BizTalk RFID & Service Bus

In this sample we have an RFID tag which was read by an RFID Device/sensor and pushed a message to the BizTalk RFID gateway which executes the processing engine to handle the tag read event. At the end of the pipeline the developer has added a custom extension which will publish the event or an enriched event to a topic in the Azure Service Bus Brokered Messaging feature.

The topic allows us to implement a publish / subscribe pattern and this means we can send the message two ways. The first is to a topic subscription where the message would be picked up by a BizTalk Services EAI Bridge and processed and transformed to be then stored in an Azure Table Store which will be used to keep a historical archive of all tag read events. The second subscriber would route the message to a BizTalk Server instance hosted as a virtual machine in Azure. Within BizTalk the integration process to update any applications can be implemented which can involve interaction with on premise applications, cloud applications or any partners as required.

This implementation used the topic capability in Azure Service Bus as it is an easy way of pushing tag read events to a highly scalable queueing system and we could actually push tag read events from many sites or locations around the world to the same queue or topic. From here we can implement various asynchronous processing of the events. For the archiving pattern using a BizTalk EAI Bridge in Azure BizTalk Services should be an easy way to implement the archiving feature which can be scaled as required but would be quite light weight.

For the core event processing we can use the power of BizTalk to implement durable integration which could interact with many systems as required and would have the full connector capabilities to integrate with on premise or cloud applications as required.