Microsoft Business Rules Framework
The Microsoft Business Rules Framework provides a foundation for enterprise-level management of business rules. Components, such as rule engines, repositories, translators and publishers plug into this extensible framework. Microsoft provides an efficient inferencine engine and a basic SQL Server rule repository, together with a Rule Composer tool for defining and storing rules within the repository.
This is the third and final part of a three-part series, as follows: · Part 1: Situating the Business Rules Engine · Part 2: Backward Chaining: the 'Simple Name' pattern · Part 3: Backward Chaining: the ‘Bound Variable' pattern In Part 2 we looked at how developers can use procedural attachments and 'directive events' to implement a simple form of backward chaining for Microsoft's Business Rule Engine. The article links to the following URL where you can download a worked example: http://blog.solidsoft.com/f...
This is the second of a three-part series, as follows: Part 1: Situating the Business Rules Engine Part 2: Backward Chaining: the 'Simple Name' pattern Part 3: Backward Chaining: the ‘Bound Variable' pattern In part one of this three-part series, I explained some of the historical influences that led Microsoft to design their Business Rules Engine as a 'situated reasoning engine'. This aspect of the engine is centred on the following features: The abstract definition of rules in a high-level rule...
This is the first of a three-part series, as follows: Part 1: Situating the Business Rules Engine Part 2: Backward Chaining: the 'Simple Name' pattern Part 3: Backward Chaining: the ‘Bound Variable' pattern Karl posted on forward and backward chaining at http://karlreinsch.com/2010... I emailed him privately and talked a bit about how backward chaining can be implemented on Microsoft's Business Rule Engine (I even sent him a little example). A couple of days later he published a...
My colleague, the ‘Arch Hacker’, forwarded an email to me this evening from Kenton Price. Kenton had noticed some peculiar behaviour using the Microsoft Business Rules Engine. Here are the pertinent extracts from Kenton’s report: “It appears that if you assert a fact in a rule, it hangs around for subsequent instantiations of the rule engine, behaving like a long-term fact.... I solved it by retracting each asserted fact on every exit path (I had a jump-out-early that halts and stops all other rules,...
A few days ago, Daniel Selman of ILOG (now owned by IBM) published a solution to the Einstein puzzle. See http://blogs.ilog.com/brms/... He did this in response to a challenge from James Owen who is one of the organisers of the October Rules Fest conference. James invited the various vendors who have involvement in the conference to provide a solution using whatever approach they deemed best. See http://orf2009.blogspot.com... The Einstein...
Being known for my interest in rules processing, I quite often get asked to help with problems with MS BRE. A couple of days ago, I was asked to help investigate an issue occurring in production for a BizTalk Server application. Occasionally, in a fairly high throughput system, BizTalk logs an error stating that a problem has been encountered while executing a rule set. That is the only information provided, with no hint of what the problem might be, and because the issue only occurs inter
A question came up tonight on BizTalkGurus on my favourite subject of rule engines. I don’t blog enough these days, so this gives me an excuse. Essentially, the question concerned an incorrect, but understandable, belief that MS BRE may be using remoting to execute rule sets out-of-process. This is not the case. Here is an explanation of how it all works.
I’ve been asked a few times how the performance of WF (Windows Workflow Foundation) Rules compares with that of the Microsoft Business Rules Engine (MS BRE). Having done no testing, I could only guess at the answer. I’ve now undertaken some initial performance testing to compare WF and MS BRE, and decided to publish the results.
I got an email today requesting help in deciding the appropriate selection of rule processing technology for a workflow application. I’ve got requests like this before, so I’ve decided to post a reply publically.
For almost two years now, I've been intending to write an article about the mysterious 'side effects' flag used in Microsoft Business Rule Engine policies. Microsoft documents this feature (see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/... and describes very briefly how to control it. The mystery that surrounds this flag arises because it is represented by an attribute named 'sideeffects' in Microsoft's BRL (Business Rule Language) although it actually controls a caching mechanism, and...
Full Microsoft Business Rules Framework Archive