Michael Stephenson

366 Posts | 3824 Comments

Michael is a highly experienced freelance consultant with lots of experience of architecting and delivering integration projects which leverage the Microsoft technology stack. He has deep, practical knowledge of delivering complex solutions with BizTalk, Microsoft .NET, Microsoft Azure and associated technologies. Michael has also been a technical lead on 25+ projects which have leveraged Microsoft's cloud platform. Michael is heavily involved in the community activities around Microsoft technologies through the Microsoft MVP and Advisor/Insider programmes and also speaks at user groups on a regular basis. Michael is also an author for Pluralsight having produced a very popular courses on .net and RabbitMQ. Michael is also the creator of the BizTalk Maturity Assessment and initiative to help companies to measure the maturity of how they work with BizTalk and compare how they do BizTalk against recognized good practices. For more info refer to http://biztalkmaturity.com I have been involved in the following Microsoft Programmes: - Microsoft Integration MVP 2012 - Present - Microsoft BizTalk MVP 2008 - 2012 - Microsoft Connected Technologies Advisors - Microsoft Business Platform Advisors - Microsoft Windows Azure Advisors - Microsoft Azure Insiders

Michael Stephenson keeping your feet on premise while your heads in the cloud

Oct 14

Goals for Integration Projects

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In case you havent seen my new blog yet check out this new post

http://microsoftintegration.guru/2014/10/16/goals-integration-biztalk-projects/

Posted On Thursday, October 16, 2014 9:31 AM

Aug 14

API Management Video

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Just wanted to put the word out that the API Management video from the recent user group meeting is available. The page on the below link has resources from that meeting:http://ukcsug.co.uk... Also we have out next two meetings available for registration at the following links:Hybrid Connectionshttps://www.even... ......

Posted On Sunday, August 3, 2014 1:52 PM BizTalk

Jul 14

Hybrid Connections Webcast

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We have lined up a webcast for UKCSUG covering BizTalk Services Hybrid Connections on the 4th August with Santosh from the Azure Product TeamCome and join us!https://www.eventbrite.c... ......

Posted On Tuesday, July 8, 2014 7:24 PM BizTalk

Jul 14

Why use Service Bus Relay when I can use Hybrid Connections?

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Im slowly in the process of moving over to a new website so ill be cross posting on both blogs for a while.Here is my new article talking about service bus relay and hybrid connectionshttp://microsoft... ......

Posted On Monday, July 7, 2014 7:47 AM BizTalk , Azure Service Bus

Jun 14

8 ways any BizTalk customer can use Azure right now

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just posted this on technet wiki

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/24755.8-ways-any-biztalk-customer-can-use-azure-right-now.aspx

Posted On Thursday, June 5, 2014 11:02 AM

May 14

BizTalk Server Best Practices

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Theres a few articles out there about various opinions on best practices for BizTalk. I thought id create a place on technet wiki to collate them all.http://social.technet.m... add any ive missed ......

Posted On Monday, May 19, 2014 1:15 PM BizTalk

Apr 14

BizTalk HL7 Testing - Tool to get config from BTS Management DB

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As a follow up to the HL7 testing framework I published recently the below video is about a tool which is part of the framework which will allow you to generate the configuration you might require for the tests to stub an application or to send messages to biztalk by pointing the tool at your biztalk management database and letting it inspect the ports ......

Posted On Monday, April 21, 2014 10:33 AM BizTalk

Apr 14

Automated Testing of BizTalk HL7 solutions with Specflow

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Recently ive been working on a small widget to help with automated testing of BizTalk HL7 implementations. In the below link there is a video which walks through how all of this works.http://youtu.be/DivfV... open sourced an assembly and the sample from the video if you would like to play around with thishttps://appfxhl7testing... ......

Posted On Sunday, April 20, 2014 11:41 PM BizTalk , BizTalk Testing

Mar 14

BizTalk Services – Can I create a mapping service in the cloud

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Ive recently been playing with some of the use cases you might be able to implement using Windows Azure BizTalk Services. In this case I wanted to look at the options for exposing the transformation capability of BizTalk as a service which applications could use. This is something that you might occasionally do in BizTalk Server where you simply take ......

Posted On Monday, March 17, 2014 1:30 AM BizTalk

Mar 14

Just some thoughts on light weight integration

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I was having a discussion with a friend the other day about how the integration world is changing and how integration products are changing to reflect this. While "back in the day" we had the large enterprise integration products which were a big deal in the 1990's and through the 2000's but things are taking a different direction these days. Today ......

Posted On Monday, March 10, 2014 12:17 PM BizTalk , Windows Azure

Mar 14

Real-world WABS - Part 1

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Ive done a video about some thoughts about using windows azure biztalk services in the real world.Check it out here:https://www.youtube.co... to hear peoples thoughts ......

Posted On Sunday, March 9, 2014 2:04 PM BizTalk , Windows Azure , BizTalk Services

Mar 14

The Future of BizTalk?

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This week BizTalk 360 held a really exceptional conference in London which had many great speakers. I was disappointed to have to withdraw from being a speaker a few weeks ago and I was unable to attend the full conference, but there was some really good content in this event. One of the things I got thinking a lot about was based on the talks by Guru ......

Posted On Friday, March 7, 2014 11:00 AM BizTalk

Why aren’t there more BizTalk accelerators?

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I've recently been talking to a few friends about the applications which various integration products claim to support integration into. It's quite an interesting thing to consider these days and for some vendors it's a great way of looking really cool by having loads of application icons showing how many apps you can integrate with. In BizTalk world ......

Posted On Friday, March 7, 2014 10:13 AM BizTalk

Feb 14

Introducing ROBODOC

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We are currently in ward 23 the kids cardiac ward at the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle and have been playing with the code club kids programming books and AJ has created his first computer programme.The Dr's work so hard here so we decided to help by creating ROBODOC the new NHS Super Computer Doctor. To use ROBODOC you simply ask it for a diagnosis ......

Posted On Saturday, February 8, 2014 6:53 AM

Feb 14

BizTalk Administrator Application Quality Checklist

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Over the years one of the tools we have used to help guide improvement of the development of BizTalk applications and deployment to through test environments and into production is the BizTalk Administrator Application Quality Checklist. This is based on some work my friend Mo Uppal did around managing applications being migrated into the application ......

Posted On Saturday, February 1, 2014 1:39 AM BizTalk

Jan 14

Deployment Automation, DevOps and a bit of BizTalk

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I should have done a shout out about this ages ago, but if anyone is interested in deployment automation and at a high level touching on how BizTalk played into this for a large enterprise check out the below video.http://channel9.msdn.... ......

Posted On Wednesday, January 29, 2014 4:09 AM BizTalk

Jan 14

Flowing a Windows Identity through Azure Service Bus Queues

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Ive recently written a whitepaper about how you could flow the details of a Windows Identity through Windows Azure Service Bus Queues and then use that on-premise to act as that user when accessing downstream resources.The paper shows a walk through of setting up a complex scenario involving protocol translation, and kerberos multi-hop delegation to ......

Posted On Friday, January 24, 2014 12:05 PM Kerberos Adventures , Windows Azure

Keeping up with the Jones’s in the Cloud

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Been meaning to blog about this topic for a while and it's an area that I've been wondering if it will come up in the future as a governance challenge for organizations using the cloud. Let's consider the problem from the pre-cloud days in an enterprise scenario. The Challenge in the past Imagine that I am writing a WCF service which is running on premise ......

Posted On Friday, January 24, 2014 9:56 AM Windows Azure

Jan 14

RabbitMQ for .net Developers Part 2

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My recent course on RabbitMQ for .net Developers part 2 has just gone live on Pluralsight

http://pluralsight.com/training/Courses/TableOfContents/rabbitmq-dotnet-developers-pt2

Yay!

Posted On Thursday, January 23, 2014 4:59 AM

Architectural Thoughts on JSON from a BizTalk Perspective

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I wrote this article a while back and Saravana has been kind enough to publish it as a whitepaper through BizTalk 360's whitepaper gallery.Its a discussion around JSON and BizTalk and some of the things BizTalk people need to think about as the use of JSON with BizTalk increaseshttp://go.biztalk3... ......

Posted On Thursday, January 23, 2014 3:26 AM BizTalk

Considerations for Logging in Hybrid Integration Solutions

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As many of my readers will know, I've been doing a lot of work around Hybrid integration solutions over the last few years involving Windows Azure Service Bus and various other technologies. One of the challenges which comes up in any architecture is how do you manage and implement logging. Well if you consider that we are now often building globally ......

Posted On Thursday, January 23, 2014 3:20 AM BizTalk , Azure Service Bus , Windows Azure

Jan 14

Log4net Azure Service Bus Appender

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In this post I wanted to explore the options around building a Windows Azure Service Bus appender for log4net (sample download). This would allow me to publish logging events outside of my application to an internet scale messaging system which can then provide opportunities to centrally store or process messages from all of my applications. This article ......

Posted On Thursday, January 2, 2014 5:15 AM Azure Service Bus

Nov 13

BizTalk Maturity Assessment vs BizTalk Health Check

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Recently a few people have asked me about the differences between the BizTalk Health Check and the BizTalk Maturity Assessment so I thought I'd put a few thoughts out here. Firstly let's start with what the BizTalk Health Assessment is. Health Check Most consultancies who have a BizTalk capability offer some flavour of BizTalk Health Check. In these ......

Posted On Wednesday, November 20, 2013 2:06 PM

Nov 13

RabbitMQ for .net Developers Part 1

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Ive just completed a training course with Pluralsight for RabbitMQ for .net developers.Part 1 of this course will be a gentlish introduction to rabbitmq from the perspective of a .net developer. It will help you get up and running and talk about some of the message exchange patterns your likely to use.Check it out on the following linkhttp://pluralsight.com/... ......

Posted On Friday, November 15, 2013 3:40 PM

Nov 13

Automated Build & Azure Service Bus

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Recently with a little advice from Paolo who created the Windows Azure Service Bus Explorer tool ive worked to create a few tasks which will help us to do a little automation around the use of Windows Azure Service Bus.Being a BizTalk guy at heart I have been thinking about the best ways to manage the configuration of my service bus namespace and in ......

Posted On Thursday, November 14, 2013 7:33 AM Azure Service Bus