PDC2008: Introducing BizTalk Express, sorry, Dublin

Just at a session on BizTalk Express, sorry Dublin…
Dublin is a set of extensions to Web Application Server (WAS) also known as Web Process
Activation Server (also WAS) – confused yet?!
Basically, Dublin allows hosting of WCF/WF services/workflows on IIS/WAS.
What it adds though is UIs for Hosting, Messaging, Durability, Correlation, and Tracking
Sound familiar? Yup, all things that BTS provides today.
It’s early days yet – most of the advanced stuff is currently configured via PowerShell
scripts, but it shows where they’re going with it.

Persistence is implemented by storing message information in SQL Server.
In the IIS Administration Console, you can look at suspended instances, resume them,
cancel them, etc. All stuff that seems very very familiar to a BTS dev.
Correlation and filtering is achieved via XPath statements (no comments on whether
it loads the message into a DOM, or whether it supports fast–read-only forward XPath
only).

We’ve all received copies of Dublin with our PDC bits – I’ll be keen to see what perf
you can achieve under load. I suspect the answer is “not much”.
The BTS dev team spent a lot of time tuning the filtering/persistence stuff, and in
a lot of ways it seems that the Dublin team are reinventing the wheel here.

One cool thing shown was creating a model in Quadrant (the Oslo modelling tool) and
deploying WCF/WF apps from there to Dublin.

More to come as I spend time with Dublin.