It's been a long time since my last post. I have been very busy with my current project, but I come back with the intention of write every week, at least! This will be my purpose for this year (it could be late to this purpose?!).

Well, my intention now is to be a referent about BizTalk... this product is emerging and every day is most present at the enterprise development. BizTalk is a very, very complex and wide product, and it's really engaged with Visual Studio 2005 development, I hope that my knowledge in this field of development will help the people involved in projects with these technologies.

To start with my new "blog-target", the next 8th of February I will have the pleasure of present all the new features in BizTalk 2006 to the spanish staff. The presentation is through WebCast technology at Microsoft Web ;-): http://www.microsoft.com/spain/technet/jornadas/webcasts/060208_info.mspx

Regards

I don't know why but today didn't look as interesting as yesterday... well any way I have discovered few cool things around BizTalk 2006 that will be loved by everyone who develops with.

The day stars with some philosophy, a presentation about workflow concepts, Roger Sessions (note the surname, it could be a joke? :-) explain us the main lines about what workflow is and how we need meet the principal business requirements in an agile way to reach the success developing applications for business. Roger starts showing the mayor requirements for the enterprise to improve the benefits: agility in the processes, alignment between IT staff and business staff and compliance with the actual law (i.e.: to avoid forbidden actions with the accounting). After that, we have reviewed the different workflows that actually occurs in the enterprise processes to finally explore witch are the requirements that any "workflow platform" must carry out to allow the implementation of the business processes matching the business process requirements. These are the basics of any workflow platform:

• Web Services native support: this provides agility to develop applications thats relies in SOA.
• Xml Enabled Database: it make sense that if we use web services intensively, and the WS interchanges XML messages, if we have a store with XML support then we are managing the interchanged messages with agility.
• Workflow framework: to support design and develop any kind of enterprise workflow, allowing process to interact process, people and services between them. Having this as an SO extension (framework) there are less things thats relies on the IT staff to manage. What we request to this framework is agility: quickly development, updatable processes, evolutionary; alignment: the same view for IT staff and for business staff ; compliance: auditable, robust and secure...
• WS Orchestration engine: to provide agility to make the web services collaborate and with features as scalability and support to communicate with legacy systems.
• Tools: to help everybody to use the platform.

  This platform make possible develop solutions which improve the business process successfully and, therefore, make more money to the companies (after all, we are talking about business).

Then, I had the opportunity to see the mayor improvements in BizTalk 2006 orchestration and messaging. Features like support to manage binary messages, multipart messages creation ad-hoc, the new flat file schema wizard (great!), adapters enhancements, runtime pipeline configuration and recoverable interchange messages processing.
One of the coolest things is the "Application Concept" that allow present all related artifacts (ports, orchestrations, pipelines...) as a unit. You can start / stop an application from the management console and all underlying artifacts are checked and requested to starts or stops.

Well, it's enough for me today... tomorrow more!

Business Process Integration And Workflow Conference Day 1...

Today it's been very hard day... my jet lag still making me wake up two hours before the alarm sounds :-).

The general sensation about the sessions is that we are evolving to a more simplistic way to connect systems and people. David Chappell session has been very interesting, he has explained the main concepts about Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) and how either will be the base to develop future business process which will be interconnected. In this session has been clear that BizTalk 2006 has its own place in the business process development and that it cannot be confused with WWF because of WWF will be the base to develop workflows but BizTalk 2006 is the tool to make Business Process Integration (BPI) when EAI is required. In this way, the future versions of BizTalk will use WWF and WCF as core technologies to implement the BPI!

Today I have seen the new version of the administration console of BizTalk 2006 too. It has been improved to be "deeply useful", unifying all administration tools in one as well as improved message look-up and manage is provided.

To finalize, Eric Swift has been speaking about the new application model: Connected Systems. Keep this concept in mind because of it will became as popular as EAI was, and as BPI is now... the core of Connected Systems concept is that relay on SOA, is Process-Centric, Model-Driven, bla, bla, bla... any way, for me it sounds as another "marketing concept"... who knows, maybe it will resolve the application development problems witch we address today.

See you all, tomorrow more!