Google


Monday, May 29, 2006

My Orchestration is up and running

Hello,

Recall from a previous post that I started developing a new orchestration. The orchestration performs a complex financial transaction against the banking system Equation hosted on an IBM AS/400. So, to update you, the orchestration is up and running !

Lessons learned:

1- As your ocrhestration starts to get bigger and more complex, use the expression shape to log the steps (major) performed, into some log file,windows application log,
windows custom log.

2- Use HAT (Health and Activity Tracking) to debug your orchestration (provides capabilities to simulate the actual steps performed by the orchestration after the orchestration has completed) which is awesome. Also, use HAT to view the messages received, built, and exchanged during an orchestration. Finally, use HAT to debug and track any other components comprising an orchestration (ex. pipelines)

3- Name and initialize orchestration variables properly (ex. Hungarian notation)
4- Add exception handling blocks to scopes defined in the orchestration
5- Dont forget the 3 steps to set an orchestration active (Bind-enlist-start)
6- Dont forget to restart the BizTalk host after undeploying - deploying an orchestration

HAT shows that my orch. was completed successfuly



Cheers,
Yousef

Monday, May 22, 2006

BTS Technical Articles of Note

Hola

A list of good technical articles for BTS 2004, enjoy!

Developing integration solutions with BTS 2004


BTS 2004: A Messaging Engine Overview


BTS 2004 and Web Services


Using XML Schemas in BTS 2004


Transactions Across BTS 2004

Cheers,
Yousef

Thursday, May 18, 2006

Well oraganized, clean, and neat orchestration

Your ocrhestration is getting fatty as mine ? then you should:

1- Think throughly before starting to author your orchestration; so you avoid making massive changes to it aferward. (Its difficult to make changes to a cluttered messy one). An organized orchestration will make it easier to modify or change.

2- Use Group shapes to visually organize the pieces of the orchestration into units (same as the notion of #region in C#). (you can collapse and expand Groups); so you keep an eye on the big picture of the orchestration.

3- If you're comfortable with MS Visio like me, download the Orchestration Designer for Business Analysts. You can use this ODBA to sketch your diagrams before doing them on VS .NET. (Later on you can import your sketches from ODBA into VS.NET)

This is for now,
Have a good BizTalk Development,

YousefO

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

New OrchX

Hello,

I've just started composing a new orchestration for the project (Symphony) :D. It's a bit complex one that requires concentration !
In this one, I will be using every type of shape available in the orchestration designer Tool Box (Sounds cool, ha ?) Like (Scope, Group, Compensation Block, Throw Exception, Expressions, and more) WISH ME LUCK...

*Thought you would like take a glimpse at my new baby Orchy, here you go




Talk to you later,
Adios

Thursday, May 11, 2006

BTS, HIS, and MOM

¡Hola!

At Estarta Solutions, I work with 3 products from Microsoft. Again, It feels good!



And before I go, to let you know, a couple of days ago, I developed my first orchestration (a graphical depiction of an automated process, created using the orchestration designer in BTS) .. Muy Bien ! :)

Here you go, a snapshot of the orchestration (The orchestration I created is a component of the Symphony project - EAI, BPA for the Arab Bank, by us Estarta Solutions)



Ba bye,
Yousef

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

BizTalk para @ Wikipedia by me

I wrote at wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BizTalk)

Why Microsoft BizTalk Server?


Microsoft BizTalk Server is a server software that aims to achieve the business objectives of


  • Seamlessly connecting desperate legacy systems with heterogenous back-end data stores

  • Cutting costs and saving time of corporate operations by automating complex business processes

  • Supporting the notion of "Don't reinvent the wheel" for software development, by providing a graphical user interface to create business processes (called Orchestrations in BizTalk) instead of writing code.

  • Promoting for the SOA paradigm, through the effective and efficient use of web services and WS-* specifications

  • Align the corporate IT with the business objectives of the organization, through a greater involvement of business people with IT operations. Achieved in BizTalk using BAM (Business Activity Monitoring), BAS (Business Activity Services), and HWS (Human Workflow Services)