Read the original article here. Will be implementing this feature in the coming days and will be sharing my experiences, but before that, its important to get a clear understanding on what can be achieved. Some of the important things that excited me are given below:

BizTalk Server 2010 introduces a new feature “AppFabric Connect”, which enables organizations to use BizTalk capabilities from both Windows Server AppFabric and Windows Azure AppFabric. For Windows Server AppFabric, the focus is to enable developers to leverage the power of the BizTalk LOB Adapters and the BizTalk Mapper from inside Windows Workflow applications. For Windows Azure AppFabric, the “connection” is to use the power of the AppFabric ServiceBus to host service endpoints in the cloud for BizTalk artifacts enabling easy interactions to external parties you need to integrate with without needing complex firewall and security infrastructure .

The first thing you notice is that using appfabric connect, developers will now be able to use BizTalk LOB Adapters and the BizTalk Mapper from inside Windows Workflow applications. That’s cool from a design point of view. I hope the performance of these maps will also improve and we may not have the same memory leakage problems that we had in BizTalk [This can be overcome by running compiled xslt's], but that’s a different topic.

The second thing you’ll notice is that it enables us now to expose our on premise services (that are running in our enterprise behind our company firewall etc), to be exposed (only the service endpoints) on the cloud enabling external entities to use these service. The service execution will be on the servers in the enterprise. Now thats cool !

For On-Premises

AppFabric Connect allows you to create workflow activities that represent these interactions with your LOB systems using the BizTalk LOB Adapter Wizard directly inside your workflow applications. It also allows you to use the BizTalk Mapper inside these applications as well, since schema transformation is a very common activity you will do when interacting with LOB systems.

For Cloud

AppFabric Connect allows you to EXTEND the REACH of your LOB Services into Windows Azure AppFabric. The services RUN on-premises, BUT can be accessed securely and easily through the Cloud. The capabilities of the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus and Access Control are utilized to publish and secure access to an endpoint definition of your service, the actual calls to the real service are passed to the service that is running on-premise. You provision a service endpoint in the Service Bus, plug this into the BizTalk Adapter Wizard at the appropriate place and that’s it. Now it’s easy to extend your internal integration processes to your customers and partners as web services that “seem” to live in the cloud, but you maintain control using your on-premises infrastructure.

Here is an article that details on how to work with AppFabric Connect.

AppFabric Connect uses Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) activities to programmatically access BizTalk Server’s LOB connectivity and data transformation capabilities. This enables users to easily create new composite applications using the WF model, which can be deployed, hosted and managed in Windows Server AppFabric. AppFabric Connect also accomodates a class of scenarios (such as Web-based queries) that can utilize BizTalk Server 2010 functionality from a WF application hosted in IIS rather than from a BizTalk Server application running in a BizTalk Server host instance. This provides flexibility for WF developers that may not want or need other BizTalk Server functionality and also maximizes the use of available resources at runtime; the overhead required to run WF applications hosted in IIS is significantly less than the overhead required to run applications hosted in the BizTalk Server runtime

Here is a link which details on how to install and enable this feature. I’ll post updates as soon as I get my hands dirty on it.

Please read John Savageau’s article on it here. Also, the authors idea for a government Cloud is quite interesting. Considering the fact that we have some governments who are in the process of providing EGovernment Services (i.e. exposing basic government functionalities on the web), this could be a good architectural decision for them. John’s article also has some links on ESB, check them out if you want to learn more about them.

Another article that talks about this is here. This article still says there is time for enterprises to move from their private clouds to public clouds, but predict that this concept will definitely catch on in the future.

Ill definitely be watching this and post more updates on them.

I also really liked the Reference Architecture that he came up based on SOA.

“The Reference Architecture is a framework used as a single point of reference to illustrate the key operating elements of the core banking solution. The reference architecture has following categories: technology, people, functions, processes, services, products, delivery channels, and customer segments.”

He then goes on to list what things are mandatory for each category. I agree on most of them and happy to say that the two implementations that I worked on, covered 70% of it. The 30% not covered is partly due to the tradeoff’s between what can be achieved in the given timeline by business and what things are nice to have, but can be done later on when time permits.

The business processes that he covers in the list, just would like to mention that architects usually like to have them broken down in Coarse Grained Services and Fine Grain Services. CG Services are the ones that actually achieve an entire business process and usually have compensation logic built in it as well. They simply control the flow of the business process and call the Fine Grained Services which actually performs/achieve a business operation. It’s important that technology people ensure that services support Synchronous / Asynchronous calls, Batch mode etc. Also, its quite beneficial to have a Business Rule Engine that is dynamic and configurable. Embedding them in code is never a good idea.

Once you have your services ready (via in a Service Bus), it makes sense to have Business / Exception reporting on it via a portal. Also service metrics can also be reported upon.

All in all, a very good article to get an easy understanding of SOA in core banking applications by the author Chris Shayan.

Temenos takes the lead and probably the first mover’s advantage in this. CORE banking applications (Temenos) in this case is now available on cloud & for us more importantly…the platform they have chosen is Microsoft Windows Azure. Also SQL Azure is running at its backend.

Please read about the official press release here. Microsoft MSDN has this to say. The cloud community is also very excited on this.

From a business point of view, these Para’s really stand out as they have a direct impact on cost reduction via reduction of data centers (or in come cases totally doing away with data centers) and the concept of per use basis:

“The combination of T24 and the Windows Azure platform, including SQL Azure, allows banks to remove the high data centre costs associated with running a multi-application environment by moving these operations to a consumption based pricing model. Banks will no longer need to expend time and budget on provisioning and operating hardware resources, as running T24 natively on the Windows Azure platform enables them to scale resources effectively and increase volume according to customer demand.”

“Hosting T24 on Microsoft Azure platform gives financial institutions anywhere in the world the ability to deploy the system on a per use basis. Giving customers this option opens up entire new markets for both Azure and T24,” commented Bart Narter, senior vice president, Celent. “

Perhaps, the big enterprises and big banks might not be comfortable with the above arrangement, but for the Mid sized and local banks, this can mean a significant cost reduction as they can do away with there data centers (to some extent).

Exciting times ahead !!!

Exception of type ‘System.EnterpriseServices.TransactionProxyException’ was thrown

The next step was to google around to find a solution. I found this article here to be the best and most easiest solution. It contains step by step snapshots as well in order to guide you through the process.

In addition to the above, whenever you go for such an architecture, please make sure you have a good concept of MSDTC [Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator]. This article here serves as an excellent guide on how to enable MSDTC.

Incase if you still find error been reported relating to MSDTC, please refer to this excellent article here which contains all the steps required to troubleshoot problems with MSDTC.

Hope it helps.

Do you have any pro-active way of getting informed that if a receive location gets disabled ???

Well I dint, but I googled it and found the solution listed here:

http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.biztalk.appintegration&tid=947985de-a2bb-4c04-a158-a3492d42924d

Hope its useful.

others have done it… & chances are that they probably have done it better then you by investing there time & efforts in it, well atleast microsoft claims it has

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/practices/bb190351.aspx

the above link contains Microsoft Best Patterns & Practices compelete catalog.  Alot of good stuff is there and alot of important tasks that are essential to any project/product is listed.  So surely check it out !!!

Summary

The Microsoft ESB Guidance uses Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 to support a loosely coupled messaging architecture. BizTalk Server includes a powerful publish/subscribe mechanism for messaging applications that works by creating and filling subscriptions, which provides a highly efficient and scalable platform for service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications.

The Microsoft ESB Guidance extends the functionality of BizTalk Server to provide a range of new capabilities focused on building robust, connected, service-oriented applications that incorporate itinerary-based service invocation for lightweight service composition, dynamic resolution of endpoints and maps, Web service and WS-* integration, fault management and reporting, and integration with third-party SOA governance solutions

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa972199.aspx

The above link not only is a centralize page for all BAM related tasks but also has a collection of good links that will help a developer to implment BAM in its Enterprise.

Also attached is a tutorial in word format

BTS2006_Business_Activity_Monitoring.doc

Kind Regards,

Noel Charles