Busy travelling, busy speaking…

So, I’ve been booked into the Microsoft 2009 SOA conference in Redmond at the end of this month to speak about the new version of the ESB Guidance (V2.0). For those of you who are familiar with version 1.0 of the guidance, I strongly recommend that you check out v2 (https://www.codeplex.com/esb). It has a number of great improvements that really help to "polish” up the concepts that were introduced in the initial release.  We now a visual Itinerary designer right inside VS 2008 (no more having to manually code up raw XML itineraries yeah!!!)  We’ve also got a new Itinerary database where we can store, version and retrieve our itineraries.  We also got a a new pipeline component called the ItineraryForwarder that allows us to chain together service calls without the need for an orchestrations (i.e. Call Service A and send the response to Service B and then send its response to service C).  We use to require a BizTalk orchestration for this, but now this kind of simple chaining can be done entirely using ports and pipelines.  Also, the team has done a nice job of cleaning up the install by giving us a Configuration application instead of requiring us to manually modify a bunch of different install scripts.

After I’m done at the SOA conference, I’ll have just enough time to fly home say a quick hello to my wife and bed before turning around and heading right back to Seattle to speak at our own internal TechReady conference about the same thing.  It appears like I’ll be making a big push early on in the year for that “elite” status on Air Canada… :)