Sergio Del Piccolo's Weblogs: Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference

Day 4 at the conference and there are some bleary eyed attendees. While the conference has been great so far, I think people are tired and ready to go home. Today's presentations were all good in my opinion:

Aaron Skonnard, Cofounder, Pluralsight
Gruia Pitigoi-Aron, Microsoft
BizTalk Web Services: The Next Generation

Aaron pointed out that Service Orientation defines an architectural paradigm for software federation, with federation being the unification of self-governing entities.

SOA is focused on unifying autonomous services, providing architectural governance, reducing dependencies and minimizing assumptions.
SOA tenets help achieve loose coupling.
Benefits of SOA are :

Cost reductions, increased agility
Business & software alignment
Technology freedom
Independent evolution
Longer-term reuse

Web Services provide a way to implement the SO design principles:

XML reduces format complexities
WS-* reduces transport complexities

Web Services is not a silver bullet

Not everything can use XML, SOAP, WS-*
Can't throw away existing investments
Many web service stacks only support HTTP

SOA must plan for disagreement on the following fronts

Transport/application adapters
Message format translators
Message schema transformations

Combining BizTalk Server 2006 with web services provides the complete solution:

BTS fills various messaging integration gaps
BTS embraces we technologies

BTS 2006 R2 ship with WCF adapters

New adapters for each mainstream binding
A WCF-Custom adapter for extensibility
WCF Adapters use cases

Transaction message send/receive
Using WS-* headers for routing/processing
Using custom bindings (binding elements)
Numerous security scenarios
In-proc hosting of non-HTTP endpoints

Gruia then demonstrated using the WCF adapters to enable transactions and showed some security features using BizTalk Server, including single sign-on capability.

Aaron's final point was that BTS 2006 R2 will provide full WS-* support, custom bindings, flexible hosting & communications.

Aaron Skonnard, Cofounder, Pluralsight
Gruia Pitigoi-Aron, Microsoft
BizTalk WCF Adapters: In-Depth

In this session Aaron and Gruia continued showing demos of the new WCF Adapters. There were no slides only the a dive into some real code (I found this refreshing).

The first demonstration showed a client sending a message to BTS through a web service with option to select separate XML versions for the message structure. BizTalk then routed the message to separate versions of the backend application. Version 1 used transport security (which resulted in a smaller message) and version 2 used message security. The BizTalk receive location was a WCF-NetTcp adapter using a custom pipeline to add a custom header to the message header that contains the version (it can also look for differences in actions, namespace, etc). The pipeline promotes the value (needs a property schema), the send port filters on the custom operation and then routes it to the service depending on the version number. It provided a model for versioning using web services.

The second demonstration showed how to build a custom WCF adapter. The binding tab on the adapter allows to pick different binding types (you can install other bindings or even create a custom binding element).

Don Smith, Product Manager, Patterns & Practices, Microsoft
Web Services Software Factory

Don started by speaking about how software factories help you build a specific kind of application (smart client, service, etc). He then went on to speak about the Software Factory that can be downloaded from the Patterns and Practices website. He mentioned that the software factory incorporates a variety of guidance content types and form factors:

Architecture & design guidance, patterns, and how-to's (readable/printable)
Reference implementations (executable) - sample applications
Application blocks (reusable)
Guidance packages (actionable)

Guidance packages provided are:

Open - documentation describes manual and automated tasks, the result of the automation is exposed
Configurable - key configuration settings can be captured within Visual Studios, automated guidance is defined using XML
Extensible - guidance can be tailored to meet specific requirements
Verifiable - generated code can be verified for compliance within a standard

Don demonstrated the Software Factory by setting up a wine rating service for a winery.

The benefits of using the factory are: