All about BizTalk Server, WF, WCF, Cloud Computing

It has been long time from when I am using Virtual PC from Microsoft; I have also tried Virtual Server from Microsoft. 

But there performance were not up to mark when you have guest OS which have heavy software’s like BizTalk, SQL , MOSS which does lot of disk I/O as well as lots of CPU too. With the ageing of these guest VM the performance of these decreases a lot. Both Virtual PC and Virtual Server were enough for me until I needed a “x64 Guest OS”.

I then went for “VM Ware WorkStation”, just for x64 Guest OS. The performance was *OK*.

The present Laptop configuration which I have is

·         DELL Latitude E6400

·         Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T9400 @ 2.54Ghz

·         4 Gb RAM

·         250 Gb Hard disk

·         Windows Vista x64 Enterprise

Virtual PC on top of this configuration allows you to run only 32 – bit guests with ok performance but if you are working on BizTalk, MOSS etc.. You will feel that it should be better. Virtual Server also results in almost the same performance.

With VM Ware WorkStation you will get capability of Hosting x64 Guests, which is one of the important things. Though our team was using VM Ware with 32 –Bit Windows 2008 with VS 2008 SP2, CS 2009, and Azure SDK etc, the performance was better as compared to that of same things running on VPC 2007 and we were satisfied with it.

Lately one of my colleagues pointed me to Virtual Box, it has been only 1-2 days I am using this but I am impressed.

·         You can point to both of you VPC Machines and

·         VM Ware machines

·         Open Source

And it also provides you a Seamless Mode, which allows you to run Guest programs seamlessly with the host OS. See the below image in which I am running Windows 7 as guest on x64 Vista Enterprise. And you can see

·         Task Bar of Vista and Windows 7

·         Calculator of Vista and Windows 7

·         And Media Player of Vista and Windows 7

The performance also seems to be good.  So …go and try Virtual Box.

The thing which are left is try these

1. Windows Server 2008 with Hyper – V.
2. Windows Virtual PC

If you are planning to use Expression Encoder to encode your videos and audios, now you can all do this using OM of Expression Encoder.

There are three options available

1.       Use Existing Audio and Video profile like VideoProfiles.HardwareDeviceH264Small and AudioProfiles.WmaForZune

2.       If you want to use some custom profiles you can save the profiles and then use them

3.       The Last is when you use presets, which allows you to have the max control on the out put videos/audios..

I have divided this article into three parts and that will make you understand some of the gotcha with Windows Azure.

1.       Windows Azure and Live Mesh

2.       Windows Azure and .NET Services

3.       Windows Azure and WCF Services

Windows Azure and Live Mesh

If you are planning to have Live Mesh integrated with you Windows Azure applications in that case you just can’t use the Live Mesh assemblies like

·         Microsoft.LiveFX.Client

·         Microsoft.LiveFX.ResourceModel

etc..etc..

As these assemblies cannot be used from your Windows Azure code guess why? The reason being these assemblies are still not APTCA signed. And you will get a security Exception if you do this.

So if you want to do functionalities from your Windows Azure Application like Connecting to Live Mesh, Creating folders, files, deleting files and folders you just can’t use these assemblies directly.

The beauty of Live Mesh is that it supports pure REST based calls; in that case you can use all the functionality of Live Mesh from Windows Azure using “System.Net.Http.HttpWebRequest” only.

For this I highly recommend Fiddler2. http://www.fiddlertool.com/fiddler/ which will definitely help do create you HttpRequest objects.

Windows Azure and .NET Services

If you are planning to integrate .NET Services from your Windows Azure code, you will face the same problem as you faced when you tried using the Live Mesh assemblies, i.e. you just can’t use assemblies like

·         Microsoft.ServiceBus

·         Microsoft.Workflow.Activities

etc..etc..

The reason being same these assemblies are still not APTCA signed.

What if you want to call Service Bus Services from Windows Azure code?

The only option is, when you host you Service Bus services use bindings like “Microsoft.ServiceBus.WebHttpRelayBinding”

Now in this case if you want to call this service from your Windows Azure code you do not need to have  “Microsoft.ServiceBus” assembly referenced. You can call this service using plan…vanilla…our old and simple “System.Net.Http.HttpWebRequest”

What if you want to call Workflow Service from Windows Azure code?

If you want to use Workflow service from an Application you have to do a sequence of steps like

1.       Create an instance of Workflow

2.       Start the workflow instance

3.       Now you can call this instance

The first two steps of above are not possible directly when you try to do this from your windows Azure code because in that case you need to have “Microsoft.Workflow.Activities” assembly referenced, and you can’t use this assembly from your Windows Azure code.

The last step of the above i.e. Call a cloud workflow instance. You can do this using “System.Net.Http.HttpWebRequest” from your windows Azure code.

Windows Azure and WCF Services

If you want to call and host WCF services in your Windows Azure application you can only use the Partial Trust profile of WCF.

At last if you are planning to develop you Windows Azure application you should know some of the above gotcha, as this will help you to know what is and what’s not possible from Windows Azure Applications.

BizTalk Server 2009 beta is now available on Microsoft connect

BizTalk Server 2009 brings you some new functionality like

·         Support for

o   Windows 2008 Server

o   Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V

o   Visual studio 2008 SP1

o   .NET Framework 3.5 SP1

o   SQL Server 2008

·         Also BizTalk 2009 now comes with a new UDDI services which is based on UDDI 3.0 standards

·         BizTalk RFID Mobile is also available

There are some other enhancements too…

I installed BizTalk Server 2009 on Windows Server 2008 with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and SQL Server 2008, and the setup was pretty smooth.

ESB Guidance CTP 2.0 is also out..