If you are interested in the BizTalk Business Rules Engine here’s one for you: we have recorded the Auckland Connected Systems User Group meeting from last Thursday by Jeffrey Chilberto on ‘A Practical Exploration of the BizTalk Business Rules Engine’. It’s a very hands on presentation that goes over basic and advanced topics – exposing rules engine rules via WCF for example. It serves as a great precursor (and good timing) to Charles Young’s presentation next week at the Sweden BizTalk User Group on the BizTalk Business Rules Engine. Here are the links:
- Video – zipped WMV file
- Slides
- Code Samples
Enjoy!
There was a great discussion that ensued after the presentation that I didn’t include in the video. Jeff asks: why aren’t companies using the BRE and its functionality more? Some of the points from the discussion:
- Time consuming/ramp up – It is a completely different technology to the rest of BizTalk or just coding, different concept, with its own list of gotchas, so the developer has to learn them
- Worth it though – performance is very high. The performance experienced is usually from the external classes used and not the rules themselves.
- BRE composer interface is old and hasn’t changed since BizTalk 2004, no changes in BizTalk 2009 other than the splash screen 🙂
- Extra functionality and updated interface would be well accepted
- No out of the box functionality to allow business users to creation of rules
- But ok to expose to an operations team to make modifications to rules especially if the vocabularies involved are already well defined
- Currently to expose the creation of rules to a specific group of business users, in their own domain, the solution is to create and edit the rules programmatically via a custom UI or website restricting what and how they can see and do
- Lack of more advanced functionality like decision trees
- Currently has to be done in code that calls multiple policies
- Business Rules being used in the ESB Toolkit and RFID is a good indication that it is here to stay, just needs to be improved
- Still required to have a license to use the business rules engine but can get away with a standard license
Regards,
Thiago Almeida
