Charles Young

BizTalk Server 2009 - Rule deployment issue

Charles Young — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:28:40 GMT

There is a small configuration issue with the Microsoft Business Rules Composer in BizTalk Server 2009. This will only affect you if you deploy the rules engine by itself without the rest of BizTalk Server. In a full installation of BizTalk Server, BTS provides a set of BTS-specific Rule Framework components in as assembly called Microsoft.BizTalk.RuleEngineExtensions. This includes a RuleSetDeploymentDriver component that manages deployment of rules via the SQL Server repository.

The BTS-specific RuleSetDeploymentDriver has a dependency on WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation). In a full BTS installation, BTS creates an instance of a CIM class called MSBTS_GroupSetting and populates various property values from the BizTalk management database. This includes the assembly and class name of a RuleSetDeploymentDriver. If you install only the rule processing components, there is no BizTalk management database, and no instance of this class is created. Unfortunately, this means that, whenever you try to deploy a rule set from the Rules Composer, you get a rude message saying:

The database "<server>:<database>" associated with the deployment driver does not match the database ":" specified during product configuration

The message is entirely correct. Microsoft's BTS-specific RuleSetDeploymentDriver component performs this check presumably to ensure that registry settings for the rule repository database name and server name are identical to those configured in the BizTalk management database. This ensures that the Rule Engine Update Service is using the same BTS-specific RuleSetDeploymentDriver component.

When you install only the rule processing components, the registry is unfortunately configured as if a full BizTalk installation had been done. The Rule Composer tries to use the BTS-specific RuleSetDeploymentDriver component to deploy rule sets and fails because no instance of MSBTS_GroupSetting has been created in the CIM store.

Fortunately, this is a simple problem to fix. Microsoft provides a non BTS-specific RuleSetDeploymentDriver component for the rule repository database. All you need to do is change the registry settings to use this instead.

Open the Registry Editor (regedit) and locate the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\BusinessRules\3.0

If you have installed the rule processing components on a 64-bit version of Windows, they key will be at:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\BusinessRules\3.0

You should find the DeploymentDriverAssembly and DeploymentDriverClass values under the key. These should be changed to the following values, respectively:

Microsoft.RuleEngine, Version=3.0.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35
Microsoft.RuleEngine.RuleSetDeploymentDriver

That's it. The Rule Composer should now be able to deploy rule sets.

SQL Server Modelling - November CTP

Charles Young — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:20:43 GMT

Hot on the heels of one CTP (StreamInsight) and timed to coincide with the opening day of the PDC, Microsoft has just released the latest version of the technology formally known as 'Oslo'. SQL Server Modelling, as we must now learn to call it, has several improvements over the previous CTP release last May. Indeed, the previous CTP was characterised by behind-the-scenes code improvements and rewrites rather than new functionality. It is therefore doubly reassuring to see the slew of new features.

I won't spend time going into new functionality here because Kraig Brockschmidt (yes, for all you 'techie's of a certain age'...this is the same Kraig B of 'Inside OLE' fame - every COM developer's bible circa 1995) has just posted an excellent summary at http://blogs.msdn.com/modelcitizen/archive/2009/11/17/announcing-the-sql-server-modeling-n-e-oslo-ctp-for-november-2009.aspx together with links to the download and various materials. In any case, it's getting late here and I need to go to bed. However, things are moving along. I'm looking forward to getting to grips with Quadrant which sounds like it may, at last, be beginning to make some sense. M improvements sound great.

Like others, I was deeply alarmed by Doug Purdy's post (see http://www.douglaspurdy.com/2009/11/10/from-oslo-to-sql-server-modeling/) a week ago, and my initial reaction was similar to many commentators (something along the lines of deep groans, punctuated by loud inarticulate screams). We must hope that the new name and product alignment, which appears at so many levels to indicate an abandonment of the deep platform vision many of us believed 'Oslo' represented, is just a temporary glitch in Microsoft's modelling story. SQL Server may be a platform. Most of us think of it as a product. Windows is the platform, and we want Microsoft to do better at supporting modelling across their entire platform, and not just one, admittedly very powerful, corner of their universe <end of rant>

Microsoft StreamInsight CTP 3 - New Features

Charles Young — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:12:26 GMT

Microsoft has just released the November CTP (CTP 3) of StreamInsight. See http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=01c664e4-1c98-4fc8-93ee-08cc039503c1.

I've encountered some confusion from more than one person about the status of StreamInsight, so let me explain briefly that a CTP is a Community Technology Preview. It's not a beta as such. CTPs are closely aligned with the shorter iterative development cycles of agile methodologies. Many Microsoft product teams use them to provide insight into their progress from a much earlier stage than would be the case for a formal beta programme. So, StreamInsight is a work in progress. It hasn't shipped yet. It isn't necessarily 'code complete'. It doesn't have full documentation. Bits are missing or may not work. Under the terms of the license, you can't use it in production. For some reason, CTPs seem to cause a lot of confusion, even in the Microsoft community, but the clue is mainly in the word 'preview' and partly in the word 'community'.

So what is new? Well, looking at the help file...

Hopping windows. This is an additional temporal window model which was conspicuous by its absence in CTP2. It is, very simply, a contiguous 'batched' window and will be very familiar to users of other CEP products. At any one time the window provides access to the set of events that are alive within that time frame. After a fixed interval the Window is incremented in time to provide access to events in the next fixed period. Because events in StreamInsight are interval-based, an event may appear in more than one time frame. Note that the graphic in the help file appears to be slightly incorrect. Event e1 is unaccountably extended in the first two 'hops'.

Joins. Again, highly conspicuous by its absence in CTP 2, CTP 3 now supports joins in LINQ! The fact that we have only just got this fundamental capability (what could be more central to CEP than the ability to specify joins directly in your query language) shows just how early a view Microsoft gave us in CTP 2 (CTP 1, incidentally, was a private preview released earlier this year to company employees only).

User-Defined Aggregates (UDAs). This feature allows developers to create highly customised aggregation operators for aggregating over windows. Developers create UDAs by deriving from one of two classes depending on the need to access timestamp information and also following a reasonably straightforward pattern involving creation of an annotated extension method that allows the UDA to be accessed directly within LINQ.

User-Defined Operators (UDOs). UDAs map multiple events to a single scalar value. Like UDAs, UDOs take multiple events as input but can return multiple events. They follow a very similar design pattern to UDAs, but return an IEnumerable<T> rather than a single value.

UDAs and UDOs provide a major piece of the CEP jigsaw and greatly extend the power and expressivity offered by LINQ.

Additional Query Improvements. TopK queries now allow lambdas to be used in Take() to project values from ranked events into the payload of each of the selected events. The Group and Apply operators have also been improved.

In CTP 2, .NET methods in expressions included in LINQ were evaluated at query translation time, which wasn't much use. In CTP 3 they are now evaluated at run time.

CTI improvements. In CTP 2, CTIs could only be enqueued in code in an input adapter. CTP 3 provides support for declarative CTI generation by allowing query template bindings to be configured with an 'AdvanceTime' specifier. You can also configure an adapter factory. CTIs are then generated internally by the engine. CTIs are very cool. Declarative CTIs are very, very cool :-)

Management Service API Improvements. A number of improvements have been made to the management service API to support a richer set of views at different levels within the engine.

So, in summary, Microsoft has made significant progress since CTP2, and CTP 3, as we might hope, looks more like a complete engine. Major gaps in functionality have been filled and we can begin to see more clearly what capabilities will be included in the first release. Keep up the good work

C or Java/.NET. Which is fastest? Does anyone know?

Charles Young — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 23:57:51 GMT

The vexed question of language performance came up a couple of times at the ORF conference last month. I've written up my viewpoint on this at http://geekswithblogs.net/cyoung/archive/2009/11/13/136295.aspx. All flames welcome :-)

Comparing Event Stream Processing and Rete

Charles Young — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:49:01 GMT

Alexandre Alves wrote an interesting article on CEP extensions for Logic Programming (see http://adcalves.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/logic-programming-lp-extensions-for-cep/) in which he mentions the use of Rete-based rules engines. I gave a presentation at a conference last week (October Rules Fest 2009) on the differences and similarities between various event stream processing (ESP) approaches and the Rete algorithm. I had a slide that is not very different in intent to Alexandre's post. I also touched on performance issues, which is something he talks about briefly. I don't know of any solid, well thought out, comparative benchmarking between any of the major ESP and CEP-enabled Rete engines, so I can only hazard informed guesses with regard to likely performance issues. I thought it would be useful to summarise some of my thinking in this area.

October Rules Fest 2009: Day 5

Charles Young — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:59:45 GMT

My report on day five (the last day) of the October Rules Fest 2009 is at:

http://geekswithblogs.net/cyoung/archive/2009/10/30/135901.aspx

October Rules Fest 2009: Day 4

Charles Young — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:32:51 GMT

My report on day four of the October Rules Fest 2009 is at:

http://geekswithblogs.net/cyoung/archive/2009/10/30/135855.aspx

October Rules Fest 2009: Day 3

Charles Young — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:07:45 GMT

My report on day three of the October Rules Fest 2009 is at:

http://geekswithblogs.net/cyoung/archive/2009/10/28/135780.aspx

October Rules Fest 2009: Day 2

Charles Young — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:20:22 GMT

I’m at day two of the October Rules Conference at the Adolphus Hotel in downtown Dallas. My report on the day's processings is at:

http://geekswithblogs.net/cyoung/archive/2009/10/27/135756.aspx

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 - Service Pack 1 announced

Charles Young — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 18:36:14 GMT

Microsoft today announced Service Pack 1 for BizTalk Server 2006 R2. Note that this is for the previous version of BizTalk Server, not the current version (BizTalk Server 2009). No doubt a service pack for BTS 2009 will follow in due course.

The service pack is currently at beta. It has only been announced, not released. You can download the beta if you log onto the Connect site.

See http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalkcrt/archive/2009/10/09/announcing-biztalk-2006-r2-sp1.aspx

There are a couple of new features. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee532481(BTS.20).aspx.

For a list of bug fixes, see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974563.

October Rules Fest 2009. See you in Dallas

Charles Young — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:19:15 GMT

I've largely finished my presentation for the October Rules Fest 2009 conference in Dallas at the end of the month. I'm speaking on complex event processing (CEP). My plan is to provide a broad survey of CEP technologies, chiefly concentrating on the similarities and differences between event stream and rules processing. There has been a lot of interest and activity around event processing in the rules community in recent years, and not a little controversy about the best approaches and, indeed, the role, if any, of Rete rules engines in detection of complex events. Constructing the presentation has been something of a journey for me, and hopefully it will prove of interest to those attending the conference.

This is rather last-minute plug for ORF 2009. It is the second year of this 'alternative' rules conference which is differentiated by a clear and unashamed focus on technology (there are other well-established rules conferences which focus on application at the business level), and by a wide-ranging interest in several related areas of science and research. For me, some of last year's highlights included hearing Gary Riley explain how he managed to squeeze so much performance out of the CLIPS engine and listening to Dan Levine's talk on rule-based mechanisms in the human brain. It's that kind of event.

The major rule-processing vendors (ILog (now IBM), FICO, Tibco, etc.,) are well represented at the event together with the JBoss team. Charles Forgy, who came up with the Rete algorithm three decades ago, is a star speaker (a fascinating talk is promised on how to maximise the benefits of parallelisation in rules engines). I'm particularly looking forward to hearing Andrew Waterman's talk on the use of rules processing in game-playing software used to promote sustainability and development of natural resources in Mexico. I've been aware of this project for some time. Greg Barton will be reporting on his experiences at Southwest Airlines. There are interesting sessions on rule modelling and aspects of rule languages and DSLs, plenty on CEP, and various talks on constraint programming, rule verification and other topics. And, to remind us all that technology, for technology's sake, is never a good idea, John Zackman will be there to talk about the role of rules in Enterprise Architecture.

ORF 2009, only in its second year, offers an incredibly varied diet for the rule technologist. Together with the boot camps and introductory sessions at the beginning of the programme, it offers practical hands-on experience, a chance to learn about rules processing in depth, a showcase for the wide-ranging application of rules in many different areas of IT and an insight into many areas of research.

Places are still available, I understand. The cost is kept as low as possible by the conference organisers, so visit http://www.octoberrulesfest.org for more information and book in while you can.

Serialising Microsoft StreamInsight QueryTemplates

Charles Young — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:26:35 GMT

At first sight, StreamInsight doesn’t appear to offer any support for dynamic queries. Once you have got over the initial ‘wow’ factor of creating continuous queries over streams using LINQ, rather than some SQL dialect or specialised DSL, the reality hits you that your query is just code. You wrote the LINQ using C# or VB.NET, and you ended up compiling it into some assembly.

That’s all very well, but it’s not very flexible. How are you going to store and manage your queries in a repository so that you can review, change and version them? Does Microsoft really expect you to recompile and re-deploy assemblies every time you want to create or change a query in StreamInsight? Surely you should be able to dynamically deploy queries straight from a repository.

Have no fear. All is well. The QueryTemplate is serialisable. It isn’t serialisable in the .NET sense (i.e., it isn’t marked up as serilaisable, and it doesn’t implement ISerializable). Rather, it implements the QueryTemplate.Definition property which returns an XML document containing a complete rendering of your template, complete with a full dataflow and all the operators. To deserialise the XML, you use Application.CreateQueryTemplate. You have to pass in an XmlReader that you have created over the XML. You get back a clone of the original QueryTemplate which you can now bind to input and output adapters and emit to the engine as a Query. Nothing could be simpler.

There are a couple of gotchas. First, don’t do what I did while experimenting. I created a QueryTemplate and serialised it to XML. I then tried to deserialise it as a second, identical, QueryTemplate in the same Server instance. I got back an InvalidDefinition error. It seems you can’t have identical QueryTemplates in a single StreamInsight Server instance.

The second thing to note is that the serialised QueryTemplate does not contain fully qualified references to your event types. You still have to define the event types in your application by calling the CreateEventType method. If you plan to store QueryTemplate XML in some custom repository, you will also need to store the fully qualified names of the .NET types your have defined for your events. Of course, you will also need to ensure that these types are available at runtime.

Much the same argument applies to adapters. The QueryTemplate XML does not contain any information on which input and output adapters you want to bind to your query. However, once you realise that your QueryTemplates are serialisable, it is simple to work out how you might store and manage the template in some repository together with event type and adapter information. All this information, taken together, defines the StreamInsight concept of a query. You can write code to extract it from the repository at run-time and run the query.

The current CTP is just a glorified SDK. Will Microsoft provide a repository and tooling in the release version? I have no idea. Given the freedom StreamInsight offers in terms of event definition, and given the fact that the engine can be hosted in custom applications, it is difficult to see how Microsoft could provide a totally generic end-to-end solution that would support externalisation of queries in any and all circumstances. They could provide a repository and API, and leave it to developers to write the code to exploit the repository. However, you would still need to write the LINQ together with code to create QueryTemplates and extract and upload XML to the repository.

A proposed introduction...

Charles Young — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:47:52 GMT

What a pity. I’ve spent some time recently evaluating SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services with respect to its proposed use on a UK public sector project that will implement a part of the 'national infrastructure'. In every respect but one, Reporting Services provides an excellent fit for the stated requirements. There is already a commitment to using SQL Server, and SharePoint, within the project, so Reporting Services appears the way to go.

What is the exception? Well, Reporting Services provides a nice little tool called 'Report Builder' for creation, amongst other things, of ad hoc reports. This is a user-friendly little gizmo that can be downloaded directly from the portal via Microsoft's excellent ClickOnce technology. ClickOnce ensures that the application is installed in a sandboxed fashion under the current user's profile, and does not interfere with other installations for other users.

All good stuff, except that the proposed system needs to provide ad hoc reporting facilities to a number of different agencies across the UK. Oh, and it must be formally accredited by the security people before it can go live. It turns out that there is no prospect that they will agree to installation of any software on client desktops at those agencies. Not even using ClickOnce. It’s out of the question.

SAP offers a similar toolset to Reporting Services, but they have a tool for designing ad hoc reports that is entirely browser-based and has zero footprint on the client.

Mmmm. Time for the Microsoft SQL Server product team to meet Ajax, methinks.

Microsoft StreamInsight and BizTalk Server - Preliminary Thoughts

Charles Young — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 05:15:54 GMT

Richard Seroter talks here about feeding BizTalk events into StreamInsight or receiving events out as BizTalk messages. I spent a little time considering the possibility of using StreamInsight in conjunction with BTS messaging infrastructure by building custom BTS adapters or pipeline components that directly hook into StreamInsight. A preliminary look through the code samples (the best way, currently, of understanding this new engine, given that the CTP documentation is somewhat sparse) suggests to me that this is probably not the way to go. As I understand things, there seems to be an impedance mismatch between BTS messaging and the concept of an event stream. The closest thing BTS offers to an ‘event stream’ is its concept of a batch, used by adapters to submit multiple messages to BTS via the transport proxy as a single transactional interaction. I say ‘closest’, but in reality a BTS batch is quite different to an event stream, and consequently a BTS adapter is not at all similar to a StreamInsight adapter. Event streams may be continuous over extended periods of time, and don’t naturally fit a transactional model.

Of course, in constrained circumstances, it may be possible for the two models to co-exist. The sample TextFile input adapter, for example, reads a single CSV file and converts its contents into a stream of events. A second CSV files would be processed as a separate event stream. In this case, StreamInsight could co-exist nicely with a BTS pipeline that processes each CSV file as a separate message. However, in other scenarios, you would have to ensure that a StreamInsight adapter continues to run over an open-ended number of BTS batch submissions. Worse still, how would you cope with multiple instances of the same Receive Ports running in different host instances? Somehow you would have to share a single event stream between those multiple BTS host instances.

So, I think that as far as BTS is concerned, the obvious places you might use StreamInsight are:

a) outside of BTS, feeding events to a BTS Receive Port

b) from within a BTS orchestration, probably exploiting the convoying and long-running

transaction facilities of the orchestration to handle submission of event messages to

a single event stream.

c) outside of BTS, receiving events emitted by a BTS Send Port.

A special case of a) would be using StreamInsight in conjunction with RFID Server. Remember that RFID Server can be used for more than just RFID devices. c) would, I think, prove to be a rare scenario. b) and c) would both significantly compromise the raw performance of StreamInsight by inserting the relatively high latency BTS message box in front of a StreamInsight input adapter.

Having spent little time yet with the CTP, I reserve the right to make mistakes! Maybe I have not properly grasped the StreamInsight model, but this is how it looks to me at present.

Microsoft StreamInsight CTP2 is available

Charles Young — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 19:30:21 GMT

It was bound to happen. The very day I fly off on vacation is the day that Microsoft posts the first public CTP of StreamInsight. This is CTP2. CTP1 was for private distribution inside Microsoft only, and I couldn't convince or bribe anyone to slip me a copy. So, I just noticed now, and I haven't had a chance to look at it yet. Can't wait, though.

CTP2 can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a3faa562-b6dc-4702-90c6-bf8e08df3b8b&displaylang=en

Microsoft StreamInsight

Charles Young — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:12:48 GMT

SQL Server 2008 R2 August CTP has just been released on MSDN and will be publically available on Wednesday. One little point grabbed my attention. The forthcoming CEP engine, formally known as 'Orinoco' (this codename was never meant to be used outside the company, but nevertheless made its way into the public domain) now has a proper name – ‘StreamInsight’ to be precise.

Microsoft SteamInsight isn’t included in the SQL Server CTP. However, a separate CTP is due to be released in the next few weeks.

BizTalk Server: ESB Toolkit 2.0 Released. UDDI issues fixed?

Charles Young — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:42:33 GMT

Yesterday, Microsoft released the final version of ESB Toolkit 2.0 (the word 'Guidance' has been dropped) which you can download from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=bc86cf1e-ef29-4b19-95f7-388f64555090#tm. I have had half an hour today to look at the documentation. A preliminary read seems to suggest that, between the release of the CTP and the final release, Microsoft scrapped the old UDDI resolver and have introduced a completely new version that complies with the UDDI standards and which addresses the issues raised in a blog article which I published earlier this year. See http://geekswithblogs.net/cyoung/archive/2008/11/12/126975.aspx. However, please be aware that I need time to properly digest the functionality changes, and won't be able to do that for another week or so. I will report back when I have had more time to investigate.

May CTP of 'Oslo' - Initial experiments

Charles Young — Wed, 27 May 2009 21:00:59 GMT

Microsoft yesterday released a new ‘May 2009’ CTP for their 'Oslo' toolset. This can be downloaded from Microsoft's web site at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=827122a5-3ca0-4389-a79e-87af37cbf60d&displaylang=en.

The release is notable for a couple of reasons. First, it provides insight into the move away from the 'three-in-one’ language approach (MGraph, MSchema and MGrammar) towards a single unified, 'M' language. Second, it contains an early version of 'Quadrant' which, to date, has only been visible outside the company as part of limited CTP releases (e.g., the PDC release).

Other highlights include an early version of UML domain models, together with an XMI repository loader. Microsoft is publically committed to providing strong UML and XMI support in 'Oslo' and this is our first glimpse of what they intend. There is also a CLR domain model and a corresponding .NET assembly loader.

The version of 'Quadrant' will raise a few eyebrows. It contains functionality for browsing the repository, inspecting types and listing database sessions. However, those of us who played with earlier versions will be surprised to find that model creation facilities are missing. You can drag items out into workpads onto the canvas as before, and use different views, but there are no tools for creating new models or amending existing models. This does not, however, indicate some reversal of Microsoft's intentions. The Oslo team explain that they simply want to focus on model browsing in this CTP release, and to get feedback on that one aspect of the tooling. Expect to see the ‘missing’ functionality re-emerge in future CTPs.

In a similar fashion, only a limited number of domain models are installed in the repository in this release. In earlier releases we saw a whole lot more stuff that Microsoft is working on. The absence of model domains in this release does not imply in any way that Microsoft has ceased working on those domains. This is a constrained release only.

Update: I just discovered that one new feature of Quadrant is the ability to point it off at any SQL Server database. This represents a further change in emphasis away from the purely respository-centric approach that was originally touted a year and half ago when MS first started talking about their plans. It's very welcome. So much metadata, and so many existing models are currently scattered to the four winds, and allowing Quadrant to explore and expolit those models in a unified fashion is a very good idea. Let's have support for other stores, and not just SQL Server.

My initial experiments with LoadUML suggest that the tool is not yet fully functional. For example, it fell over the use of the xmi:type attribute on the uml:Model element. It failed to handle a type element of an ownedAttribute, and it didn’t recognise the packageImport element. The error messages were not always very helpful and the tool is slow. This is very early preview (‘alpha’) code, so we must make allowances for these sorts of problems. With a little messing around, I managed to successfully import a simple XMI file into the repository.

Update: The Oslo team plans to do a lot more work in this area to ensure that their XMI tooling works well with a spectrum of more widely-used modelling tools. This, apparently, will mean building support for a number of XMI variants.

Initial experiments with LoadAssembly went a little more smoothly. Again, the tool is very slow, and can take several minutes to complete imports. The basic problem is that the tool imports a full closure of all assembly dependencies. This means that every time you import an assembly, you are likely to suck in large amounts of additional metadata for.NET framework assemblies and anything else you are dependent on! Nevertheless, the tool managed to cope with the assemblies I threw at it without any errors.

This early version of Quadrant has big problems with big models. It could, in some cases, take several minutes of 100% CPU usage to display the contents of a folder. Memory usage can also grow to monumental proportions. Do not import assemblies with large numbers of dependencies! Another problem is that the ‘Refresh’ facility in Quadrant doesn’t appear to work properly yet. After re-importing a model, you will need to close the Repository Explorer and re-open it to see the changes. Worse than that, when importing for the first time, I found I generally needed to close and re-open Quadrant itself to see new folders. All in all, don’t expect Quadrant or the new loaders to behave very well. This is very early preview code.

I haven’t yet played with the new version of IntelliPad or M. I’m looking forward to seeing where these technologies have got to.

Biztalk 24x7 - new version goes live

Charles Young — Thu, 21 May 2009 21:55:02 GMT

Saravana Kumar has just re-launched BizTalk 247.com (see http://www.biztalk247.com) with lots of new content and a new layout, look and feel. Look very quickly and you might just spot that awful photo of me on the home page! The one with the bright purple tie and a dark blue shirt. What was I thinking? Oh well, no-one said that being a BizTalk user equated to being cool. And I desperately needed a haircut.

Anyway, congratulations to Saravana. This is a really useful single stop shop for BizTalk resources. Lots of videos (including a couple with me waving my hands around like a manic thing) and links to various widgets, featured books and guides and tons of other stuff. Saravana has also worked hard to ensure that URLs to various resources on the site are short and to the point so that you easily find what you are looking for. Mind you, being a point & click man, myself, I think the site is very easy to navigate anyway.

Microsoft Presentation on CEP and BizTalk

Charles Young — Thu, 21 May 2009 14:23:57 GMT

After publishing the article on CEP on the Microsoft platform a couple of days ago ( see http://geekswithblogs.net/cyoung/archive/2009/05/18/cep_explained_for_biztalk_users.aspx), I was reminded of an excellent presentation given by my good friends John Plummer and Jeff Johnson at the Microsoft Architect Insight conference in 2008. John and Jeff both work for Microsoft in the UK. They used NEsper (the .NET port of the open source Esper event processing engine) to demonstrate how CEP might be used in conjunction with BizTalk technologies. I dug out the slides and reminded myself of their presentation. All very good stuff. the slides are at:

http://download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/msdn/events/SOL/SOL08.pptx

BizTalk server: ESB Toolkit 2.0 due mid-June

Charles Young — Tue, 19 May 2009 02:03:47 GMT

Wow...three posts in one day - a world record for me.

According to Brian Loesgen, ESB Toolkit 2.0 for Biztalk 2009 will be released mid-June.

Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 is here

Charles Young — Mon, 18 May 2009 20:51:37 GMT

Microsoft will, later today, release beta 1 of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 on MSDN. A public release will follow on Wednesday. For further informtion, see http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2009/05/18/visual-studio-2010-and-net-fx-4-beta-1-ships.aspx.

Complex-Event Processing (CEP) Explained for Microsoft BizTalk Users

Charles Young — Mon, 18 May 2009 17:52:13 GMT

Last Monday, Microsoft used the TechEd keynote to announce their plans to include a Complex-Event Processing (CEP) engine in SQL Server 2008 R2. This article attempts to explain CEP from the perspective of a long-time user of BizTalk Server and to address the question as to why BizTalk architects and developers might have a reason to take an interest in the forthcoming CEP engine.

Read on at http://geekswithblogs.net/cyoung/archive/2009/05/18/cep_explained_for_biztalk_users.aspx...

CEP: Microsoft reveals more at TechEd

Charles Young — Wed, 13 May 2009 11:56:01 GMT

Following on from the news about Microsoft's CEP engine, Richard Seroter attended yesterday's TechEd session on the new engine and has blogged very detailed notes. See http://seroter.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/teched-2009-day-2-session-notes-cep-first-look/. I'm delighted to see that Microsoft is disclosing much the same level of information publically that they made available internally a couple of months ago. Now all we need is CTP 1.

Richard notes that the session was sparsely attended. CEP has some way to go before it is widely acknowledged or understood in the mainstream, and the potential impact of engines like this will be poorly understood at present. I intend to put together an article or two in which I'll attempt to explain why I think we should all take note.

I responded to a comment from Tim Bass last night. Tim is a vocal critic of the CEP marketplace, and one of his common themes is the belief that most/all CEP vendors currently attach the term 'CEP' incorrectly to what are 'mere' event stream processing engines. I responded by pointing out the CEDR technology, on which I believe Microsoft's engine in based, directly tackles one of the chief characteristics of the event 'cloud' (a core concept in CEP) which is that events may be detected out-of-order in terms of time and causality, and that CEP engines must be able to handle this efficiently. I was interested to see that Richard recorded an emphasis on this capability of Microsoft’s new engine.

Also, one other point. I had a Twitter message yesterday from another well-known person on the CEP circuit who said that he hadn't seen any sign of anyone using the new Microsoft engine yet. For the avoidance of confusion, Microsoft only announced the engine yesterday. There is a very early private preview of the code doing the rounds internally within Microsoft. It looks like the first public CTP will be available later this year and that launch is expected next year. So no one is yet using the engine, apart from Microsoft themselves (apparently, if I understood comments made during the keynote correctly, they are currently handling 500 million events a day through the engine in association with their web site).

Microsoft announces entry into Complex Event Processing (CEP) market

Charles Young — Tue, 12 May 2009 01:01:53 GMT

NewsFlash...Microsoft today announced their long-awaited entry into the Complex Event Processing market. The press release is at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/May09/05-11TechEd09PR.mspx. The news was also announced by Bill Veghte as part of his keynote at TechEd. The Microsoft CEP offering will be delivered as part of SQL Server 2008 R2

Unfortunately, this is the only information I can find so far in the public domain, and, being a cautious kind of guy, and NDAd up the hilt, I will hold back from saying more until I can guage just how much detail Microsoft is releasing at the current time. It looks like they have a session at TechEd tomorrow on their forthcoming offering. There was talk a few weeks back of an early public CTP, but there is now some suggestion that this may not be available until later in the year. Watch this space for more info.

In the meantime, here are a couple of Microsoft Research links that you might find interesting. I couldn't possibly say how relevant they might be ;-)

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=70517

http://middleware05.objectweb.org/WSProceedings/demos/d1_Barga.pdf