Presenting at TechEd

I'm pleased to announce that I'll be presenting two sessions at TechEd which is being held at Orlando between Monday 4th June and Friday 8th June!  The first is a breakout session which covers BAM and demonstrates some real-world examples of how we've put BAM to great use and how it has a place in almost every BizTalk solution, the second is a chalk-talk covering BizTalk performance testing.

Ewan Fairweather (author of the Administration chapter in my book) will also be presenting a breakout session titled "SOA310 - Best Practices and Customer Evidence on Enterprise Ready BizTalk Implementations"

The session abstracts are shown below for reference, and it looks like a book signing will be organised during the week for those of you attending that want to get a signed copy!  See you there!

SOA306 - Building an Enterprise-Wide Instrumentation Solution Using the Microsoft BizTalk BAM Infrastructure
Track(s): SOA and Web Services
Level: 300
Speaker(s): Darren Jefford

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is a powerful feature of BizTalk Server and is often marketed as allowing "the business" to understand what is happening within your BizTalk solution. BAM does this really well, but it can in fact be used in a variety of other ways which can deliver huge value to customers and address a number of issues they have with BizTalk based solutions and non-BizTalk based solutions.

In this session, we cover some of the fundamentals of BAM and detail how you can utilize BAM to collect a variety of information and produce a "tracking portal" which you can use to support your application, perform manual repair of messages, and generally observe your solution.

We also show how BAM is not just for BizTalk solutions and how it can be used to produce an enterprise-wide instrumentation solution that is highly scalable and flexible; we touch on the new Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) BAM Interceptor technology that enables data to be collected from Workflows and WCF services enabling a true end-to-end instrumentation solution.

SOA13-TLC - Microsoft BizTalk Performance Testing
Track(s): SOA and Web Services
Level: 400
Speaker(s): Darren Jefford

Testing is a critical area for any solution and BizTalk is no exception. In this session, we start by covering the foundations that you need to put into place before beginning any performance testing, covering the most common environment problems that cause problems during testing and highlighting a number of tools to make testing easier including BizUnit and LoadGen.

Then, we cover how you should monitor your solution during testing; highlighting the key performance counters that should be monitored and explaining how throttling works. We finish by covering a number of common symptoms that you're likely to experience during testing; we explain why these occur, how to spot them, and more importantly how to resolve them.