Saturday, 11 February 2012 03:29

BizTalk Operation and administrators should create an SDK?

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Below statement is off course not suitable for all companies and how they work, but in my company we separate developing and operation and this is the background why I wrote this article.

To gain more quality in delivery to customers, I think the BizTalk operation team should have a Software Development Kit (SDK) so the developers that create code and deliver application package and bindings to BizTalk operation must understand the infrastructure part of the delivery, often i see that developers focus is to handle functions but forget that it should run in a complex infrastructure.

It is important that this should be written by and come from the BizTalk operation and it´s administrators off course aligned with developer's community inside the company or 3 party vendors.

This SDK should also describe how the infrastructure is working as well how it is setup and configured. It should also describe how the development environment should be set up, even better create a developers image and set it up aligned with the infrastructure so the developer get the right environment from the beginning, in that way it should be much simpler to do the deploy for the BizTalk operation and it´s administrators.

What should this kind of SDK handle and describe?

A challenge to this community is to make the below list more complete so please make some comments on this. My intension is to write a general SDK for BizTalk Operations and put it out for other to use, then it´s better if i get some real life input what the community thinks about this good or bad comments.

1.       Infrastructure develop environment setup

a.       Requirements?

b.      Service Accounts and groups

c.       Host´s and Host Instances setup (Tracking Host, Send Host, Receive Host, Processing Host?)

2.       Name Standards and conventions

3.       Mockup services

4.       Exception Handling (ESB?)

5.       Error Handling

6.       Event Handling

7.       Test Process (BizUnit?)

Read 1532 times Last modified on Thursday, 23 February 2012 06:52
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Peter Winther

Peter Winther is an IT architect at Volvo IT and works with information technology since 1998. He has worked with BizTalk from 2004 inside Volvo IT with BizTalk Operation and he also works with SOA technology, and integration both inside Volvo Group and for external customers.

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More in this category: « C# solution to decompress BizTalk messages and their context Applying the Microsoft Operations Framework 4.0 Concepts to Administering and Managing BizTalk - Part 2 »

4 comments

  • Comment Link Lex Hegt Saturday, 11 February 2012 07:59 posted by Lex Hegt

    Hi Peter,

    Nice article! If a SDK like this is handed over to the project team before they started designing the solution, this will surely benefit to the quality and maintainability of the solution in production.

    You could also think on things like:
    - where to put configuration (the less places, the better)
    - how things are delivered to the operators/administrators
    - what should be described in the Technical Release Notes (to achieve a succesfull installation)
    - the project team should deliver some kind of performance indicators of the solution

    Regards,
    Lex

  • Comment Link Jeroen Hendriks Saturday, 11 February 2012 08:45 posted by Jeroen Hendriks

    Hi Peter,

    Some other things you could add:
    -How to handle logging
    -How to handle tracing (where did your message go)
    -Support manual

  • Comment Link mike stephenson Saturday, 11 February 2012 22:48 posted by mike stephenson

    Hi Peter

    I like your idea, but an enhancement of that is that i actually believe for integration solutions you should have 1 team who understands the full life cycle of your solution.

    I want my biztalk developers to feel the pain of any problems in production every bit as much as the 2nd/3rd line support, infrastructure people etc so they think about how their solution works in production as much as how it functionally does the job.

    A good SDK for consistency is a great start. Id recommend standards on how the solution integrated into SCOM or HP Openview, deployment and automated build processes as very important too

    All the best
    Mike

  • Comment Link Gene Hughson Sunday, 12 February 2012 20:48 posted by Gene Hughson

    I'm amazed that an application could be put into production without these aspects covered. That a development team would need to be given this sort of guidance is a little scary.

    Another area you might want to add is method of storage of configuration settings.

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