Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference - Day 2

Time	Session
7:30am-8:30am	Breakfast
8:30am-9:30am	BizTalk Adapters for WCF: Deep Dive
10:00am-11:00am	Service Lifecycle Management: Addressing the Challenges of the Provider/Consumer Relationship
11:00am-11:30am	Lunch
11:30am-12:30pm	Best Practices for Service Oriented Architecture
1:00pm-2:00pm	Service Virtualization with .NET and BizTalk Server
2:30pm-3:30pm	How Everyone Should Test Their BizTalk Server Based Solutions
4:00pm-5:00pm	Building a Service Monitoring Infrastructure with BizTalk Business Activity Monitoring

 

Skonnard on WCF BizTalk Adapters was great!  Really communicated the flexibility of WCF, including performance gains over older WSE.

Managed Service Endpoint was discussed in both the SLM and Virtualization talks.  MSE appears to allow providers to protect consumers from service change through the use of endpoint resolution and XSLT to transform message requests to newer formats. 

Best Practices for Service Oriented Architecture was a good review of the Microsoft Enterprise Service Bus.  New code drop is on the way, don't bother with current code on Codeplex.

Darren Jaffords talk on BizTalk testing reinforces that functional testing is feasible, but it would really - really - be great it if it was more of a first class citizen in the IDE.  He also mentioned using the visual studio profiler OFF the desktop and on the server - didn't know you could do that.  Evidently can also do that with the code coverage. Will need to definitely check that out for all of our C# code running in our BizTalk projects. 

BAM as a tool for monitoring service operations kinda helps put BAM potentially back in the picture - I got a t-shirt for explaining why we aren't using BAM and a lot of feedback on how it could give better insight into our inflight service instances, as well as services outside of BizTalk.  Our 3PL tier could really benefit from something like this but will take a little thought to identify what we want to capture.  Jon openly stated that he would not use DTA for tracking, and would build a tracking infrastructure around BAM.