14 DAY TRIAL // On Monday, Microsoft has made available for download a refreshed flavor of Windows Azure Service Bus EAI & EDI Labs release, in an attempt to bring along more innovation on Windows Azure.
Windows Azure Service Bus EAI & EDI Labs comes with integration capabilities for Microsoft’s Windows Azure to provide rich messaging endpoints to process and transform messages and to extend on-premises applications to the cloud.
The new April 2012 refresh is meant to enable two key scenarios on Windows Azure, namely Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI).
The former delivers rich message processing capabilities, while the latter was designed to provide support for business-to-business (B2B) scenarios.
The Windows Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI 0.1 SDK is available for download via the link below, but it requires the free signing in to the labs environment with a Windows Live ID.
Some of the main changes brought by the refresh include:
- The bridge has been enhanced to process both positional and delimited flat files along with xml messages. It can also pull a message from your existing FTP server and then process it further
- Flow of messages within a bridge is no longer a black box: we have exposed the operational tracking of messages within it along with its metadata
- Creating and editing schemas has become simpler and easier using the schema editor we have added as a first-class-experience in our Visual Studio project. Yes, we heard your feedbackJ. Fetching schemas from another service is also simpler using an integrated wizard experience
- You can now send messages to the bridge in UTF-16, UTF-16LE and UTF-16BE too apart from UTF-8
- We have further enriched the Mapper functionality to support number formatting, timezone manipulations and different ways to generate unique Ids. To handle errors and null data, we let user configure the behavior of the runtime
- The Visual Studio Server Explorer experience to create, configure and deploy LOB entities on-premises has become simpler using a new wizard which is much easier to use
In the new release, the EDI Portal offers the possibility to delete agreements to reduce the clutter. Moreover, agreement settings can easily be changed, while EDI messages can be tracked for one or more agreements.
Some other changes in the new release include support out-of-the-box archiving in EDI, and for send side batching in EDI based on message count.
A series of UX enhancements were included in the package to provide a smoother experience, and are complemented by enhancements to the EDI Portal performance and improvements to the error messages.