neudesic

Neuron ESB 2.5 Available for Download!

Rick G. Garibay — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 01:12:05 GMT

Version 2.5 of our flagship messaging product, Neuron ESB is now available for download.

I’ve talked briefly about Neuron ESB here, here and here and you may have seen Sam Gentile’s excellent treatment of the product here: http://samgentile.com/Web/neuron-esb/. Neuron is the only commercial ESB built on WCF and the .NET Framework that is fully supported by a Microsoft Partner. We built Neuron ESB to accelerate SOA adoption by taking sophisticated messaging patterns such as Pub-Sub, Virtual Service, Naming and Discovery, Mediation, Protocol Bridging, and Security (to name a few) and commoditizing them so that they fall into the reach of developers of all disciplines and levels of experience, whether they are veteran WCF developers or have not yet made the leap.

Put simply, Neuron is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and integration platform built entirely with Microsoft technologies. While specific definitions of ESB’s vary, there is consistent agreement within the industry as to the types of capabilities an ESB should provide; Neuron provides all of these, and more.

Some of the capabilities provided by Neuron ESB include:

· Message routing (content based, static, rules based)

· Mediation (protocol bridging, LOB adapters)

· Message processing (transformation, enhancement/augmentation)

· Management (auditing, monitoring,, logging)

· Quality of Service (security, delivery reliability, transactions)

The diagram on the right depicts a fictional Neuron configuration illustrating interconnections in a heterogeneous environment, as well as the major Neuron functional components. You will notice that publishers publish or send messages to the bus on a topic. A topic is a network, or a channel that constrains communication to a business event. For example, there may be a number of different applications/systems that are interested in being notified with a customer places an order. Topics model the business domain, just like events, so any applications that are interested in orders can subscribe to the topic named “Orders”. The topic is configured with a messaging channel such as TCP which will provide very low latency, high throughput and excellent reliability. However, it will not guarantee message delivery in the event that a subscriber is not available at the time the message arrives. In this case, MSMQ might be a better choice. Other systems such as a WCF inventory service, fulfillment application hosted in an ERP or a CRM application might be interested in new orders, so they subscribe to the Orders topic. Now, when a publisher (such as a POS system) publishes a new order, each subscriber receives a notification. The notification may prompt the application to call a service (pull notification) or Neuron may deliver a message according to the interface of the application subscribing to the message. The latter enables the automation of a business process by orchestrating or composing several services to carry out a business process such as order fulfillment.

Best of all, Neuron ESB integrates seamlessly with both Microsoft and other vendors. It provides WCF binding support out-of-the-box via Client Connectors and Service Connectors to enable WS-I Basic Profile messaging, WS-* and REST. In addition, it provides traditional integration via adapters for working with SQL Server, CRM, Sharepoint, SMTP and FTP to name just a few. Neuron ESB also integrates directly with BizTalk Server via a dedicated BizTalk channel that enables publishers to send and receive messages via the BizTalk MessageBox. This allows customers to expand the reach of the their BizTalk solutions while continuing to build upon their investments in BizTalk Server. The key objective is to allow customers to continue to leverage their existing investments while streamlining development efforts so that you can focus more on adding business value and less on the plumbing.

There is much more to Neuron ESB than I can capture in this quick blog post, but some additional benefits of Neuron ESB include the ability to:

— Quickly integrate your systems and applications

◦ Insert/retrieve data from databases with no coding

◦ Interconnect heterogeneous systems, legacy applications, and the newest technologies with no coding

— Leverage your existing assets

◦ Utilize current developer skills. No retraining, or special tools required

◦ Use adapters to connect to your applications and systems

— Easily extend your applications

◦ Add workflow with no coding

◦ Add pipelines, with rules, transformation, logic, etc., with no coding

— Gain visibility into your business

◦ Extract basic information from messages for business indicators

◦ Populate data warehouses, and analysis stores in real time

— Create a powerful, reusable infrastructure

◦ Common code is in the ESB, not applications

◦ IT resources can manage infrastructure with no impact to applications/services

◦ Evolves with you, and in support of your objectives

◦ Get monitoring, management, admin for “free”

◦ Utilize industry standards

We are very excited to make this new release available for evaluation. You can find more information about Neuron ESB 2.5 here: http://www.neuronesb.com/default.aspx

If you have any questions, would like a demo or want to talk about some of the key scenarios that Neuron can help you attain, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

New Year, New Role

Rick G. Garibay — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:14:51 GMT

I’ve been with Neudesic since 2007 and have thoroughly enjoyed my role as the Connected Framework Practice Lead for the Connected Systems Practice.

I am passionate about model-driven, distributed software and have focused my career on helping organizations across all verticals streamline business processes while enhancing the productivity of developers by combining modern, iterative software engineering methodologies to deliver business value and drive revenue while reducing operational costs.

This role has been exhilarating. I’ve been fortunate to work with some of the best and brightest consultants in the world and helped build a regional Connected Systems practice that I am very proud of. In my role as Connected Framework Practice Lead for the Connected Systems Practice, my focus has been on architecting, designing and leading the implementation of solutions built on distributed .NET technologies such as WCF, Azure, Neuron ESB and Sync Framework as well as focusing on model-driven tools such as Entity Framework (EF) and SQL Server Modeling Tools (Oslo).

Effective 1/2, I am moving out of my role as Practice Lead and into a Solutions Architect role with the Enterprise Solutions Group (ESG) at Neudesic.

As a Solution Architect, I will continue to apply my passion in helping customers realize the benefits of the Microsoft platform by integrating distributed and model-driven Microsoft technologies to attain business outcomes, however this role will significantly limit the amount of time I spend on delivery/implementation and focus almost entirely on strategic architecture and design to help ensure that the solutions in which we partner with our customers are envisioned, orchestrated and executed as effectively as possible.

This new position aligns wonderfully with my areas of interest and career goals and will position me to have a larger footprint with Neudesic’s customers by being both a touch point and a touchstone for all customers within the Desert District and to help ensure they are effectively leveraging technology to accomplish intended business outcomes and help align business needs with the Microsoft stack.

It’s an exciting time for building distributed, service-oriented solutions. The enterprise and consumer market present endless opportunities for integrating applications and services, and SOA-much like the Internet- has become both a conduit and the lynchpin for integrating and surfacing these assets to add value to people and organizations both on-premise and in the cloud.

To this end, this year will be very exciting with a number of exiting releases including Windows Azure moving to production and the release of the .NET Framework 4.0 which will include updates to WCF which I believe will significantly increase adoption as well as new value-added functionality around discovery and routing. In addition, this year we’ll see a complete rewrite of WF, a tremendous update to EF and continuous investments in SQL Server Modeling Tools.

As such, the focus of my blog over the next 12 months will be on leveraging these technologies to solve business problems and provide new opportunities for organizations, developers and architects. I will also begin introducing Neuron ESB (our Enterprise Service Bus built entirely on .NET and WCF) and what a tremendous accelerator this product can be in crossing the cost-value chasm.

Lastly, we are hiring. If you are interested in talking with me about career opportunities at Neudesic, please send me a note.

Happy New Year everyone!

Phoenix Visual Studio Team System Big Event was BIG!

Rick G. Garibay — Tue, 12 May 2009 00:29:16 GMT

Thanks to all who came out for the Visual Studio Team System Big Event on Thursday, May 7th! We had a great time with the Microsoft Developer Evangelist team, Microsoft Technical Specialists, MVPs and influencers who at the end of the full day of action packed training left no doubt that Visual Studio Team System is BIG!

Dan Weinman, Senior Consultant at Neudesic kicked off with the keynote on "Development Best Practices & How Microsoft Helps" and set the stage for what the day full of training had in store. Dan talked about the various roles that VSTS supports and how each role comes together to enact process under a single tool that maximizes transparency and communication on Agile teams.

Next, Brendon Birdoes, Principal Consultant at Neudesic delivered a great talk on Test-Driven-Development with Visual Studio. Brendon covered unit testing, including test first development and showed off the refactoring capabilities right within the IDE along with code coverage. Brendon talked about how important code coverage and quality assertions are to ensuring that your unit tests are as useful as possible in maintaining high degrees of quality within your software projects.

Following the excellent session on TDD, Visual Studio Team System MVP Dave McKinstry delivered a session entitled ""It Works on My Machine!" Closing the Loop Between Development & Testing" which discussed the close integration between testing tools in Visual Studio Team System and the code itself which minimizes the cost and complexity in task switching.

We were then treated by another excellent talk by Rob Bagby, Developer Evangelist on "Treating Databases as First-Class Citizens in Development". In this session, Rob made clear that database work can no longer hide from unit testing and how the Database Project in Visual Studio Team System makes synchronizing DDL and DML objects seamless and eminently testable.

I was lucky enough to show off the new Visual Studio Team System 2010 Team Architect bits which include fully compliant UML 2.1 diagram support as well as assembly, namespace, class and method visualization using the VSTS 2010 Architecture Explorer. I talked about VSTS 2010 Team Architect being yet another clear signal of Microsoft's commitment to modeling which is, and will continue to manifest itself in technologies like Windows Workflow, BizTalk Server, Entity Framework, and Quadrant to name just a few. As a Connected Systems guy, VS2010 Team Architect is really going to go a long way in helping me and my teams visualize the problem domain and partition our big balls of mud into the right architecture.

Speaking of which, I think my favorite new modeling feature in Team Architect is the Layer Diagram which lets you define your layers and then validate them at build time! What this means is that I can use a layer diagram to define separation of concerns and single responsibility principle and then make sure that team members are honoring the layer rules. It is just awesome to be able to map namespaces to a layer diagram, wire it up to the automated build and keep violations from every being delivered.

The day winded up with a great talk by Steve Lange, Technical Specialist on how to get the most out of TFS. The session was aptly called "Bang for Your Buck" Getting the Most out of Team Foundation Server, and Steve gave away some great tips on things you can do with your investment in TFS that you may not have even known about.

I want to thank Steve and Rob for inviting us to speak at this event. The room was full of great folks with lots of passion and great questions which is exactly what we like to see at these events. If you have any follow up questions that I wasn't able to get answered at the event, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Padres vs. Rangers - April 26th

Rick G. Garibay - The more I learn, the less I kno — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 21:39:39 GMT

If you are reading this you are either:

a) passionate about Microsoft technologies

b) interested in how to leverage best of breed technologies to solve business problems

c) interested in all things SOA & Connected Systems

d) really, really smart

e) wondering how the heck you ended up here

If you chose anything other than "e", then you're invited to a fun and sun-filled afternoon of baseball and lunch in a pavilion at the Padres vs. Rangers MLB Spring Training game!

Come and network with your local Microsoft and Neudesic teams and gain insight on the latest ideas and technologies. We’ll have various team members who I think you’ll be impressed with, along with existing clients in attendance and we always have a good mix of business and technical focused discussions at these events.

If you think might enjoy talking about application lifecycle management, Visual Studio 2008, .NET 3.5, Silverlight , WPF and enjoying a cold beer (or two), just show up!

Please register quickly to reserve your spot at this limited-attendance, no charge event.

Click here to register or call 877.905.1905 with event code #126147.

Neudesic Ranked in Inc 500

Rick G. Garibay - The more I learn, the less I kno — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 19:43:44 GMT