Jesus Rodriguez's WebLog

The upcoming BizTalk Server R2 extends heavily the messaging capabilities of BizTalk Server.  Together with the rich messaging engine the WCF adapters and the WCF Line of Business Adapters SDK opens a whole new set of possibilities for developers. However, there is still some overlapping between the messaging features of BizTalk and WCF that developers must understand in order to apply the correct technology to a particular scenario. One of the most interesting scenarios with these characteristics is the interaction with MSMQ for achieving asynchronous and persistent messaging. Since the 2004 release BizTalk Server includes a MSMQ adapter for addressing this type of interaction. Now, with the WCF adapters included in R2 it is possible to use the WCF-NetMsmq and the WCF-Custom adapters for achieving similar scenarios. The question then becomes when to use one option versus the other.

Last August I was invited, with a few other Architects, to a .NET 3.5 Design Review hosted by the Connected Systems Division. That was the first time I saw the prototype of some “services” that the Connected Systems Division is working as part of a Software as a Service initiative. Today, the first CTP of “BizTalk Services” was officially released with two services “BizTalk Identity Service” and “BizTalk Connectivity Service”. Future releases plan to include the “BizTalk ServiceBus Services” and “BizTalk Workflow Services”

One of the major challenges in Real World SOA enterprise applications is the lack of semantic information associated with Service Contracts. For a while now the W3C folks have been working in different efforts for relating semantic web Standards (RDF, SPARK, etc) with Web Service basic standards (SOAP, WSDL, etc). One of those efforts Semantic annotations for WSDL and XML Schema has been announced as a W3C working draft.

My friend John Evdemon has been writing about the different components of a SOA Reference model. Check the first two posts here and here. Both articles emphasize in the idea of a SOA model based on capabilities that can evolve independently throughout the system lifetime.

A few weeks ago, in an SOA forum, someone inquired about which technologies to use to achieve untyped interactions with Web Services. Untyped interactions are interactions in which the Service Contract (WSDL, Policies, etc) is not available at design time. This is a classic Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) scenario in which multiple and generic interactions with Web Services are needed and in which generating specific proxies per Web Services is not a practical solution. Going back to my conversation, my response to the question was that the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) channel model in .NET and the Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF) in J2EE are technologies that can address those types of scenarios. Surprisingly, when somebody else asked me about .NET-J2EE interoperability references for those technologies, mainly WSIF, I could not find a good example for them to reference.

Last January 31th my good friends Javier and Carmen Mariscal were blessed with the birth of their second son, Daniel Mariscal. After two months, the baby got his first exposure to the Microsoft world.

BEA WebLogic 10 has been released. I am particularly impressed with the enhancements to the Web Services stack which includes:

Some good news in a middle of a crazy weekend for me.