Is Biztalk Dublin is Dublin Biztalk?

Juan Suero — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:55:10 GMT

Someone out in the ether asked a question that I have heard many times and i just shake my head.

With "Dublin" on the horizon as the future distributed application server role for Windows, does it make sense for Microsoft to call this new role "Windows BizTalk Services"?

my answer is ...

I don't think they want to do that.
Biztalk and Dublin are different products.
Biztalk is an application integration messaging server.
Dublin is an application server.
Biztalk integrates applications. Dublin runs applications.

Someone develops a line of business application or server for example like a CRM system.
They expose functionality to itself and to the outside world by installing bits in Dublin.

If you want to integrate your CRM system with some other system.
like an ordering application that takes thousands of orders from the internet.
you don't necessarily want your endpoints exposed to such high traffic.
You can drop those messages in Biztalk and it will queue them up for you
letting your downstream app "catch up"

Biztalk is all about receiving messages and queuing them quickly
with the ability to possibly transform those messages into a structure that you can handle uniformly.
A set of canonical types of just all XML.

In application architecture they have the n-tiered design.
They separate these things for logical and physical strategies.
In one of the tiers you might do ADO.NET in another you might do ASP.NET
Both of these things do similar things if you think about it.
They take some data from the user and processes it and spits back a response.
Both use similar patterns of OO, the .NET framework etc. etc.
But they are very different animals too.
even though you can manipulate both with visual studio.

The analogy is the same in Dublin vs. Biztalk.
Even though they have similar tools and provide similar patterns and abstractions they are different.. very different tools
for different strategies.
Yes they both exist in the applications integrations space but I think Dublin exists more on the application end. To host endpoints and their application protocols and whatnot.

If im an ISV selling an enterprise application that you can plug into your SOA
its gonna need to be able to host its workflows and endpoints in a technology like dublin.

and if im a high transaction company im going to need something like Biztalk to manage interactions between all those applications.

The ISV is not going to require that I install bits into my biztalk server.
What if some companies dont have Biztalk server but something else.

Biztalk is also a very mature and complete kindof appliance.

They are totally different.

Dont be fooled by the similar looking tools and workflow and similar looking management tools.
These actually might be standard things you SHOULD have in any system that takes and input and spits out an output.

what do you think?

What a WF4.0 Workflow looks like in code

Juan Suero — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 14:44:10 GMT

This code contains a sequential workflow running in a console application.

There is a sequence and inside the sequence a QueryActions and ForeachLoop.

The QueryActions Activity is a custom activity that you can create through Visual Studio add >> new >> .... etc... it gives you a design surface where you can drop standard out of the box activities. In this case the QueryActions activity has inside of it a standard toolbox DBQuery activity which lets you point and click your way to a database select. The QueryActions activity also takes some parameters it can supply to its DBQuery Acitivity.... Actions and DBConnectionContext. The QueryActions activity outputs a List<Action>. which is a generic list of Actions. Actions is a Class manually created with XAML.

Inside the QueryActions activity the DBQuery fills the List<Action>. The List<Action> is then returned to the top level sequence activity and then the FOREACH activity is running iterating of the List<Action>.

Inside the BODY of the FOREACH you can see other Activities being executed. Namely CopyFile and DeleteAction activities. The CopyFile Activity is another custom activity around a powershell commandlet activity that comes out of the box with WF4.0 The DeleteAction activity is a custom activity around DBQuery again. This time executing a delete of records.

The whole workflow does is take a list of file locations from the database, copies files from one location to another then deletes the records in the database.

C#
namespace CustomActivities
{
    using System;
    using System.Linq;
    using System.Threading;
    using System.WorkflowModel;
    using System.WorkflowModel.Activities;
    using System.Collections.Generic;

    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            AutoResetEvent syncEvent = new AutoResetEvent(false);

            Variable<DbConnectionContext> context = new Variable<DbConnectionContext> { Default = new DbConnectionContext("System.Data.SqlClient", "Data Source=localhost;Integrated Security=SSPI;Initial Catalog=HOL_Lab2") };
            Variable<IList<Action>> actions = new Variable<IList<Action>> { Default = new List<Action>() };
            Variable<Action> action = new Variable<Action>();

            var sequence = new Sequence
            {
                Variables = { context, actions },
                Activities =
                {
                    new QueryActions { Actions = actions, ConnectionContext = context },
                    new ForEach<Action>
                    {
                        Values = actions,
                        Body = new ActivityAction<Action>
                        {
                            Argument = action,
                            Handler = new Sequence
                            {
                                Activities =
                                {
                                    new CopyFile { Source = new InArgument <string>(e=>action.Get(e).SourceFile), Destination = new InArgument <string>(e=>action.Get(e).DestinationFile) },
                                    new DeleteAction { ConnectionContext = context, ActionId = new InArgument<int>(e=>action.Get(e).ActionId) }
                                }
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }
            };

            WorkflowInstance myInstance = WorkflowInstance.Create(sequence);
            myInstance.Completed += delegate(object sender, WorkflowCompletedEventArgs e) { syncEvent.Set(); };
            myInstance.Aborted += delegate(object sender, WorkflowAbortedEventArgs e) { Console.WriteLine(e.Reason); syncEvent.Set(); };
            myInstance.Resume();

syncEvent.WaitOne();

}
}
}
Note: The program above creates a workflow containing a sequence. The sequence will execute firs the QueryActions activity that returns a list of actions. Foreach action the workflow will execute the CopyFile and DeleteAction activities.