Silverlight Rehab and Biztalk R3

Hilarious video here.  Check it out.

Looking at the R3 information post i’m thinking that, if the Oslo vision is realised then maybe one day someone will have a clinic for Biztalk addicts !! (Right now, many times it seems we need more Nurofen or Prozac) . Hey, maybe Biztalk will get a Silverlight based designer !!. You know that nice Solution Designer that Eddie Churchill demonstrated that disappeared off the scene altogether?. My brain’s been ticking over (it does that very rarely ) and i’ve been wondering if the product group has something like that up its sleeve.

The ideas for R3 are good. It moves Biztalk more into the SOA space from being an integration server. As i mentioned in my earlier post about the SOA competitive landscape and no mention about Biztalk in the rankings,theres a lot of products out there in this space and a good opportunity to take Biztalk up several notches in usability to make it a strong contender.

The thing that i’m most keen to see is the SOA patterns that are being promised. There’s definitely a need for more guidance. However, i think what would make it more useful than just having some patterns is the ability to cherry pick and use them. Take the current set of scenarios in the documentation for instance. Theres some brilliant material there but i wonder how many people actually got to install them and try them out. Just looking at the deployment guide for some of those scenarios got me scared. I never even attempted an installation. What would have been most useful is an eval VHD with them pre-installed. Ok, call me lazy, but i dont have time to build a new VM and walk through a large install guide so see some patterns in action. Its a good thing Jon Flanders baked some of them into his Pattern Wizards tool or else many folk wouldnt have even got a stub orchestration sorted for some of the advanced ones.

Its the little things that can go towards making a good product great. Theres plenty of power in the Biztalk engine. No doubt about that at all, but we need more in the area of modelling support. Integration will never be trivial, but it sure can be made simpler. I want to see the day when Biztalk knocks the socks off TIBCO and Oracle in the SOA rankings. The good thing is, the product team are definitely taking steps in the right direction. With WF and WCF baked into the core and with metadata repositories and registries etc, its going to be unrecognizable soon, but in a good way.

Happy Biztalking!!

Where are the non R2 Adapter Samples?

I got stuck with the complexities of the awful NativeSQL schemas when working with the Oracle ODBC adapter and i thought i had got lucky when i saw a PollingQuery sample but on closer examination of the binding files etc it was clear that the WCF LOB adapter was being used. Very disappointing. I had a good hunt around the net. Theres a nice list here – Biztalk Adapter Pack Samples but they are all for R2. Am i the only one in the world not using R2? So where are the samples? Installing the SDK that comes with the ODBC adapter gives a pathetically insufficient 2 examples both dealing with sending data to Oracle and nothing else.

C’mon now.. where are they hiding? Does anyone know?

BizUnitDesigner and a Biztalk Testing Series

This post is mainly to call out two new resources that i just came across.

The first one is BizUnitDesigner. Finally someone has taken the plunge and written a GUI for BizUnit, at least, one that is publicly available. (I’ve heard rumors of IPR protected toolsets which obviously havent made the public domain). That was one of the key things on my TO-DO list . You know, sometimes procrastination can be good! Someone else takes the initiative. :-) I recently started “interviewing” my colleagues to find out what their idea of the ultimate BizUnit GUI would be. I shall compile their responses and share it. I also had some work items for the GUI on my Extensions roadmap on the codeplex workspace. The feedback was going to inform my next toolkit . Since we already have this project available, theres no sense in starting another one. I’ve asked the coordinator if i could join and contribute to this project. At this time it works for BizUnit 2.x and it should be interesting to see how it will work with BizUnit 3.0 (which is still in beta) where Kevin has changed the object model and made it easier to generate BizUnit test cases (and included a tool to generate BizUnit test cases from Excel).

The second one is Michael Stephenson’s series on Biztalk Testing. Michael has already written up over half a dozen articles starting with this and it looks like a really good resource. Some of my colleagues have been doing some interesting work in the way they have been using BizUnit and i have been planning to write them up so i find these posts to be a spur in that direction. We do need a lot of sharing in the area of Biztalk testing and using BizUnit. Here’s hoping we’ll get some good info on practices out into the community.

Check out those links. Enjoy!!

 

I’m an MVP!

I just got this award a few days ago. Can you imagine? Me ,an MVP in Biztalk !! I was absolutely gobsmacked to receive it and am over the moon now. Its going to take me a while to come down.

Here’s an excerpt from the email

Dear Santosh Benjamin, 

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2008 Microsoft® MVP Award! The MVP Award is our way to say thank you for promoting the spirit of community and improving people’s lives and the industry’s success every day. We appreciate your extraordinary efforts in BizTalk technical communities during the past year.

and here’s a picture of the certificate.

I was informed that it was not only the blog but also the CodePlex projects (BizUnitExtensions and Project Solution Kits) that were noticed. 

I have learned a tremendous amount from the folk who hang out on the newsgroups and tirelessly respond to all sorts of questions and while it will be a long time before i can really be a part of their ranks, this blog and the codeplex stuff have been my attempt at giving back something to the community and so It’s absolutely awesome to get this and i must thank the Biztalk community for all the answers to my newsgroup posts and the feedback to the posts here and at the old DotNetJunkies blog.

I hope i can do justice to this award and provide lots more useful information over the next year and beyond.