nicer colors this time.

·         A PDC 08 T-shirt

·         A PDC 08 water bottle

·         A copy of MSDN Magazine

·         An invite to the Universal Studios Party

·         Lots of bits of paper

·         No Oslo bits (There should be a green ticket in your pass wallet that allows you to pick up “The Goods” on Tuesday at 13:00.)

I’ve so many people are saying that XXXX is YYYY on steroids. Here is a summary of the ones I have heard so far.

 

It seems everything at the PDC is on steroids, I wish I was I’m exhausted.

I’ve just heard that my MVP status has officially been switched from “BizTalk Server” to “Connected Systems Developer”. I’ve been considering the switch for a while, and the kick off at PCD seems to be perfect timing for this. It will allow me to focus more on WCF, WF, and the Oslo and related technologies, whilst still being involved in the BizTalk Server community (BizTalk is the most connected system there is right?). Over the past few months I have been getting more involved with the WCF/WF side of things, and the imminent (I’ve heard its Tuesday sometime) release of the Oslo bits will mean I can focus on the new technologies.

In a way it’s sad to be breaking one of the strong ties I have had to the BizTalk community, but I’m really looking forward to working (playing) with the new technologies, and working with the development community to help to add some context and public information as to using the bits. It will be like back in the day with BizTalk 2004 beta, where there was no real documentation and all the best information was in the blogs.

PDC registration began at 08:00, and it seemed like quite a lot of the Swedish attendees were there on the dot. This year there are over 300 attending from Sweden, the third highest country after the US and Canada, not bad for a nation of 9 million. (Just to settle any confusion, I am actually English, but living in Sweden.) As I’m not in the “pre-con” I thought I’d hang around the lobby and hook up with people know. I bumped into Kevin Smith, Jon Fancey, Jon Flanders and a few others. The bad news is I could not get into lunch without the “pre-con” wrist band, and all the soda fridges were locked.

Later on I had dinner with Kent Brown and Cliff Simpkins, who both work on the CSD team, and chatted about all kinds of Oslo, BizTalk, WCF, WF & Dublin related stuff. It’s going to be a very exciting few days when this information all goes public.

After dinner Kent and I headed for the Palermo party. When we arrived it was fairly chaotic, with a queue to get in, and very busy inside. I met up with Joao Martins and Yossi, and took advantage of the free beer (the free food and free swag had all run out by then). The QuickLearn team arrived later on, and I had some time to chat with John and Rob, and some of John’s ex-students from Norway.

PDC Top Tip #2: All the best parties are word-of-mouth

There’s the Official PDC Party, and the Un-official PDC party, but there is also a host of other parties, dinners, and social events going on all week. If you have the right connections, you probably know the score, but if not it’s always asking people you are chatting with what their plans are for later on, there’s a fairly good chance that you might get word of one of these secret events, and maybe even get an invite.

PDC FAQ 02: Where are you guys from?

On Monday I was up at the Swedish Microsoft campus north of Stockholm for an interview for MSDN Radio. “MSDN Radio – Oslo och Dublin, en rundresa bland kodnamn” (Oslo & Dublin, a tour of the codenames). Dag König, Johan Lindfors, Mikael Deurell and Robert Folkesson, were providing the singing and the questions, and we were discussing as much as we are allowed to talk about relating to Oslo and Dublin before the PDC.

The intro is in Swedish, but from 05:45 it’s in English.

The link is here.

I’ve added another two webcasts to the BloggersGuides.net website. One of them has been on my to-do list for a long time. There have been a lot of BizTalk mapping questions on the forums where the best answer is “Don’t use the mapper, use custom XSLT!”, so I’ve finally added a webcast to show you how you can achieve this.

The other one is taken form a demo that I have been running in the BizTalk courses I teach for a while. It’s looking at how BizTalk Server can be used to take a stream of RFID tag reads, and create a process that produces business related information. I’m using WPF to create an “Animated Sushi Emporium”, complete with conveyer belt and RIFD reader, and then using a fairly basic sequential convoy to determine which sushi plates have been consumed, and which are too old and need to be removed.

The full list of BizTalk downloads is here.

I have quite a few more webcasts on my to-do list, but I also do requests, so if you have an idea, let me know and I’ll see what I can come up with.

On Friday I passed the “70-503 - TS: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 – Windows Communication Foundation Application Development”, so that makes me a “Technology Specialist” in WCF. This is the third technology specialist (TS) exam I have taken, the others being BizTalk Server 2004, and BizTalk Server 2006, so it felt good to broaden the spectrum a bit. I prefer the TS exams to the regular .net exams; I have the MCSD certification, which required passing four .net exams and a server product exam (I chose SQL Server 2000 for that). The TS exams are much more focussed instead of covering a broad area, and the questions tend to be tougher, but more focussed towards hands-on experience.

If you are thinking of going for the exam, make sure you really know the topics that are listed in the official preparation guide here. The best book that I found for covering the basics was “Learning WCF: A Hands-on Guide” by Michele Leroux Bustamante. This will cover most of the stuff you need for the exam, and go into sufficient depth on all the topics covered, there’s also about 20 or so labs that you should run through to get the hands-on experience. If you are fully knowledgeable with everything covered here you are well on your way to pass. There are some points on the official preparation guide that are not covered in Learning WCF, so you should make sure you have the 3.5 features covered and look at consuming non WCF services.

Back in 2005 Eddie Churchill, one of the BizTalk team members presented a couple of Channel 9 video titled “First look at Solution Designer” and “Biztalk's sexy new XSLT Mapper”. These videos showed very early prototypes of want may go on to form a part of BizTalk Server vNext. The BizTalk Solution Designer and the new mapper looked like great tools, and I remember many BizTalk developers looking forward to using them in BizTalk applications. Unfortunately they never made it into BizTalk, and the BizTalk team continued with the development of future versions of BizTalk Server and pretty much stuck with the same developer toolset.

About the same time in 2005, Microsoft announced Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF at the time, later changed to WF), and ever since then there has been speculation that WF would replace the orchestration engine in BizTalk Server, with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) forming the communication layer. BizTalk Server 2006 R2 saw the introduction of WCF based adapters, and a new adapter framework that is based on WCF, but so far there has been no use of WF in BizTalk Server.

In October 2007, two years after Eddie’s presentation and the announcement of WF, Microsoft publicly unveiled the “Codename Oslo” strategy at the SOA/BPM summit in Redmond. They announced that there would be a “Universal Editor”, a graphical tool that could be used by architects and analysts to model SOA and integration applications at a high level. This “Universal Editor” may lift some of the ideas from the BizTalk Solution Designer, but it is expected that it will be much less technical in nature as it’s aimed at modelling applications rather than implementing them. They also announced a number of other technologies that would be included in the Oslo wave of technologies.

·         BizTalk Server "V6"

·         System Center "V5"

·         Visual Studio "V10"

·         BizTalk Services "V1"

·         .NET Framework "V4"

Since then there has not been much public information shared about Oslo, there have been a few rumours circulating regarding some of the Oslo technologies.

TechEd US in June saw pretentions and interviews by David Chappell and Jon Flanders that were touching on Oslo technologies but not going into any deep technical details on what would be delivered. David gave a good overview of the Oslo technologies, and Jon provided some useful information for developers who are wanting to gear up for Oslo.

In the TechEd Fishbowl interview, David Chappell mentioned that Oslo would consist of three main components.

·         A storage repository and visual modelling tool

·         A new version of Windows Workflow Foundation

·         A process server to host WCF services and WF workflows

This was the first public indications of the development of the Oslo platform from Microsoft that has come since the SOA/BPM summit in October last year.

On 5^th September 2008 there was an announcement in the BizTalk homepage regarding the future directions of BizTalk and Oslo, featuring a Q&A with Oliver Sharp, and an updated BizTalk Roadmap.

BizTalk Server 2006 R3 has been renamed to BizTalk Server 2009. This decision makes a lot of sense. BizTalk Server 2006 R2 was basically the same server runtime and development tools as BizTalk Server 2006, but with the addition of features for WCF, WDI, RFID, and BAM interceptors for WF and WCF. BizTalk Server 2009 will see improvements in the developer tools, support for the 2008 wave of developer tools and server platform, as well as enhanced EDI and UDDI functionality. Microsoft also announced that there would be continued development of the BizTalk platform in the future, with a release cycle roughly every two years. This is very good news for existing BizTalk customers and developers as it confirms the commitment to continue development of BizTalk Server for the foreseeable future.

One of the proposed features for the version after 2009 is improved developer productivity enhancements, mentioning complex mapping. So one day we may see some of the ideas from Eddie Churchill’s “Sexy New XSLT Mapper” finally make it into the product.

The September announcement also changed the scope of codename Oslo in a significant way. Last year Oslo was described as a large collection of differing technologies, at PDC David Chappell described Oslo’s three main components as modelling tools, a process server, and a new version of WF. According to the announcement, Oslo now consists of just the modelling components.

·         A modelling tool

·         A modelling language

·         A storage repository

This is confirmed by Douglas Purdy in his “What is Oslo?” blog post. “That is it. That is all Oslo is. Oslo is just the modelling platform.”

This makes a lot of sense, as previously there were a large range of existing and future technologies that were under the Oslo umbrella. This “wave of technologies” included server products, modelling tools, and improvements in the .net platform. Having a clear definition of Oslo representing the modelling aspects of these technologies provides a much clearer definition of what Oslo is.