Now @ Microsoft

Dear all -

this week is my second week as a Microsoft Employee :)
my title in Microsoft in a really Long one ,, it goes like this

"
Regional Technology Solution Professional
Process Platform Solutions
Middle East and Africa (MEA HQ)
"
i guess it will be challenging to get this on the business card :)

i'm really excited about the new Role, i'll be basically working with the pre-Sales team in Microsoft on Biztalk opportunities in the region, conducing technical Architecture sessions and delivering proof of concept solutions.

cheers : )

Ahmed

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 :)

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

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

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

ESB CTP 3 UddiPublisher Error

i have been playing around with the ESB CTP 3 and i found the following error when trying to run the "PreProcessingCORE.vbs" ,, it started by creating the Virtual directory and then stopped at the step of running the uddipublisher project giving the following exception

"Error Creating UDDI Entries... Class:Microsoft.Practices.ESB.UDDI.UddiClient Method: Void .ctor : Exception: System.ServiceModle.FaultException'1[uddiorg.api_v2.dispositionReport]: "

the error is clearly an authentication error, so after trying several options for a while, i discovered that the error was in the Uddi publisher settings, the user name must be defined as /.

Cheers :)

Biztalk Build or Buy ???

I have been asked a lot, "where is the power of Biztalk?" and that’s comes from experienced Software engineers, they always tend to say "Well, we can do this!!”, and in fact that's true, if you took a bird’s eye view on what Biztalk does, it's primarily two things,, Business Process Management and Messaging Solutions, and this involves basically handling messages from different sources with different formats.

So what about the engineer who said that he can do this, well the answer is simple, Yes, you can do custom code to query a web service and get the response and then transform the message using XSLT and possibly apply some business rules checks. However when you try to deploy this solution in an enterprise, you will start facing some problems that you will have to address.
First, you will need to worry about the online vs. offline support of your application, what if the web service is not available? And you need to re-try the call; you will hence need to develop some sort of service that does this for you. Also, what about the business rules that you have applied; you need to give access to the business users to change them at any time, so you'd probably create a separate business rules store with its own configuration and database.

What about the throughput of the messages, what if the load on the server increased, could your application be load balanced? , you'd then have to create some sort of a load balancing service that is could be distributed on multiple servers...!!

You will find so many "what if" in this application that you will eventually end up building a complete framework just to support your initially small application!!
This framework of tools is what Microsoft calls Biztalk Server!!!

Biztalk Server comes with out-of-the-box support for long-running transactions; Rules engine storage, scalable infrastructure, tracking capabilities and much more; basically all what you need to host an integration/BPM solution.

So if you are targeting enterprise level solutions, I believe the equation turns in the favor of "Buy" not "Build”.