Azure

NuCon 2012–Feb 16th, Irvine, CA

Rick G. Garibay — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 19:44:34 GMT

I’d like to pass on some details regarding an event I will be speaking on in Irvine, CA on February 16th.

NuCon is a one day conference put on by my employer, Neudesic that features talks and content from fellow Neudesic colleagues like David Pallmann, Ted Neward and Simon Guest, just to name a few.

As Irvine is Neudesic’s headquarters, the event provides a great opportunity to gain insight into the future of technology as seen by my fellow colleagues as well as providing pragmatic guidance that you can put to use the following day while networking with other Neudesic customers, executive management, partners and thought leaders to help guide your strategy on making the most of the tremendous opportunities that the Microsoft platform and Neudesic products have to offer.

In my talk, Hybrid Composition on the Microsoft Application Integration platform, I’ll share how organizations of all shapes and sizes can benefit from the improvement, automation and streamlining of their business operations through hybrid composition.

Abstract

In today’s technology landscape, exposing key functional areas as traditional services or other means has become the norm for achieving agility and is a requirement for taking advantage of the dramatic improvements that modern middleware capabilities both on-premise and in the cloud provide.

As organizations adapt to this new hybrid model, a shift from a homogenous, single product, big iron approach to heterogeneous, best in class, capability-driven model is necessary for realizing the benefits of service-orientation and enabling the composition of these services on-premise, in the cloud and behind the firewall without making big spending commitments on a product that may only meet some of these needs.

The Microsoft platform offers a number of capabilities for achieving these goals across common Hosting, Workflow, Rules, EAI and Messaging workloads that allow you to choose the right capabilities for delivering your intended business outcomes.

BizTalk Server 2010 and Windows Server AppFabric 1.1 provide a comprehensive middleware platform for developing, deploying, and managing composite enterprise capabilities on-premise and Windows Azure Service Bus and Access Control Service allow you to extend your investments beyond traditional trust and network boundaries making the cloud and other partner/vendor endpoints merely an extension of your enterprise.

Come learn how Windows Server AppFabric, WCF, WF Services, BizTalk Server and Windows Azure can benefit your approach to building and supporting application services at enterprise scale while transcending traditional trust boundaries and enabling the hybrid enterprise.

To give you an idea of the breadth and depth of the sessions, in my talk, I’ll be talking about and showing live demos of the latest capabilities that enable you to build hybrid composite solutions to drive differentiation and innovation within your organization:

Windows Server AppFabric 1.1 Caching (On-Prem) Featuring:

AppFabric distributed caching including implementing the Cache-Aside caching pattern and Read-Through caching, new in AppFabric 1.1

WF 4 Workflow Services (On-Prem) Featuring:

State Machine Activity, new in .NET 4.1 and .NET 4.5
AppFabric Connect BizTalk Mapper for WF 4 in AppFabric Connect
Long-running workflows
Workflow Correlation
Composition with WCF services in Windows Azure

Windows Server AppFabric Deployment (On-Prem) Featuring:

Easy deployment with Microsoft Web Deploy
Windows Server AppFabric Configuration Experience

WCF hosting in Windows Azure Web Roles (Cloud) Featuring:

Azure Web Role hosting
Azure Service Bus Topic client

Azure Service Bus Brokered Messaging (Hybrid) Featuring:

Brokered messaging from Azure to on-premise custom applications behind the firewall
Topics and Subscriptions

BizTalk Server 2010 Orchestration & Messaging (On-Prem) Featuring:

Custom WCF Adapter for consuming messages off an Azure Service Bus Topic
Support for custom WCF behaviors
Support for hybrid ERP integration such as Dynamics CRM or SAP

So, if you are interested in attending, please consider yourself invited! Click on the links in the invitation below to register (save $100 if you register before Feb 1) and I look forward to seeing you at NuCon 12!

Azure Service Bus Connect EAI and EDI “Integration Services” CTP

Rick G. Garibay — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 18:46:51 GMT

I am thrilled to share in the announcement that the first public CTP of Azure Service Bus Integration Services is now LIVE at http://portal.appfabriclabs.com.

The focus of this release is to enable you to build hybrid composite solutions that span on-premise investments such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, SAP, Siebel eBusiness Applications, Oracle E-Business Suite, allowing you to compose these mission critical systems with applications, assets and workloads that you have deployed to Windows Azure, enabling first-class hybrid integration across traditional network and trust boundaries.

In a web to web world, many of the frictions addressed in these capabilities still exist, albeit to a smaller degree. The reality is that as the web and cloud computing continue to gain momentum, investments on-premise are, and will continue to be critical to realizing the full spectrum of benefits that cloud computing provides both in the short and long term.

So, what’s in this CTP?

Azure Service Bus Connect provides a new server explorer experience for LOB integration exposing a management head that can be accessed on-prem via Server Explorer or PowerShell to create, update, delete or retrieve information from LOB targets. This provides a robust extension of the Azure Service Bus relay endpoint concept, which acts a LOB conduit (LobTarget, LobRelay) for bridging these assets by extending the WCF LOB Adapters that ship with BizTalk Server 2010. The beauty of this approach is that you can leverage the LOB Adapters using BizTalk as a host, or, for a lighter weight way approach, use IIS/Windows Server AppFabric to compose business operations on-premise and beyond.

In addition, support for messaging between trading partners across traditional trust boundaries in business-to-business (B2B) scenarios using is EDI is also provided in this preview, including AS2 protocol support with X12 chaining for send and receive pipelines, FTP as transport for X12, agreement templates, partners view with profiles per partner, resources view, and an intuitive, metro style EDI Portal.

Just as with on-premise integration, friction always exists when integrating different assets which may exist on different platforms, implement different standards and at a minimum have different representations of common entities that are part of your composite solution’s domain. What is needed is a mediation broker that can be leveraged at internet-scale, and apply message and protocol transformations across disparate parties and this is exactly what the Transforms capability provides. Taking an approach that will be immediately familiar to the BizTalk developer, a familiar mapper-like experience is provided within Visual Studio for interactively mapping message elements and applying additional processing logic via operations (functoids).

In addition, XML Bridges which include the XML One-Way Bridge and XML Request-Reply Bridge are an extension to the Azure Service Bus which supports critical patterns such as protocol bridging, routing actions, external data lookup for message enrichment and support for both WS-I and REST endpoints and any combination thereof.

As shown below in the MSDN documentation, “bridges are composed of stages and activities where each stage is a message processing unit in itself. Each stage of a bridge is atomic, which means either a message completes a stage or not. A stage can be turned on or off, indicating whether to process a message or simply let it pass through”.

Taking a familiar VETR approach to validate, extract, transform and route messages from one party to another, along with the ability to enrich messages by composing other endpoint in-flight (supported protocols include HTTP, WS-HTTP and Basic HTTP, HTTP Relay Endpoint, Service Bus Queues/Topics and any other XML bridge) the Bridge is a very important capability and brings very robust capabilities for extending Azure Service Bus as a key messaging broker across integration disciplines.

In reality, these patterns have no more to do with EAI than with traditional, contemporary service composition and become necessary once you move from a point-to-point approach and need to elegantly manage integration and composition across assets. As such, this capability acts as a bridge to Azure Service Bus that is very powerful in and of itself, even in non-EAI/EDI scenarios where endpoints can be virtualized increasing decoupling between parties (clients/services). In addition, this capability further enriches what is possible when using the BrokeredMessage property construct as a potential poor-man’s routing mechanism.

In closing, the need to address the impedance mismatch that exists between disparate applications that must communicate with each other is a friction that will continue to exist for many years to come, and while traditionally, many of these problems have been solved by expensive, big iron middleware servers, this is changing.

As with most technologies, often new possibilities are unlocked that are residual side-effects of something bigger, and this is certainly the case with how both innovative and strategic Azure Service Bus is to Microsoft’s PaaS strategy. Azure Service Bus continues to serve as a great example of a welcomed shift to a lightweight capability-based, platform-oriented approach to solving tough distributed messaging/integration problems while honoring the existing investments that organizations have made and benefiting from a common platform approach which is extremely unique in the market. And while this shift will take some time, in the long-run enterprises of all shapes and sizes only stand to benefit.

To get started, download the SDK & samples from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=184288 and the tutorial & documentation from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=235197 and watch this and the Windows Azure blog for more details coming soon.

Happy Messaging!

A Middle-Tier Guy’s Take on HTML 5

Rick G. Garibay — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 22:50:58 GMT

(My) Early Beginnings

I started my career in software development as a very junior web developer in 1999. I taught myself HTML, VBScript and JavaScript. The browser wars between Microsoft and Netscape were raging. I still remember how exciting my first Classic ASP page was. The fact that I was able to connect to an Access or SQL Server 7 database with just a few lines of code inside my markup was incredible at the time. I consumed new recipes from “4 Guys from Rolla” with relish and kept Scott Mitchell’s titles like “Teach Yourself Classic ASP 3.0 in 21 Days” on my desk at all times (it’s still on my bookshelf which itself has become a sort of Smithsonian for software development over the last decade). Even more exciting was that fact that it seemed like the beginning of a new era in which I could relegate JavaScript as a necessary evil for handling tricks like focus and validation on the UI.

At the time, I was doing some really fun and interesting work as a young Padawan for the credit card division inside the #1 Visa issuer in the country (we didn’t have a fancy name for it other than “reports” back then but we were doing very early work on what would become “BI”). By rendering data-driven operational reports dynamically on the browser, we had revolutionized how metrics like Occupancy, Average Handle Time, and Multiple-Call-Rate were disseminated within the bank ushering in a new era of productivity, transparency and accountability for everyone from agent to VP. Through this experience, we built a center of excellence which served as a benchmark for other call centers to follow (in fact, we had the likes of Amex come in and review how we did it). Sure, we had displaced an army of Excel Macro and Access developers, but such was the price of progress. As this little rogue IT shop basking in our success, I remember a number of “true programmer” personas in the “Real IT” group that tended to undermine what was happening. These were programmers who came from C++ or Java (and whose managers felt threatened by what we were able to do with such few resources) and mostly thumbed their nose at things like lack of strong typing, OO, etc. They looked at JavaScript as just a tool for dirty hippie web masters (remember that term) and VBScript as as something OK for administrators to use to walk AD hives, but being inferior for lacking OO and being handicapped by things like variants. Despite our incredibly visible success (at the CEO level and above) by applying these scripting technologies, I was hungry to see the forest for the trees and experimented a bit with COM and COM+, learning how to encapsulate business logic in components and delighting in being able to wire up my COM libraries with Classic ASP even though with the exception of my manager and mentor at the time, no one else even had the tools to debug my components.

The Server Era

Then, this thing called Windows DNA came along which promised to marry Windows, ActiveX and Internet into one big cluster… well you know. Fortunately, it’s fate was short-lived, but I remember attending a couple MSDN events where it seemed like concurrency and single threaded apartments would become mainstream topics on the web. Maybe us script kiddies would earn some respect after all? Then, just like that, this new, new thing called .NET happened. All of a sudden, just like that, I had a ton to learn. All my Classic ASP and JavaScript skills were superseded by Web Forms. I still remember stepping through every line of code in the I Buy Spy reference app and being completely blow away. ASP.NET offered something that was OO, strongly typed, and would even render JavaScript for you. Cumbersome JavaScript validation was replaced by server-side templates and controls. Form fields magically remembered their values across post backs. And, as I learned, WebForms offered a better separation of concerns with a nice, clean code-behind model that I would later leverage to introduce patterns like MVP, MVC Page Controller and Front Controller. I built a nice CMS portal for a multi-national bank (which according to Forbes Magazine is the largest public trading company in the world today) with these new skills and I hear it is still running today. Life was good. This was the age of the web server, and the only major argument within the Microsoft web community at that time was “C# or VB.NET”?

At this point in my career, I’d grown a bit bored with web development. I felt like I’d accomplished everything I wanted to with ASP.NET, and the roles I found myself in started dealing with problems at a more holistic, program level which would involve a handful of web apps and coordination between them and new and existing enterprise resources. I discovered Web Services, and the problems I was now trying to solve led to the gradual gravitation to enterprise architecture and middleware and before I knew it, I was hooked. Admittedly, it was a great time to make the shift. SOA was king. COM+ had grown up with support for Enterprise Services in .NET and in parallel, this amazing new messaging framework codenamed “Indigo” was in development that would provide a black belt for hungry ninjas like me who wanted to take over the world with SOA. When it came to Indigo, there were two types of members in the community: Those on this inside, and the rest of the world. I was very much part of the rest of the world, but I consumed every bit of content I could get my hands on from folks like Don Box, Juval Lowy, Wenlong Dong, Michele Bustamante and Dr. Nick.

Around the same time, a major re-engineering of a product called BizTalk Server was nearing release which took full advantage of the .NET Framework. My employer then, a mid-sized auto retail and finance company was one of the first BizTalk Server 2004 customers in Phoenix. For a fledging enterprise integration architect, this was an awesome opportunity. I learned a ton from my friend Todd Sussman, Brian Loesgen and Adam Smith, the latter of the two I wouldn’t meet in person for a few years, but I had read “BizTalk Server 2004 Unleashed” and “The Blogger’s Guide to BizTalk” from cover to cover more than once. Even better was that I was leading the development of our first SOA and 802.11 enterprise mobility project. We had decided to build the mobile apps- which were a superset of a desktop control center- with ASP.NET. Users would hit the same URL whether they were on the desktop or in the field with their device, and the right screen would render. All of our business logic was wrapped in an ASMX façade which then communicated with our BizTalk orchestrations. With my first real enterprise program under my belt, and WCF nearing GA, I decided that this was what I wanted to do when I grew up, or at least for the next 5 years.

Along with WCF, WPF was nearing release. WPF offered a completely different paradigm on which to build traditional Windows apps. Support for rich media like video and sound, flat controls, new gradients all with an incredibly “webby” DHTML-looking design aesthetic. At the time, I remember introspecting that if presentation technologies like this were successful at winning over users, then one day, users won’t care if they are using a browser or an OS to interact with software. What I didn’t realize was to what extent everyone’s cheese was about to be moved. Here we had two tremendously powerful additions to the .NET Framework, poised to revolutionize how we write software from a presentation and back-end perspective, and yet, something subtle was happening that was bigger than Microsoft, bigger than the marvel that is .NET.

The Web Reborn

Content building SOA solutions in the walled gardens of my employers and clients, almost overnight, I remember when web developers started insisting on me starting to expose JSON endpoints on my services. Apparently, while I was in messaging la la land, users had grown tired of refreshing their browsers and posting back to the server every time they submitted a form. Turns out, I too was one of them! Users were demanding not just a dynamic web experience, but one that was interactive, and felt more like a rich client (a great example at this time was Outlook Web Access). But if you wanted a rich experience, isn’t that why you stuck to the desktop and used WPF? Following the promulgation of XML as the second coming, wasn’t JSON nothing more than an esoteric relic of JavaScript? AJAX had arrived. What followed was a complete disruption of the seeming balance between intended purpose that would shift the pendulum once again to the web.

This was about the same time that Microsoft had shared its vision for Software + Services, first unveiled at Mix 07. On the outside, the Mix conference was all about the web, but the reality was that this was also part of a pretty massive campaign to court and win over designers from Adobe/Macromedia to a new technology: WPF/Everywhere, aka Silverlight. While many had been signaling WPF as the return of the smart client, users were accepting an alternate, even degraded user experience in exchange for interop. Silverlight offered a superset of WPF capabilities, delivering a somewhat equally productive design time and development experience as .NET and thus began penetrating Apple and Linux via the ubiquity of the browser. This was the first time I saw Microsoft really understanding that it wasn’t only about .NET and Windows anymore. This was evidenced by prominent PMs on stage demonstrating Silverlight apps on Macs, and running Linux distros on VMs to show that you could write the app once, and run it (almost) everywhere. A number of incredible apps were released on Silverlight including examples like Netflix and Hard Rock Café Memorabilia which were each both a sign of the times and a hint at what was to come.

To be sure, this had indeed become a software + services world, and for a while Silverlight looked promising despite the tremendous market footprint that Flash had and continues to have. I remember writing about how remarkable Silverlight was and what a game changer it could be. But then, an interesting thing happened. JavaScript and REST started appearing more and more in web apps, particularly in the consumer space. At first, despite the popularity of Fielding’s paper, REST seemed like a fringe thing, and in many ways a step backward. Here we had a tremendously powerful consortium of standards built around SOAP representing the intersection of the very few things big players like Microsoft, IBM, Sun and Oracle agreed on. What’s more, it seemed that Microsoft had timed this SOAP bubble (no pun intended) perfectly, with its shiny, new, equally efficacious messaging stack called WCF which was, and still today remains unrivaled by other platform vendors. In addition to HTTP, WCF brought TCP, MSMQ and IPC to the enterprise, offering (proprietary) binary encoding and MTOM for optimizing message exchanges. The programming model had (and continues to have) a learning curve over ASMX, but once you got over the hump, you were on a high summit and could see the world for miles around from this new vantage point. So, why in the world would anyone want to go back to using HTTP POST and POX? How could it be that the world was settling for REST and JavaScript?

Simple. The world (and the internet) was changing. A gradual, yet viral shift was taking place fueled by the success of Ruby on Rails and PHP which built the foundation for what is today known as Web 2.0. All of a sudden, anyone with a laptop and an internet connection could download a few packages and get an app up and running in no time. The barrier to entry was financially negligible and because these languages fully embraced HTTP, a tremendous community was born that was as smart as they were entrepreneurial. Interop and reuse were mere side-effects that led to tremendous adoption by everyone with a browser. Fully embracing JavaScript with their productivity boosting libraries that took the sting out of writing JavaScript, similar approaches to packaging robust functionality into libraries such as JQuery followed. In addition, while at first, Ruby on Rails embraced SOAP, it was later replaced with REST. Ask your mother or grandmother what Twitter or Groupon is and you’ll have the answer as to why REST and JavaScript have persevered.

In response to all of this, WCF added support for JSON first, followed by REST, and by the release of .NET 4, both were in the box. In addition, WCF RIA Services was introduced, adding an easy button for integrating with Silverlight clients with the stack, and WCF Data Services provided a REST-friendly approach to managing CRUD operations using ATOM as the message contract. The success of the ASP.NET MVC framework, which has all but subsumed its older, less cool ASP.NET Web Forms sibling, is further evidence of the developer and user community embracing the browser as a conduit for interoperability on the client.

The Mobility Wars

Even amidst the mobile revolution, which has been largely built on the ubiquity of broadband connections and increasingly capable handheld devices, proprietary platforms have emerged which in many ways are more restrictive, and costly than any other platform. Want to build apps for iOs? Learn Objective C. Android? Got Java? Windows Phone? .NET. Even though they all sit on similar devices and depend on the same infrastructure for messaging (the internet), apps are hardly interoperable with one another. I am sure you know at least two people that carry multiple headsets with them for this very reason, and tablets, sure to be the next wave of mobile innovation suffer from the same dilemma (if you ask me why HP abandoned WebOS, I think it has more to do with the writing on the wall regarding HTML5 than anything else, but more on that shortly). At first, this dilemma seems somewhat benign, perhaps only affecting developers. The truth is it affects everyone. Talk to any iOS developer (that’s not a complete Apple zealot) and they’ll tell you that Objective C isn’t the most productive language to write apps with. Aside from Java not being too sexy these days, I don’t hear many Android (or WP7) users raving about the selection of apps in Android Market. Same goes for WP7 and Windows Marketplace- I remember how long I had to wait to get Angry Birds on my Windows Phone 7! But the most salient example I can think of is the fact that after a decade of browser wars, tremendous innovation on the client and the server, I still can’t play Flash videos on my iPad or WP7. My iPad refuses to run Silverlight apps, even though its browser on the desktop is fully capable of doing so. This is a situation that is just plain broken, and it isn’t just me that feels this way…

The World Wants Native Interoperability on the Client, and Today, the Answer is HTML 5.

Like it or not, HTTP has become the ubiquitous interface for both the client and its conduit to the backend. This incredibly simple protocol has had more influence on software over the last decade than any other technology, completely reshaping the strategies of the biggest players. I don’t have to tell you that without HTTP, you don’t have cloud computing. For example, who would have thought that Amazon, after pioneering e-commerce would get into the PaaS business by being the first to truly innovate in commercial cloud computing at scale? Who would think that Microsoft would completely reinvent itself on Windows Azure and invest as deeply in REST as it has, not only with standards and technologies like OData and WCF Data Services, but also in exposing their incredibly rich and powerful Azure APIs as REST heads? Again, the answer is simple. HTTP has become the lingua franca of the interconnected world and the disruption started with the first packet in the early 60s.

Just as SOAP was developed to aid in interop between vendor platforms, banks and partners, REST has increased the native interoperability of applications on the web. Hold your rotten tomatoes, but I am afraid that so too is the fate of iOS, Android, WP7, WPF, ASP.NET and Silverlight. Are they going away tomorrow, next year or 5 years from now? Nope. SOAP still has a very important place in back-end systems and I don’t mean just for legacy applications. When you you want to work with contracts and interfaces (very important when designing critical message exchanges for business processes), need support for heavy lifting such as distributed transactions, reliable messaging, multiple transports and the like, SOAP is your tool. Case in point as I mentioned briefly above is Windows Azure. While the investment in REST has been significant, these REST endpoints are merely designed for optimizing interop allowing any client or platform to take advantage of the services offered by Microsoft’s cloud. Want to start or stop a compute instance? Need to write a file to blob storage, retrieve an entity from table storage or publish a message for hundreds of subscribers to consume over the AppFabric Service Bus? There’s a REST API for that. While adoption is key to the success of any product or platform, the API, and thus REST is not the end itself but merely a means to the end, and as such is only the tip of the iceberg. Below the water’s surface, there is, and will continue to be a ton of SOAP and .NET.

The same is happening on the client with HTML5. While Silverlight and ASP.NET MVC were a step in the right direction and aren’t going to just vanish tomorrow, HTML5 offers true interop at the native (browser) level, and since native interop is what the world wants, it will win, at least for now. I say at least for now because as tempting as it is to chock this up to just another trend, unlike the crusty programmer personas I mentioned when I started this stream of consciousness that has become a rather long post (thanks for staying with me this far, btw), I’ve been doing this long enough to have seen software reinvent itself a few times now. I’ve learned that rather than cry over spilled milk, it is important to embrace change and this means you have to expect and be prepared for anything. HTML 5 could fail, and companies that have already invested significantly in ASP.NET, Silverlight, Flash and one (or several) mobile platforms aren’t going to just jump in right away, but they are going to watch very, very carefully. If I am building a web app or a rich client app today from scratch though, I’m going to think very, very hard before I decide to do so in anything but HTML 5.

Who Moved my Cheese?

Who would have thought that Microsoft, with an incredibly lucrative productivity, OS, server and tools business would bet the farm on Windows Azure? As innovative as I think Microsoft’s (PaaS) cloud story is, in many ways, it is the software giant’s response to its cheese being moved by the web. And make no mistake, it is a massive bet. Initial buzz around Windows 8 has so far been met with both positive and quite negative feedback after the revelation that Windows 8 will make HTML 5 a first class citizen on the desktop and the tablet. Viewed simplistically, the seams between client and server/backend are exposed with Windows 8 and Microsoft Azure respectively. At first, this seems quite alarming (Joel Spolsky saw this coming over 8 years ago), but if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. If the client is moving to the browser, the value proposition of a beefy desktop or a rack of servers in an opaque data center is diminished significantly. However, all that data, records, images, videos, files still have to be stored and served up some where, and that somewhere needs to be natively interoperable with the the client at the iceberg and get the heavy lifting done below the water’s surface. The need for middleware- integration between the client, that somewhere and its data, applications and systems has never been greater.

Even though I’ve joked to friends that stayed on the front end that I didn’t miss anything by skipping WPF and Silverlight because we’re back to where I first began with HTML and JavaScript, the reality is that the last decade has been incredibly important in reinforcing that innovation is bigger than any platform vendor or standards body because unlike them, it is you and me that determine the fate of technology, and for that we should all be proud.

So, What Now?

I provide no value without designing distributed solutions that can be consumed by the client applications and automate the business processes they serve. So just as before, its time to buckle down once again and learn the client technologies that one of my primary customers- the UI developer- will soon be using. First in line is Mango. Next is HTML 5. And who knows, after specializing in integration for the last 5 years, I just might start generalizing a bit and get back into web development again.

See you at the other end of the wire.

DB Tech Con 2011

Rick G. Garibay — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 21:38:03 GMT

I had the privilege of recording 3 sessions in the SSWUG studio this week for the upcoming DB Tech Con conference on April 20-22. This is the largest online conference in IT the world, with speakers covering topics ranging from .NET, SQL Server and cloud.

The focus of my track is all about hybrid solutions in the enterprise and how you can take advantage of AppFabric and BizTalk as a comprehensive platform for building on-premise solutions that take advantage of the cloud in a pragmatic way.

You can find the full session schedule by clicking here and below is an abstract of my sessions that will air starting April 20th:

Building Occasionally Connected Hybrid Applications

Keeping applications and devices synchronized with a company’s back office is a common challenge. Retail, transportation and oil and gas are just a few industries that rely on the ability of software solution deployed outside of the data center to be respond to external events that may occur virtually anywhere. As organizations move certain assets to the cloud, occasionally connected applications are becoming the norm, creating a new breed of hybrid applications. In this session, learn how to implement a sophisticated pattern for enabling push synchronization across your applications and services using Microsoft Sync Framework, SQL Azure and WCF 4.

Building Composite Enterprise Hybrid Services with AppFabric and BizTalk 2010

AppFabric and BizTalk 2010 provide a comprehensive middleware platform for developing, deploying, and managing composite enterprise capabilities both on-premise and in the cloud. Come learn how AppFabric and BizTalk Server can benefit your approach to building and supporting application services at enterprise scale while transcending traditional trust boundaries and enabling the hybrid enterprise.

Hosting WF Services in Windows Azure, Today & Tomorrow

Workflow Services bring many benefits that help you build modern, responsive composite applications. Learn best practice for building and hosting Workflow Services on-premise as well as how you can take advantage of Windows Azure for hosting your workflow services today along with improvements coming to Windows Azure which will make hosting your workflow services in Azure more compelling than ever.

The good folks at SSWUG are offering a $30 discount code on registration for anyone who provides a discount code of SP11DBTechRG during registration. If you’ve already registered, you can take advantage of this discount by updating your registration and providing the code.

If you are planning on attending, drop me a line on twitter and be sure to say hi in the chat room when my sessions air.

Pat Filoteo and Fellow MVPs on AppFabric & More

Rick G. Garibay — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 22:17:54 GMT

I was fortunate to participate in a one hour discussion with Microsoft architect Pat Filoteo and a few fellow MVPs including my Neudesic colleague David Pallmann on Windows Azure and AppFabric a few weeks ago when I was on campus for PDC 10.

The discussion was filmed and posted by the MVP team, uncut in its entirety.

In the segment below, we talk about the potential for AppFabric to transform how we think about composite applications and how important hybrid composition will be to the enterprise as it identifies the chemistry and seeks the right psychology for leveraging the cloud in a manner that leads to increased effectiveness while preserving and more importantly extending the reach of on-premise assets to the cloud and beyond.

If you are interested in watching all segments, please check out the MVP Award Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mvpawardprogram/archive/2010/12/08/windows-azure-q-amp-a-discussion-with-microsoft-azure-architect.aspx

Composite Applications Roadshow – Dallas & Houston

Rick G. Garibay — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 17:44:26 GMT

Microsoft is hosting a two events in Dallas and Houston on 12/8 and 12/9 covering composite application scenarios, governance, composite application roadmap and upgrading to BizTalk Server 2010.

I just got done presenting the keynote, “Building Composite Application Services with AppFabric” at the Microsoft Las Colinas Campus in Dallas and will be presenting once again at the Houston Microsoft Campus tomorrow (12/9), so if you are in the area but missed today’s event, please feel free to register and attend: https://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032469800&IO=ycqB%2bGJQr78fJBMJTye1oA%3d%3d

In this session, I cover how to enable hybrid composition scenarios leveraging AppFabric, Azure and BizTalk Server 2010 by looking at a hybrid travel & hospitality scenario that manages reservation requests on-premise by composing services hosted in an Azure Web Role and a BizTalk Server 2010 Orchestration hosted out in the edge (such as a restaurant location itself) which receives new reservation manifests and reserves a table. The on-premise application is implemented with WF 4 as a Workflow Service and is hosted in Server AppFabric and consumes a WCF 4 service hosted in an Azure Web Role which in turn consumes the BizTalk Orchestration using AppFabric Connect for Web Services.

Below is the agenda for both events and I am also attaching the deck from my talk for any attendees or others who would like to reference it.

09:00 – 10:00 Composite Application (Windows AppFabric, Azure AppFabric, BizTalk 2010)

10:00 – 11:00 Accelerate Adoption of SOA – Tools, Best Practices, Governance

11:00 – 12:00 BizTalk 2010 and Beyond Roadmap

12:00 – 01:00 (Lunch) Upgrading BizTalk Server 2006 R2 / BizTalk 2009 to BizTalk 2010

The AppFabric Platform is Landing

Rick G. Garibay — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 20:07:17 GMT

Today is an exciting day for the AppFabric Platform.

Over the last two years, we have been talking about two “AppFabrics”: Server AppFabric as an on-premise platform for hosting and monitoring composite applications and providing a fabric for managing persistence and elastic scale. We have also talked about Azure AppFabric, a set of cloud-based services including the Azure AppFabric Service Bus and Access Control Service. In various talks and articles over the last several months, I’ve talked about how we really need to start thinking about AppFabric, not just as a single brand, but more importantly as a single platform for seamlessly hosting, managing and optimizing both on-premise and cloud assets.

Today

The Azure AppFabric Service Bus is probably one of the least understood, and therefore under-appreciated Azure services. Part of this is a marketing problem, but the other part is that it is middle-ware under middle-ware. The Service Bus is a bridge between Windows Server AppFabric; your WCF, WF and ASP.NET applications running on premise, and Azure services including Web Roles, Worker Roles and SQL Azure. This isn’t just a dry infrastructure thing, and to suggest that it is merely a internet-scale pub-sub story undersells its value. This is a fundamental technology that is the cornerstone for enabling enterprises to take advantage of both on-premise and cloud assets. What does this mean? In short, we have have been drunk on request-response message exchange patterns over the last decade, making request from behind our firewalls to a service hosted on some commodity hosting provider. What remains a very, very difficult problem is talking to on-premise services from outside of the firewall. While there are very good reasons for this, this is the single greatest inhibitor to truly realizing the potential of a hybrid platform. Azure AppFabric Service Bus solves this problem, and I believe it is one of the sleeper technologies that once awoken has the potential to do for composite applications and SOA what Web.20 did for the Internet. If you want to learn more about it, please check out my presentations, decks and videos here:http://rickgaribay.net/archive/2010/05/19/desert-code-camp-2010.1-content.aspx

Tomorrow

Windows Server AppFabric is a huge leap forward in brining first class hosting, monitoring and scale to WCF, WF and ASP.NET applications. It provides a simplified deployment model, a dashboard for monitoring your applications and services and a drill down perspective in the domain of service era applications. From a consumer perspective, the Azure Development Portal is the equivalent for managing your services in the cloud, and up until recently what you give up in terms of knobs and switches you gain in terms of convention. That said, while functional, most would probably agree that the Azure management experience is lackluster compared to its on-premise Server AppFabric sibling.

I am very pleased to see how far the platform has come and I look forward to the day when the AppFabric platform delivers the benefits of location transparency that a logically centralized but physically distributed platform can provide. In speaking with various PMs, it looks like the AppFabric Platform will be one step closer to fully landing by the end of the year.

Application Infrastructure Virtual Launch Event

Rick G. Garibay — Mon, 10 May 2010 21:34:14 GMT

As you are probably aware, AppFabric is Microsoft’s delivery vehicle for brining the next generation of on-premise and cloud application hosting infrastructure to the masses.

If you are interested in learning more about this new platform and how it can help you build and gain insight into composable applications more easily and effectively while taking advantage of the benefits that Windows AppFabric and Windows Azure AppFabric provides, be sure to check out the launch event on May 20th.

In looking at recent poll results, 33% of those surveyed are looking to leverage AppFabric to simplify the composition of their applications and 26% are interested in cloud hosting and connectivity. How are you thinking about leveraging AppFabric for your on-premise and cloud investments?

You can register for this free virtual event here: http://www.appinfrastructure.com/

Desert Code Camp November 7th

Rick G. Garibay — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 12:11:22 GMT

I will be speaking at DCC on November 7th on the following topics:

Developing and Deploying an On-Premise .NET Application with Azure Table Storage
Developing and Deploying a WCF Application with Azure Compute Services and Azure Table Storage

There are several excellent sessions this time around, including talks from fellow colleagues at Neudesic like Michael Collins, Joel Neubeck and Andrew Wilson.

Hope to see you there!

Speaking at Ultimate Virtual Conference on October 22

Rick G. Garibay — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 04:14:09 GMT

I will be speaking at the SQL Server Worldwide User Group Ultimate Virtual Conference on October 22.

If you haven’t experienced an Ultimate Virtual Conference, it is very similar to other industry conferences. There are a number of tracks including .NET, SQL and MOSS and sessions are scheduled on specific days.

Unlike traditional conferences, however, you don’t have to leave the comfort of your home or office to attend. All sessions are streamed in HD video at the scheduled time. Speakers are available via live chat during the initial screening of their sessions and then you can watch the sessions again and again.

I will be delivering the following two sessions:

Developing and Deploying an On-Premise .NET Application with Azure Table Storage

Azure Table Storage provides a scalable data access solution for applications hosted on-premise or in the Azure cloud. Learn how to get up and running with Table Storage with a look at building entities, provisioning Table Storage locally in Development Storage and in Azure Table Storage along with techniques for maintaining a consistent development experience when developing locally or against the cloud.

Developing and Deploying a WCF Application with Azure Compute Services and Azure Table Storage.

The Azure Compute Service provides robust hosting capabilities of you .NET application in the Azure operating system. Learn about Web Roles and Worker Roles and how to configure your .NET application for deployment to Windows Azure. We will also explore techniques for consuming data via Azure Table Storage and put at all together and deploy the application live to Windows Azure.

My colleague Brendon Birdoes of Neudesic will also be presenting the following sessions:

ESB Toolkit 2.0 Overview

An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is an architectural pattern and a key enabler in implementing the infrastructure for a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The ESB Toolkit for BizTalk Server 2009 implements best practices and patterns for building loosely coupled service oriented solutions using BizTalk as the bus. The ESB Toolkit 2.0 is one of the best new features of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009! Join Brendon as he explains what the ESB Toolkit is, explores the features and capabilities and discusses the benefits of using the Toolkit for your BizTalk solutions.

Implementing Messaging Solutions Using ESB Toolkit 2.0

Itinerary based routing is the key pattern in delivering solutions in the ESB Toolkit 2.0. The challenge though is how to take a traditional BizTalk scenario and implement it using the ESB Toolkit and itinerary based routing. This session will walk through a real world scenario and iteratively build the solution from a simple itinerary to a more complex itinerary including some of the more advanced capabilities of the Toolkit. This session will also take a closer look at the best new feature of the ESB Toolkit which is the Itinerary Designer that is fully integrated into Visual Studio 2008. If you are a BizTalk developer and would like to get an idea of the Toolkit development experience, this is a must see.

For a complete list of sessions and speakers, go to http://www.vconferenceonline.com/shows/fall09/uvc/

~~I have a limited amount of discount codes I can give out so feel free to contact me via email or @rickggaribay on twitter and I will set you up.~~

Please feel free to use discount code SPRGUVC09 for $25 off registration discount.