BizTalk Neophyte

-
Recently, I got the opportunity to start learning BizTalk: first BizTalk 2010 and, more recently, BizTalk 2013. It has been quite an experience. All the things I sorta took for granted (WCF, SOAP message formats, etc.) are now proving to be little nuggets (with deep threads!) of knowledge that, until now, I haven't needed to know. 
BizTalk is Microsoft's answer for an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). It can be used as a mediator/broker between multiple systems in a company infrastructure. It relies heavily on the pub/sub design pattern and uses the concept of messaging almost exclusively. 
BizTalk is designed to be extremely flexible. Which is good. And bad. Good in that it can most likely fill any gap that you may have in your company, but bad in that specificity is difficult to define: there are so many options!
We're also in the process of establishing a new approach to the software systems we are responsible for. Along with that, we're implementing the notion of process-traceability, but we don't really want BizTalk to be aware of that data - we just want it to go along for the ride. More to come...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using Bogus to create Hierarchical Data Structures

-
I was recently asked to create an API for retrieving multitenant data. The actual implementation requires a LOT more work than I have time to complete, so I thought I would create an API with some faked data. Now, at first, I was tempted to grab some data from one tenant and serialize it into a fake service that essentially hijacks the process, returning pseudo-random data. THEN I remembered working with a class library called Bogus . This is a cool library that "generates" random data of all sorts using a fluent interface. You configure the rules using lambdas and then call methods to generate the classes. This is very straight forward for simple POCOs and works great. However, I was trying to create an object graph, essentially, with hierarchical data. Objects at the second layer need to have a valid reference to objects at the first layer. Third to second, fourth to third. That way, you can query down the chain or get objects at the next-level-lower that have references to...
Read more

Adventures in Getting a Site Hosted

-
A couple years, I decided that was the year I was going to finally get a website setup. Fast forward to a couple days ago and that's how long it took me to begin executing on that plan. I tend to be afflicted with Paralysis By Analysis when it comes to something that I don't know how to start. Rather than just try, I think of all the ways it could fail. I know this about me and I also know that it's debilitating. Sometimes the debilitation wins. Sometimes I roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty and break shit. The latter is almost always more rewarding than the former, yet the internal struggle remains.  But enough with the meta-crap, this post is meant to explain my approach to getting my domain name hosted with something. I've had this Blogger account for several years. It's free. It's easy. It's a little too easy to ignore, so I'm thinking I may resurrect it a little bit and start writing about my goings on as a mechanism for growth and learnin...
Read more

Design Patterns: An Introduction

-
I'm refreshing my memory about software design patterns by watching some videos and taking some notes. I thought I would document them here for future posterity. These are the design patterns as defined by the Gang Of Four (GoF) in their seminal book "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" and can be found on Amazon (non-affiliated link) . Some of the things I'll be posting will be related to the various categories of design patterns (as defined by the GoF): Creational, Structural and Behavioral. They are broken down like so: Creational Abstract Factory Builder Factory Method Prototype Singleton Structural Adapter Bridge Composite Decorator Facade Flyweight Proxy Behavioral Chain of Responsibility Command Interpreter Iterator Mediator Memento Observer State Strategy Template Method Visitor I will try to break each of these patterns into sections: Intent, Structure, Example. For those following along, I'll have the code for these examples ...
Read more