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Saturday, October 27, 2007

Tips : Consuming Orchestrations as WebService

as i promised those who attended my training last Thursday, i'd post the issue that we faced together and the solution we found during consuming Orchestrations exposed as Webservices from infopath.

it started with the event viewer throwing an exception that the "NT Service Account" doesn't have privileges to access the Biztalk Database and we found another entry about the "Isolated Host" user doesn't have privileges to register the SOAP receive port.

well, the solution was simple, basically, when you expose an orchestration as a webservice, the wizard automatically creates the webservice with it's code for you. however, when you try to call this webservice, from a client like InfoPath, the AppPool under which this site runs normally uses the default NT System Service account, all what you need to do is to assign a different identity for that AppPool that has privilege to access the SQL Database.

also you need to do the same for the user running the Isolated Biztalk Host Instance.

That's it :)

Cheers :)

Friday, October 26, 2007

Another Deep Technical Biztalk Training

last Wednesday i have started a deep technical training on Biztalk 2006, the training took place at ITWorx and was attended by more than 25 different software developers from different seniority levels,

we had open discussions all through the two days plus many comprehensive demos, most of the attendees had little or no idea about Biztalk so we started by discussing the feasibility of building enterprise integration software, we went through the possible design alternatives for building such application, everyone started recommending components in such a solution.

the design proposed by the attendees included a messaging component, business rules component, and different "agents" to handle different communication protocols :)

then we started to map the proposed design by everyone to the actual Biztalk Components, realizing that BizTalk Does all this "out-of-the-box" .. i believe this helped the attendees a lot in realizing what exactly BizTalk does. :)

these sessions were video taped , i'll try to do my best to get these videos and post them here.

for those who attended the session, please feel free to drop by and send me your feedback. :) , i hope you have enjoyed it as much as i did.

Cheers :)

Ahmed Farrag

Sunday, October 21, 2007

MEA MVP Open Day (My Last Event as a MVP)

Today was a really nice day at the MEA MVP Open Day in Egypt, i got to deliver a session on BizTalk titled "Real world SOA and Biztalk", in the session i have tried to focus on what it takes to build SOA solutions in the Real World and all the myts and facts and SOA.

also i have touched base about the Biztalk Architecture and how it fits in the SOA world and how you could easily use Biztalk as the core engine of your SOA solution.

unfortunately i have planned to discuss a lot about ESB (Enterprise Service Bus Guidance ) that is published on codeplex ..www.codeplex.com/esb but i didn't have much time left in the session so i focused only on SOA and Biztalk.

I'll upload the PowerPoint presentation tomorrow as i have just forgot the updated version of it on the presentation laptop !!!

This event is very special to me, as it will be the last event for me as a MVP since i'll be joining Microsoft MEA team after 2 weeks, and as you all know, once you are in Microsoft, you can't be a MVP no more, I'll be working as a Regional TSP in the process group, focusing mainly on Biztalk, it's a challenging position and I'm really looking forward to it.

anyhoow, if you have attended the session, i hope you have liked it and feel free to give me your feedback.

cheers :)

Ahmed Farrag

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Biztalk Server 2006 R2 RTM is Ready !!!

The Biztalk Team has Recently released the RTM Version of the very anticipated Biztalk Server R2, the New R2 version is available in evaluation version for registered users, you download the new release from here
The New version contains major enhancements, my favorites are the support for MOSS 2007 adapters, WCF Adapters and the all new RFID Support, I have been playing with the betas for quite a while and i seen the patterns and practices team doing a great job with there ESB guidance that was based on specific build of the R2 Release. i believe with this new release and with the upcoming release version of the ESB guidance, developers will have all what they need to build real SOA solutions, if you need to know more about the ESB Guidance project, you can check it at www.codeplex.com/esb.

Regards,
Ahmed Farrag
MVP Biztalk Server