BPM and SOA conference - Day 4

Day 4

I opted to attend Jon's sessions as he always has this high energy when he speaks .
So true to that I picked two of jon's session
Developing Applications for the Web 2.0 and
Generating Orchestrations Using a Visual Studio Wizard.
The Orchestraion Wizard session was a complete dive in hands on on the tool . I was reallly blown away with the tool . This basically lets you templatize your solution , I tell you if you want to invest in 3 hours learning a feature this is one that you will absoultely not regret . Downlad the Wizad at Jon's Blog . The documentation is still in latest office . I send a feedback to Jon so hopefully they wil put an earlier office based documentation.



During Lunch I hanged out with Kevin(See Pic) whose team in corning I worked for pretty much the whole of last year going over the conference days so far . On day 4 there is only so much more presentaions you can take. I ended up going to " BizTalk WCF Adapters In-Depth " by Aaron Skonnard, Pluralsight and Gruia Pitigoi-Aron, Microsoft . This was a good session as it was not too many slide kind of session . I like those on Day 4 . The last one I picked was
"Part 6: The Future of the Microsoft Application Server Platform"
Steve Swartz & Clemens Vasters Microsoft . What I niceabout the session was it gves you a good understanding on what you can expect and what is going to come and the
road ahead like the transacted file systems , the transacted registry and even a transaction command from the command line " I must add Steve and Clemens have a great energy and they make a good team . I hae gone to many presentations where there are multple speakers but they never felt unfied . But these folks session are an absolute pleasure to attend and listen to ..


I spoke with Marjan our Biztalk MVP Community Lead on how the coference was a great value for everyone . I went to meet some of my friends and left seattle the next day morning and reached here withhout any major incidents en-route.



All in all it was a great conference and time well spend

BPM and SOA conference - Day 3

Day 3

I missed the first session, most part of it amyway Windows Workflow Foundation: Creating Custom Activities for Workflows , Remember the movie and the relaxing yesterday .Anyway I had downloaded all the labs that day which has a Custom Activty lab . i then took the Driving Business Process Automation through Vertical Accelerators Brennan O’Reilly & Mark Smith . The had some intersting case studies . Interesting I met Brennan through one of my old friends Vishnu . So that was a definite higlight .

The next session I picked was "Effective Techniques for Handling Large Messages in Service Oriented Solutions " Thomas Abraham. This was an intersting session and one thing that I picked up was how BTS2006 pages your maps for translation on to disk after a certain threshhold and how you can control that threshhold. .
The next session was BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Adapter Framework - Walkthrough
Chandramouli Venkatesh Microsoft , This was no kidding the most Packed session of the conference in my opinion . I was sitting on the floor as there were no seats available . So that kind of gives you a general idea. CV's session was a blast !!. he demoed a WCF based SAP adapter . This is one of my High value session in mt eval . Hey You now owe me that drink !

Well the best part about thursday was getting to go for Dinner with the Product Team . This had a pretty good crowd.

Oliver Sharp: General Manager – BizTalk Server
Steve Swartz: Architect – WCF
Patric McElroy: Product Unit Manager – BizTalk Messaging & Process Server
Dan Eshner: Product Unit Manager – BizTalk Executive & Analytics
Kris Horrocks: Sr Technical Product Manager – BizTalk Product Marketing
Peter Wise: Group Program Manager – BizTalk Customer Projects & Services
Kartik Paramasivam: Dev Lead - BizTalk Messaging & Process Server
Lee Graber: Dev Lead – BizTalk Messaging & Process Server
Andrew Layman: Product Unit Manager – BizTalk Interoperability
John Wyss: Group Manager - BizTalk Customer Projects & Services
Jean-Emile Elien: Architect - BizTalk Messaging & Process Server
Chandramouli Venkatesh - Adapters


THe conversation was spontaneous and I rememeber some of the jokes that I had on my cold . Well if you dont know Ravan is a an evil king in Hindu Mythology who has 10 heads. I was thinking what if Ravan catches cold !. It is pretty funny when you think about . And since Ravan has 10 heads one head of that being on the nect , it has 4 on one side and 5 on the other that creates an equilibirium problem to an otherwise symmetirical human structure . And like in SQL it is possible to have a split brain for an issue if you have 5 heads voting for and against. And another one I thought is Ravan does not need to do a seperate brain storning session . He is always in one . And finally if one head sneezes does the other heads go belss you !



I also got to meet most of the Biztalk MVP's whose blogs I read regularly like
Alan ,Bill , Jon,Matt , Rod , Scott , Stephen Thomas
.It was a great evening , it was in Daniel's Broiler in Bellevue Downtown and I tell you the lamb chops there are absoultely delcious not to mention the crab cakes . So was an exciting day in short and a memorable day in my MVP life.

BPM and SOA conference - Day 2

Day 2 :
The session started with Customer Panel: SOA Success Stories for me and I was realy amazed at the cariety and scale of challenges that Biztalk is solving . The next session thta i picked was
Avoiding 3 Common Pitfalls in Service Contract Design by Tim Ewald. This was a great session , This did focus on the facts that message contracts and schemas do evolve no matter how much reasearch you do upfront and the trick is to expect that change and how to make your schema extensible and how to change your idea of validation from a sub- set presence rather than an exclusion from a sub set of valid nodes.

There was a demo by K2 on thier new Workflow tool and I must say I am IMPRESSED with it's capabilities starting from AJAX based browser workflow designer to thier tight integeration into the Visual Studio environment and integerated debugging. It is code named BlackPearl , Reminds me of Pirates of the carribean . It is truly amazing howK2 has grown from it;s humble begininig in South Africa.

Choosing the next session was tough . I was torn between two sessions
Advanced Routing and Correlation with BizTalk Orchestrations
Lee Graber Microsoft and
Building an ESB on the Microsoft Platform
Brian Loesgen , Neudesic & Lukas Cudridge, Microsoft

I finally chose to attend Lee's Session and it was well worth it . His slide on Zombie factory ( classic Zombie a Recieve with a timer in the parallel branch ) had the room in splits :-) . Other thing that I really found out was Lee was not Chinese , i am not sure how that notion got into my head . This was one of my best rated sessions

I went for the "ESB Technical Deep Dive " by Brian next as I missed the intro talk but I was really impressed with the framework . You can get more details on the tool at EBIZTLKIT@microsoft.com .

I finished the day with a Developer Q and A and went to the Birds of the feather and Partner Expo. Some of the things that caught my fancey were

Farpoint Spread - An excel pipeline component

SKELTA workflow tool . They too has Ajax based workflow designer like K2 . It has outlook integeration too .It is not integerated into the .net platform at this point . This might be a cost effective option if K2 is out of your reach .

Java- Bizalk - JNBridge Adapter

Did stroll over to Jon's QuickLearn Booth , but couldnt catch him anywhere . Spend some time chatting at the BOF tables and went for a movie to relax

BPM and SOA conference - Day 1

Day 1: Went in Registerd for the conference and went to the keynote talk By David Chappel "Conference Keynote: SOA, BPM, and Microsoft: A Pragmatic View"
This was one of the best talk that I had at the conference . It really does give you a pragmatic view of things.

The next session was by John deVadoss on Real World SOA .This really had some intersting comparison on the big bang approach vs the small end to end scenario in finding out the SOA Value . This had some intersting videos on a leading bank in Australia and some good case studies.
There was a presentation over lunch by HP
After this one had to choose between differnt tracks and I kind of took
The Architecture of SOA - John Evdemon
Technical Solution Spaces for BizTalk and CSD - Oliver Sharp
Then we had an SOA Q and A Panel which was really valuble and it kind of had lo of thought provoking question like what is schema versionin if XML stands for Extensible Markup Languuage. Well that was not the exact question but you know the philosphical flamy question . Really felt lie after a days full of presentations. I had suddenly got this cold from somewhere by then . WEnt ove rto Bldg 3 to meet some of my old friends and watched some movie in the evening

BPM and SOA conference - Day 0

Day 0 : I had a kind of Bad flight from here to Seattle on US airways . After a really tough scrutinizing at security where they bought out everything from my aftershave , deo and my bottle of Dasani(Water) . I got on my flight from Elmira to Philly. I had a 45 minute connection which became a 20 minute connection as flight was late . So had a real tough time running from one terminal to another where they keep announcing my name wrong on the PA systems. Somehow made it to the terminal and was the last person in . The flight was long and I was hungry but could not buy food as they ran out of meals. ( Great first they charge you and then you font get it even if you want to buy ! ) . Reached Seattle and crashed at my friend DK's place after eating some nice Indian Pulav.