BIA - The BizTalk Intelligence Agency

TechNet Wiki: The number of BizTalk articles is growing …

2012-01-25T18:27:00.001+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post for the Official blog of TechNet Wiki with the topic “Wiki-Ninjas on Technology: BizTalk Server”. In that blog post I wrote a story on contributions of the community and Microsoft employees for the TechNet Wiki. Mid December there were little of 40 BizTalk Wiki Articles and over a month’s time it has grown to little over 70. That is a tremendous growth of articles (around 30). It show increasing popularity of the TechNet Wiki as a channel of information on Microsoft technology and products.

The newly added articles on BizTalk Server have been written by myself, Tord Glad Nordahl, Sandro Pereira, Howard S. Edidin, and Mick Badran. All these articles (existing and new) are being improved every day by people mentioned here and others (Microsoft employees and the community). I expect the number will grow over time to over 100+ articles as more community members will probably join.

With the wealth of information on TechNet Wiki, MSDN and other Microsoft channels combined you can fully leverage the BizTalk Server platform. You can reach all the BizTalk related wiki articles through BizTalk Server Resources on the TechNet Wiki article.

Enjoy reading any of the articles and hopefully you will find them useful.

BizTalk Processing Monitor in Public Beta

2012-01-21T12:35:00.000+01:00

Since this week BizTalk Processing Monitor is available as a Public Beta. It can be obtained here.

Why use BizTalk Processing Monitor
Depending on how you setup BizTalk Processing Monitor, it helps you, amongst others, with the following needs:

Monitoring and notification of any message flow interruptions
Get insight in how the BizTalk solution is setup
Adds value when doing stress or load tests
Informs you when your BizTalk system is throttling and why
Informs you in how many messages (in number and in KB, MB or GB) are processed
Informs you what kind of messages (Message types) are processed
Informs you about transmission failures

Features
The most important features of BizTalk Processing Monitor are:

Message flow monitoring with notifications
Throttling monitoring with notifications
Singleton Backlog monitoring
Support for multiple environments
Integration with other monitoring tools

Documentation
The following documentation is available:

Getting started with BizTalk Processing Monitor (download)
How to use the Traffic Light Monitoring (download)
Overview Keyboard Shortcuts (download)
Exporting and importing Diagrams (download)

Ordina BizTalk Innovation Event: Monitoring and Administration

2012-01-04T14:37:00.001+01:00

I am organizing an event at Ordina on BizTalk Innovation with the topic “Monitoring and Administration”. This is the first event of a series of events under name “Ordina BizTalk Innovation” that will take place at my company Ordina. This and future events are open for customers, the community and Ordina professionals. The event on the 1st of February three speakers will do their presentations on BizTalk Monitoring and administration. During the event I will be the host.

Wouter Crooy, Senior BizTalk Consultant, will have a session on:

Custom Monitoring solutions for BizTalk, ESB Toolkit & WCF

Wouter will during his talk provide a number of custom solutions for monitoring a BizTalk solution and the ESB Toolkit . Using the standard tooling of BizTalk will get you a long way, still with some of the custom monitoring solutions you can have more insight in your own custom BizTalk solutions.

Saravana Kumar, BizTalk MVP, CEO of BizTalk360 will talk on:

Manage your BizTalk Server environment efficiently using BizTalk360

BizTalk 360 is a web based (Silverlight RIA) application primarily designed for supporting and monitoring Microsoft BizTalk Server environments. It addresses some of the common challenges organizations face on running the day to day operations of a BizTalk environment. Some of the key capabilities of BizTalk360 includes:

Fine grained authorization
Governance/Audit
Proactive Monitoring/Notification capabilities
Graphical Message Flow Viewer for Tracking data
Various dashboards (Environment, Application, BizTalk Server, SQL Server, Host etc)
Advanced Event Viewer
Integrated BAM Portal
Dynamic topology diagram
Message Box Viewer (MBV) integration
Knowledge base repository

There are various other features in addition to the above, that makes BizTalk 360 a must have application for any Microsoft BizTalk Server environments.

Lex Hegt, BizTalk Architect, will have a session on:

Lex will talk on BizTalk monitoring in general and provide an overview on existing tooling in context with BizTalk administration. He will also demonstrate the BizTalk Processing Monitor. This is a tool that, among other things, does (near) real-time monitoring of message flows through BizTalk systems enabling the administrator to quickly identifying issues.

You can register for the event here. The talks of Lex and Wouter will be in Dutch and Saravana’s talk in English. Also joining us during this event will be Tord Grad Nordahl BizTalk expert on BizTalk administration from Bouvet ASA (Norway).

Cheers.

Windows Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs

2011-12-16T17:13:00.001+01:00

Microsoft today has put Windows Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs on its Windows Azure Platform. These labs provides integration capabilities for the Windows Azure Platform to extend on-premises applications to the cloud, provides rich messaging endpoints on the cloud to process and transform the messages, and helps organizations integrate with disparate applications, both on cloud and on-premises. In other words, Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs provides common integration capabilities (e.g. bridges, transforms, B2B messaging) on Windows Azure Service Bus.

Below you find list of resources (taken from Windows Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs - December 2011 Release page):

Installing the Windows Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs - December 2011: Supplies details about what is required to properly install and run Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs.

Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs - Tutorials: Start learning the basics of developing Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs solutions using these short tutorials.

Business to Business Messaging: Learn how Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs enables business-to-business messaging on Windows Azure

Rich Messaging Endpoints: Learn about the basic concepts about of rich messaging endpoints and how to use them in Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs.

Transforms: Learn how to use and configure transforms with rich messaging endpoints.

Service Bus Connect: Learn how to use Service Bus Connect in an EAI application to extend the reach of cloud-based applications to on-premises LOB applications.

Samples: Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs: Download the samples available for Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs.

This is great news for us BizTalk professionals and ones that are interested in integration capabilities in the cloud.

I can see the labs through my management portal:

Have fun.

Ordina behaalt zilver in Microsoft Applicatie integratie

2011-12-12T17:05:00.000+01:00

Afgelopen week heeft Ordina AIM binnen het Microsoft Partner Model de mooie zilveren status behaald binnen de competentie “Applicatie Integration”. Onder deze competentie vallen onder andere de bekende producten zoals BizTalk en WCF. Mede dankzij effort van Steef-Jan Wiggers en Sjoerd van Lochem is deze eerste mooie stap gemaakt. Steef-Jan ligt de prestatie verder toe:

Het Partner Model bij Microsoft is volledig op de schop gegaan, omdat in feite in heel de wereld en dus ook in Nederland teveel partners de status van “Gold” Partner hadden. Het onderscheid tussen de partners was in zijn geheel niet meer duidelijk. En “Gold” Partner waarin? Je bent Microsoft “Gold” Partner, maar wat betekent dit nu in feite voor mij als klant en waar onderscheid jij als leverancier van Microsoft diensten nu van de rest.

Als je voldoende opbrengsten levert als partner op Microsoft producten en diensten en voldoende gecertificeerde mensen in dienst hebt, dan was je “Gold” partner. Het nieuwe Partner Model van Microsoft is georganiseerd op basis van competentie, waarbij criteria gelden voor:

• Referenties
• Certificering
• Omzet

Op basis van je status op competentie kun je je onderscheiden van andere partners. Er zijn diverse competenties voor virtualisatie, communicatie, desktop, web development, applicatie integratie enzovoort. Op de competentie kun je een “Silver” of “Gold” status behalen.

Als Ordina AIM zijn we trots dat we de “Silver” status hebben kunnen behalen voor “Applicatie Integration”. De “Silver” status betekent dat we als Ordina AIM aan onze klanten kunnen laten zien, dat we voldoende referenties hebben opgebouwd op het gebied van applicatie integratie, voldoende gecertificeerde mensen aan boord hebben en omzet maken door het leveren van diverse diensten. We behoren met deze status op “Applicatie Integratie” tot 5% van alle bedrijven wereldwijd, die dergelijke status hebben op deze competentie.

De “Silver” status is een mooie mijlpaal, die we hebben bereikt. We willen uiteindelijk natuurlijk de status “Gold”. Deze status geeft ons nog meer onderscheidend vermogen ten opzichte van onze concurrenten. Met deze status kunnen we namelijk aantonen dat we wereldwijd tot de beste behoren op het gebied van “Applicatie Integration”. De status toont onze commitment tot Microsoft technologie, die bij deze competentie hoort. Technologie als BizTalk Server, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) en SQL integratie technologie als Integration Services en SQL Broker. Als Ordina AIM zijn we in staat specifieke, hoogwaardige oplossingen te leveren en de “Gold” status zal uiteindelijk het bewijs richting onze klanten zijn.

Contest at Sandro's blog: Win an e-copy of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns book

2011-12-12T11:03:00.001+01:00

Sandro Pereira has a contest in which you can win an e-copy of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns from Packt Publishing.

Since I love the book as well (got the printed version), I thought I'd try to give the contest some extra attention.

If you would like to win an e-copy, be fast: the contest closes Friday December 16th.

BizTalk Server 2010 R2: Continuing story….

2011-12-09T12:46:00.001+01:00

Last year communication of BizTalk has been a little cloudy. Will it be discontinued, will it be dead. Richard blogged on the BizTalk future story, and Tony kept discussion very lively with his talk on World Partner Conference this year. In the roadmap on Microsoft BizTalk site a vNext after 2010 was depicted.

A new release has been announced through BizTalk Server Team Blog: BizTalk Server 2010 R2. This is great news as people wondered when next release was due. This release will be delivered six months after Windows Server 8. To me it makes sense as the release will align not only with Server 8, but also VS 2011 and SQL Server 2012. Besides platform alignment other improvements have been announced like alignment with industry standards, adapter improvements, and more tighter integration with Azure. The release does not deviate much as what was shown on existing roadmap.

Exact dates of release of BizTalk Server 2010 R2 are not disclosed yet. I think when it will be release it will probably be renamed BizTalk Server 2012 or BizTalk Server 8. I personally am very happy with the announcement of this release and Microsoft continuing support for this great product and dedication to keep improving it. BizTalk is not dead or going away soon and I think it to stay for a long time.

Cheers.

New kid on the block: My BizTalk Processing Monitor

2011-12-08T10:57:00.001+01:00

Since quite some time I am developing a BizTalk monitoring tool, called BizTalk Processing Monitor (or BPM). This tool is different from most other BizTalk monitoring tools in that it does not monitor end points, but it gives (near) realtime insight if messages flow through your BizTalk Group. If there are any interruptions, you get warned. To retrieve this kind of information, BPM uses the Tracking database.

Diagram View - here you can add a picture from your system and define which information you want to see

Wednesday December 7 I had the pleasure to demonstrate BizTalk Processing Monitor to Saravana Kumar, known from amongst others BizTalk247 and BizTalk360. During a one hour Skype session we discussed BizTalk monitoring in general and BizTalk 360, but most of the time was reserved for a demonstration of my BizTalk Processing Monitor.

For January my collegue Steef-Jan Wiggers, Saravana and me are planning a talk at Ordina, Nieuwegein in the Netherlands about BizTalk monitoring and the available tools. This talk will be part of Ordina's 'Innoveer jij mee' series (Innovate wih us). For now I'll just show you a couple of screen dumps from BPM, but for a live demonstration I hope to meet you in January! Details will follow when available.

In the mean time: if you are interested in the capabilities of this tool or just want to know how it works, please don't hesitate to drop me a line!

Warning Levels legend - When, for example, it took longer
than 60 minutes to receive a certain messagetype, the
so-called Tracker in the Diagram View will turn red

Throttling View - Your Hosts and their instances are auto discovered. In case BizTalk is throttling, you get a warning.

Performance Counters by Throttling State - this screen shows more information about the
throttling related performance counters

BizTalk360 Another release more capabilities: Version 3.1

2011-12-01T22:11:00.001+01:00

BizTalk360 evolves to be a more and more mature product. In past I and other BizTalk MVP’s have written stories on this monitoring product (I used to call it a tool, but it has gone that stage it’s a product and a very good one). I have been impressed by it since the first time it almost a year ago.

On Saravana’s blog you find a detailed overview what is new in this 3.1 release. On my VM I have 2.5.790.0 version, which I uninstalled before installing the 3.1.335.0 version i.e. public beta. And I must say this was an easy process lasting only a few minutes. Only thing I needed to do is deleted the BizTalk360 database in my SQL Server database.The msi installer has been improved.

One of the new feature is the graphical end-to-end message flow viewer. I tested this by enabling tracking in one of my orchestrations. I enabled all tracking options in ports and orchestration. I ran a message through orchestration and went to BizTalk360 Tracking Data Queries and click pipeline (XmlReceive) belonging to receive location that picks the messages and sends them into MessageBox to be picked up by orchestration.

This comes very clear when dialog pops up and I click Transmitter on pipeline, then transmitter of orchestration and I get diagram shown below.

I conclude that this is a very handy feature and works easy with guidance given by Saravana blog post on this feature.

Thumbs up.

BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010: Calling a View in SQL Azure

2011-11-30T22:33:00.001+01:00

I have posted a new sample on Code Gallery: BizTalk Server 2010 Adapter Pack: Call SQL Azure View.This is one of samples I have used in my talks on BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010 Integration (A Lap Around BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010) I held in Stockholm for Swedish BizTalk User Group and in Nieuwegein for BizTalk User Group The Netherlands. Hopefully you experiment with it yourself. If you want to work with SQL Azure and want to create a database, see How to Create a SQL Azure Database wiki on TechNet.

Cheers.

My First Ten TechNet Wiki Articles on BizTalk

2011-11-21T10:56:00.001+01:00

Last couple of week I written a few wiki article for TechNet Wiki a place, where content is generated by community about Microsoft technologies for the community. I very much like the concept and glad I was able to contribute (see my interview on Wiki). Below you will find a list of my ten completed wiki articles on BizTalk:

First the featured article BizTalk Server 2010 and discusses BizTalk and shows all resource on its features.
Second a list on all available BizTalk Server 2010 community tools in BizTalk Server 2010 – Tools.
Third article is on BizTalk Server 2010 Adapter Pack an enhancement of previous adapter pack 2.0.
Fourth article is a short overview on BizTalk Server 2010 and created before I written complete article on BizTalk and its features.
Fifth article on BizTalk databases as a survival type of article listing all relevant resources on how to maintain healthy BizTalk environment with focus on BizTalk databases.
Subsequently I written another article listing resources for recovery of BizTalk itself not its databases, but this article goes hand in hand with the previous fifth article.
Seventh article is a BizTalk beginners guide listing all resources for a beginner and a little outline how he/she should proceed.
Subsequently I also written a preparation guide for 70-595 exam that can be read in conjunction with beginners guide.
Ninth article talks about monitoring tools for BizTalk and lists all alternatives to SCOM.
Final tenth article is a collection of resources for BAM and is again a survival type of article.

I hope you will find these articles useful and feel free to edit them (correct, add, enhance) as that is intention of wiki’s. I will be working on next couple of articles in near future, which will be more in depth BizTalk ones.

Cheers!

BizTalk User Group Meeting 30 November 2011

2011-11-21T09:35:00.001+01:00

My company Ordina will host next Dutch BizTalk User Group Meeting. This event we will have four speakers and agenda will be:

Steef-Jan Wiggers (Ordina) - "BizTalk Server Adapter 2010 Integration"
Jeroen Boiten (GasUnie) – "BizTalk at Gas Unie"
Jasper Defesche (Axon Olympus) - "BizTalk and Dynamics AX"
Jeroen Hendriks (Axon Olympus) – "Robust BizTalk DTAP”

It will be all Dutch talks and if you able to attend you can sign up here.

Code Gallery BizTalk Samples : Steef-Jan Wiggers

2011-11-02T18:54:00.001+01:00

Past few weeks I have contributed the following samples to MSDN Code Gallery:

BizTalk Table Operations - Messaging

This sample will show how to perform simple table operations using WCF-SQL Adapter a part of BizTalk Server Adapter Pack. The Sample provided by Microsoft shows only Select statement operation. This sample will show all the other operations. It is based on the BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010 WCF-Custom with sqlBinding Table Operations through Messaging solution post.

Polling SQL Azure Table - BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010

This sample will show polling a SQL Azure database table. It is based on Polling SQL Azure Database Table with WCF-SQL Adapter blog post.

Sample - Table Operations on Oracle 11g XE with OracleDbBinding

This sample will show all the Oracle Table operations (in comparison with SQL, but there a few differences!). It is based on Table Operation on Oracle 11g XE with OracleDbBinding blog post.

WCF-SQL Adapter Stored Procedure : SQL Azure

This sample will make use of BizTalk Adapter Pack as well and call Stored-Procedure in Azure. Sample is based on SQL Azure Stored Procedure blog post.

ExecuteReader, ExecuteNonQuery, ExecuteScalar Operation with BizTalk Messaging

This sample will demonstrate three query operations through messaging in stead of using the WCF Service Model. BizTalk Server 2010 Adapter Pack Samples show only invoke ExecuteReader operation in SQL Server using ,NET. This sample shows all operations through messaging.

Cheers!

BizTalk Server 2010–Tools

2011-10-30T17:19:00.001+01:00

I have created an article for TechNet Wiki called BizTalk Server 2010 – Tools and it is a compilation of all tooling available through Codeplex or Microsoft Download Center. These tools are not provided out of box with BizTalk Server 2010, but can be of tremendous help in debugging, logging, testing, troubleshooting, documenting solution, and performing health checks and benchmarking of your BizTalk environment. The number of tools listed and of codeplex projects pretty much covered in the article. Thanks to Colin Meade the Orchestration Profiler can be of used with BizTalk 2010. If you feel there is a tool that I have missed, which can be beneficial in any way, please feel free to add comment to the article.

Cheers !

BizTalk Server TechNet Wiki Articles

2011-10-23T21:38:00.001+02:00

The TechNet Wiki is a library of information about Microsoft technologies written by the community for the community. Through TechNet Wiki you will find the following BizTalk Server 2010 articles:

Hopefully you find one of more article that are useful for you to learn about capabilities of BizTalk or new ways to integrate with BizTalk.

Cheers!

BizTalk User Group Sweden : My debut as International Speaker

2011-10-13T15:25:00.001+02:00

Next week a new BizTalk User Group Meeting in Sweden is scheduled with two sessions:

A Lap Around BizTalk Adapter Pack
A Lap Around BizTalk360

The first session will be done by me and it will be first time I will do a session in English in another country. The other session is done by Saravana on BizTalk360. It will be second time both me and Saravana will share the same stage. Last time was June this year for the Dutch BizTalk User Group.

There are still seats left for this event, so if you want you can attend; it is in Stockholm and I expect many if it not all from Sweden. My session will be talk about BizTalk Adapter Pack, its evolution how it became the pack that is shipped along with BizTalk 2010, its origin, alignment with Microsoft Platform, Cloud and an integration scenario with Oracle. Saravana will take you through his BizTalk360 product showing a lot of its capabilities and how you can leverage them in a BizTalk production environment.

For those who will attend I am looking forward to meet you and present my story on the BizTalk Adapter Pack.

Cheers!

BizTalk360 new V2.5 release–Message Box Viewer Integration

2011-10-10T23:04:00.001+02:00

Saravana has released new version of BizTalk 360, a version 2.5 release with following important features/enhancements:

Role Based Security
Knowledge Base Repository
Message Box Viewer Integration
Message Detail (Content/Context)
Alert/Notification Enhancements

It shows that BizTalk360 has more monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities. In this blog post I will focus on troubleshooting capability: MessageBox Viewer Integration.

Many of you have heard of the BizTalk MsgBoxViewer tool that has been around for some time. It has been created by Jean-Pierre Auconie. The tool runs a set of tests and queries against the MessageBox database of your BizTalk Server. The results are displayed in the tool and can also be exported as HTML reports including links.

I wondered how this integration works with BizTalk360.After installing BizTalk360 V2.5 I looked for the feature. I clicked Settings –> Configure MBV Integration.

You will see that you need to install the MessageBox Viewer first as licensing restrictions prohibit bundling with BizTalk360. On BizTalk360 the steps are explain for configuring MessageBoxViewer. If you do not follow these steps you will see error like below:

and nothing will appear in BizTalk360 Message Box Viewer – Reports!

If you do have accept the EULA, but still see no reports than check if key below exists.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\MBVConsole\EULA]
"EULAAccepted"="YES"

In my x64 environment it set the following key after accepting EULA of MBVConsole (and not the above):

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MBVConsole\EULA]
"EULAAccepted"="YES"

After configuration you set schedule (day(s) and time(s)) and the click Save.

I set schedule on everyday at evening/night on 21:00 – 06:00 (as a test, later I rescheduled to only 21:00). And soon as MBV has run you will see report appear like below.

There is more besides having a report and that is BizTalk360 also allows you to send emails based on MBV report thresholds. For instance if in the last run MBV reports a couple of critical errors (let’s say 5), you can configure BizTalk360 to send a notification!

This is just one of new features of BizTalk360. There is more to explore through Feature Tour.

Cheers!

BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010 WCF-Custom with sqlBinding Table Operations through Messaging solution

2011-10-06T20:20:00.001+02:00

Last year I did a post on table operations using WCF-SQL Adapter as part of Adapter Pack 2.0. This post was targeted for BizTalk 2009 and I now like to do an update targeting BizTalk Server 2010. With BizTalk Server 2010 (DVD/ISO) comes the adapter pack that bundles old (non-WCF based) Enterprise Adapter for BizTalk with new (WCF-based) adapters to support compatibility with different versions of Line Of Business systems (SAP, Siebel, Oracle, Oracle eBusiness Suite). The BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010 includes support for new versions of the following line-of-business applications and databases: SAP 7, Oracle EBS 12.1 and SQL Server 2008 R2. The Adapter Pack also provides support for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4. For documentation see MSDN BizTalk Server Adapter Pack 2010 Documentation and interactive poster.

Installation is straight forward and made simpler through following steps in a wizard and adjusted to installing on x64 (you can read that in post “Installing BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010 on x64”). After installation you will need to add adapter manually if you want to use SQL adapter through a WCF-SQL port. The SQL adapter can be also used in BizTalk as a WCF-Custom port. If you want to use the SQL adapter through a WCF-Custom port, you do not need to add the WCF-Custom port to the BizTalk Server Administration console, because the WCF-Custom port is added to the BizTalk Server Administration console by default. When you use Consume Adapter Service Tool in BizTalk Project it will create xml schema’s based on operation contract (inbound or outbound) and WCF-Custom binding file.

To perform operations on SQL Server through messaging by using the WCF-Custom adapter, you must perform a set of design-time and run-time tasks using Visual Studio and BizTalk Server Administration console respectively. The following high level tasks are required to create a message based solution:

Create BizTalk project, and generate schema.
Create messages instances.
Build and deploy the BizTalk project.
Configure the application.
Start the application.

BizTalk Project and generate schema (‘s)

First, we need the XML schemas, which represent our data source. By installing the WCF LOB Adapter SDK, you will have a metadata browser built into Visual Studio. NET at your disposal. You can access this from a BizTalk project by right-clicking the project, choosing Add then Generated Items and selecting Consume Adapter Service.

This action opens a new window that provides us the interface to connect to, browse, and select database objects for service interaction. The very first thing we need to do here is choose the sqlBinding as the service binding, and then configure a connection string. The simplest working connection string consists of an Initial Catalog value for the database, and a valid Server name entry. Note that the adapter now uses a connection string in the form of a URI instead of the traditional Data Source=;Initial_Catalog=;User_ Id=;Password= style.

Once a satisfactory connection string is defined, the Connect button can be clicked to establish an active connection to the target database. If the connection is successful, one see the category browser with a set of database object categories.

On the root "/" character a range of un-typed generic functions are displayed, which can be exploited. Click on tables and you will see a number of Tables, select Products.

Click the Delete, Insert, Select and Update statement in available categories and operations. Click the Add button to add the operations. After clicking the Ok button at the bottom, schemas (and a single binding file) is added to our associated BizTalk project in Visual Studio.NET.

The binding is required later on, when solution is deployed and ports have to be configured for SQL Server (i.e. Send Port). This binding has to be edited for each operation (Select, Update, Insert, and Delete), because there is no corresponding logical ports as this a complete message based solution (if you keep original binding file and import in than you will run into error described in this post Why does the Adapter say ‘Action is not understood’ even though I am using the binding file generated by the ‘Consume Adapter Service’ wizard?). I choose to create four new binding files, each a copy of original, but all with a single operation in BtsActionMapping.

Create message instances

Next step is to generate messages from generated schema, which can be routed from Recieve location in Receive Port to a send port with WCF-Custom Adapter. Generating the first message is easy, as you can right click on the TableOperation.dbo.Products.xsd and select Generate Instance and an instance of top element is created (e.g. Select).

You will get a instance of message as depicted below:

By opening up the TableOperation.dbo.Products.xsd in file-editor you can move the next operation to top, so you can then in Visual Studio generate the next instance for an operation or you can use XML-Editor inside Visual Studio (closing schema, right click and select open with… and then select XML Editor) to move elements around. In end you will have four xml instance for TableOperations, save to file as xml (type all files, encoding UTF-8!).

Build and deploy the BizTalk project

Only schemas are required for a messaging only scenario with WCF-SQL Adapter to perform operations on SQL Server. Therefore after assigning a strong name and application name to BizTalk project it can be build and deployed.

Configure the application

After solution has been deployed it is time to configure the ports. FILE ports are easy and focus here will be configuring the WCF-Custom Send Ports. Through BizTalk Management Console one can browse to BTS.SQL.Table.Operations application and right click the application and select Import Bindings … and navigate to file called WcfSendPort_SqlAdapterBinding_Custom_Select.bindinginfo.xml, select and click Open. You will notice that a Send Port will be created automatically. You can repeat the import for binding:

WcfSendPort_SqlAdapterBinding_Custom_Delete.bindinginfo.xml
WcfSendPort_SqlAdapterBinding_Custom_Insert.bindinginfo.xml
WcfSendPort_SqlAdapterBinding_Custom_Update.bindinginfo.xml

Next steps are setting filters on WCF-Send Port and File Send Port. Configuration is as follows:

Start the application

In the end your messaging solutions can be depicted as below. After configuration you can start BizTalk application. Schema below gives an overview what will happen once drop message in folder (e.g. In folder).

I hope with this post I was able to show all operations (CRUD) on table. The sample from MSDN shows only SELECT operation and here I have extended on that, showing all operations and how to setup WCF-Custom Adapter using sqlBinding and steps to do, before you can execute all operations on a SQL Table.

You can find sample for this post through MSDN Code Gallery: BizTalk Table Operations – Messaging

Cheers!

BizTalk Operations Using a Web Console

2011-10-03T21:06:00.001+02:00

One of features that BizTalk lacks is a Web UI for operating BizTalk. There is a BizTalk Administration Console that enables BizTalk operators and Administrators to deploy and manage BizTalk Server applications and group(s). The console is basically a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) you can start from Server where BizTalk is installed or remotely on a different machine, but it is not web based. To be able to manage BizTalk from a Web UI has been a desired by BizTalk professionals for quite a while (as in years!).

I think many of you by now have heard or seen BizTalk360, a web based (RIA) BizTalk monitoring/support tool for Microsoft BizTalk Server. BizTalk360 is product created by Saravana Kumar a fellow BizTalk MVP and it is a commercial tool that gives you remote access to BizTalk Group, and gives a nice web based (Silverlight) UI! I have seen this tool in early stages during MVP summit in Redmond last February and it has evolved into great tool, feature rich with an excellent User Experience (see latest post by Kent BizTalk: Adding BizTalk 360 to your Environment). BizTalk360 can be an alternative to SCOM using BizTalk management packs.

There is another alternative if you desire a Web based UI, but do not or wish to use a product like BizTalk360. That is BizTalk Web Console you can download since this week from Codeplex and it was developed by Abdul Rafay another fellow BizTalk MVP.

As I did not see it in action I was interested to see what it can do. According to description it allows administrators/operators to perform the following operations from the browser:

Stop/Start/Restart Host Instances
View Status of Service Instances by applying queries to the group.
Stop/Start/Unenlist Orchestrations, Send Ports and Send Port Group
Stop/Start Receive Locations

I download the tool and installed it on my VM with BizTalk 2010 according to the release notes. I then opened up the BTS2010WebConsole in my browser and started some operations like Stop/Start/Restart Host Instances. That worked without a problem.

I then tried some others operations and they worked fine too.

These basic operations are available from the browser and the UI is very basic and straight forward. The number of operations is still limited though and resembles a subset of all capabilities the BizTalk Administration Console offers.It is a start and for those who want to have custom web based access to their BizTalk group they can leverage this project to their own needs. If you do have enough budget in your organization and prefer to have an off the shelve product than BizTalk360 is definitely a product you should consider!

Polling SQL Azure Database Table with WCF-SQL Adapter

2011-10-02T21:45:00.001+02:00

I have seen polling related questions sometimes on the BizTalk forums and I myself occasionally have come across a scenario’s where I had to use polling. In past I have read a couple of posts on polling like the one from Richard (TypedPolling) and Armen (Polling). Now with SQL Azure I wondered if it is possible to poll a SQL Azure Table.

If you have an account with Windows Azure Portal than you can create 1 Gb database online. You can go for a free trail (90 days), or through MSDN account (you receive quite a lot of benefits with Windows Azure), or commercially (see pricing). In a previous post I showed some steps how to create a new SQL Azure database.

You can create a database through Windows Azure Portal or SQL Management Studio. If you connect to SQL Azure through Management Studio you need to use SQL Server Authentication, fill in the server name, and credentials.

Once connected you will in the left pane see Azure database you connect to.

When you click New Query a query windows will appear on the right. Here I executed the following statement:

USE [master]
GO

CREATE DATABASE [CustomerOnlineDb]
GO

In left pane you will see new database in databases tree. Select that database and click New Query again, a new query pane will appear. Here I executed the following statement:

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[CustomerAddress](
    [CustomerAddressID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,
    [FirstName] [nvarchar](50) NOT NULL,
    [MiddleName] [nvarchar](50) NOT NULL,
    [LastName] [nvarchar](50) NOT NULL,
    [FullName] [nvarchar](50) NOT NULL,
    [CompanyName] [nvarchar](50) NOT NULL,
    [FullAddress] [nvarchar](50) NOT NULL,
    [PostalCode] [nvarchar](50) NOT NULL,
    [City] [nvarchar](50) NOT NULL,
    [StateProvince] [nvarchar](50) NOT NULL,
    [Country] [nvarchar](50) NOT NULL,
    [Polled] [bit] NOT NULL
CONSTRAINT [PK_CustomerAddress] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED
(
    [CustomerAddressID] ASC
)
)

INSERT INTO dbo.CustomerAddress(FirstName, MiddleName, LastName, FullName, CompanyName, FullAddress, PostalCode, City, StateProvince, Country, Polled)
VALUES('Catherine','R.','Abel','Catherine R. Abel', 'Professional Sales and Service','57251 Serene Blvd','91411','Van Nuys','California','United States',0)
GO

INSERT INTO dbo.CustomerAddress(FirstName, MiddleName, LastName, FullName, CompanyName, FullAddress, PostalCode, City, StateProvince, Country, Polled)
VALUES('Frances','B.','Smith','Frances B. Smith', 'Area Bike Accessories','6900 Sisk Road','95354','Modesto','California','United States',0)
GO

INSERT INTO dbo.CustomerAddress(FirstName, MiddleName, LastName, FullName, CompanyName, FullAddress, PostalCode, City, StateProvince, Country, Polled)
VALUES('Margaret','J.','Adams','Magaret J. Adams', 'Bicycle Accessories and Kits','Lewiston Mall','83501','Lewiston','Idaho','United States',0)
GO

INSERT INTO dbo.CustomerAddress(FirstName, MiddleName, LastName, FullName, CompanyName, FullAddress, PostalCode, City, StateProvince, Country, Polled)
VALUES('Samuel','N.','Agcaoili','Samuel N. Agcaoili', 'Vinyl and Plastic Goods Corporation',' 25800-130 King Street West','M4B 1V5','Toronto','Ontario','Canada',0)
GO

INSERT INTO dbo.CustomerAddress(FirstName, MiddleName, LastName, FullName, CompanyName, FullAddress, PostalCode, City, StateProvince, Country, Polled)
VALUES('Robert','E.','Ahlering','Robert E. Ahlering', 'Fun Toys and Bikes','6500 East Grant Road','85701','Tucson','Arizona','United States',0)
GO

I then executed SELECT * FROM dbo.CustomerAddress TSQL Statement and check if there is data.

I have set up now a database in SQL Azure with one table containing five records. The next step is to create a BizTalk project and having a xml schema and WCF-Custom Receive Port Binding generated for table in my SQL Azure database I wish to poll. I configured the URI to connect to SQL Azure (security, connection string and adapter binding properties), choose inbound operations and from available categories Polling. When I click Ok a DataSetSchema.xsd and Polling.xsd is generated together with WcfReceivePort_SqlAdapterBinding_Custom.bindinginfo.xml file. I deployed project after signing and giving appropriate name for BizTalk application.

Notice that with the Consume Adapter Service Wizard you have ability to choose between three type of inbound operations: Polling, TypedPolling and Notification. This means you can with:

Polling operation a data set as part of the polling message returned.
TypedPolling operation a strongly-typed polling message returned.
Notification operation a notification message returned.

Important step after deployment of schema’s is importing the custom binding file and setting some properties (i.e. pollDataAvailableStatement, pollingStatement). Importing a binding is a straightforward operation inside BizTalk Administation Console. After the receive port and location is created you can double click receive location and then Configure Type (WCF-Custom). URI is present in General Tab and can be left as is. In next tab you see binding information of sqlBinding. In polledDataAvailableStatement I have the following statement: SELECT COUNT(*) FROM dbo.CustomerAddress and for pollingStatement: SELECT * FROM dbo.CustomerAddress WHERE Polled = 0; UPDATE dbo.CustomerAddress SET Polled=1 WHERE Polled=0;

I also changed useAmbientTransaction property to False (for operations where the adapter client does not write any data to the SQL Server database, such as a Select operation, you might not want the additional overhead of performing the operations inside a transaction. In such cases, you can configure the SQL adapter to perform operations without a transactional context by setting the UseAmbientTransaction binding property to false.)

In the tab called Other I configured the credentials filling in user name and password for the account to access database on SQL Azure. After that you are ready for receive side. As I just wanted to poll data and send it to file, I also created a Send Port that uses FILE Adapter. I configured the adapter to send data to folder with a filter that subscribes to message type http://schemas.microsoft.com/Sql/2008/05/Polling/#Polling.

As you can I basically have messaging solution now that polls data from SQL Azure database table and routes the polled data as a single message to a folder on-premise (i.e. my virtual machine). Once I start the application I see after a few seconds a xml file containing data.

If I perform a query inside my SQL Management Studio I noticed the column Polled is 1 for every record.

With WCF-SQL Adapter I am able to poll a SQL Azure table and not just polling, but calling a Stored-Procedure or table operations are also possible using WCF-SQL adapter, available through BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010. I conclude that you can use WCF-SQL adapter for on-premise SQL Server and its cloud variant SQL Azure!

BizTalk Server 2010 Unleashed

2011-10-02T13:56:00.002+02:00

This weekend I received my copy of the new BizTalk Server book BizTalk Server 2010 Unleashed.

This book, from the hands of elite members of the BizTalk community Brian Loesgen, Charles Young, Jan Eliasen, Scott Colestock, Anush Kumar and John Flanders is the second edition of a series that started with BizTalk Server 2004 unleashed and which was then concidered to be The Book when working with BizTalk Server 2004.

Although I have not yet had the chance to read it front to back, I am already delighted to see some very exciting and usefull chapters in the Advanced Topics section of the book.

The book deals with the topics of the Business Rules engine and the ESB Toolkit not only from a technical perspective but adds conceptual insights too. This alone should be reason enough to get the book at your earliest convenience.

In chapters 10 and 11 the business rules engine is explained to a level of detail I have never seen in one single place before. It is the coherent collection of snippets of information to be found all over the internet but also adds value by explaining some theoretics behind Rule-based programming.

In chapter 12, you will find the ESB Toolkit described. Again, it offers a complete overview of the technology and some basic insights into the concept of ESB, the added value of the ESB Toolkit and what you are supposed to use it for. Unfortunatly, despite being well written and well explained, it still is very theoretic with little to no handles for developers developing interest to get started. This is in contrast with most other chapters and may very well be the biggest shortcoming of the book. However, this still does not disqualify it at any time as a must-have for BizTalk consultants of any given level.

Windows Azure Service Bus Topics and Queues

2011-09-27T15:03:00.001+02:00

A topic that I think BizTalk professional find appealing in Windows Azure is the Service Bus (part of Windows Azure AppFabric). Service Bus provides secure messaging and connectivity capabilities that enable building distributed and disconnected applications in the cloud, as well hybrid application across both on-premises and the cloud.

One of new features is topics and queues. Clemens Vasters did a talk on Windows Azure Service Bus Topics and Queues during Windows Build and an advanced one, which you find on his blog.

You can work with this new feature through Windows Azure AppFabric SDK V1.5 - September 2011. The version 1.5 SDK includes an updated Service Bus assembly that includes support for durable, or “brokered” messaging features, such as queues, topics, and subscriptions. These features require the .NET Framework version 4.0. (Note: If you have a dependency on the .NET Framework version 3.5, you should download or continue to use version 1.0 of the AppFabric SDK.)

If you have virtual machine available or laptop following requirements are applicable:

Account Requirements Before running the samples in the SDK, you must have one or more service namespaces. To create a Windows Azure AppFabric service namespace, you have to register or login Windows Azure Platform Portal.
Runtime Requirements The Windows Azure AppFabric SDK samples are available as Visual Studio 2010 solutions (C# and VB) and require Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 higher to run. The SDK is supported on Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, and Windows XP operating systems. For Windows Server AppFabric integration, IIS7.5 is required.

Documenting BizTalk Environment and BizTalk Solution

2011-09-23T14:32:00.001+02:00

When it comes to documentation with BizTalk it can be challenging task. What do and what do I not document and how do I document it. In my view there are three types of documentation when it comes to BizTalk in my opinion. That is:

BizTalk Environment (Design) document
Functional Design of BizTalk Solution
Technical (Design) of BizTalk Solution

BizTalk Environment (design) documentation you can described the different BizTalk environment Development, UAT and Production. In this type of document you can roughly describe the following:

Purpose;
Design Decisions regarding environments;
Considerations/Issues;
Landscape (how does it fit with in IT-Landscape in Enterprise);
MS BizTalk and SQL Server editions;
SQL Server configuration (sizing disk, clustering e.a.);
ICT Policy (Back up, Anti-virus, Patching, e.a.) applied in Enterprise;
Operating Systems;
Security Settings;
Backup and Restore (procedures e.a.);
BizTalk Group Configuration (clustering, availability e.a.);
Host configuration;

To add you in documenting the environment or take into consideration (i.e. reference material) is MSDN Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 Operations Guide.

Functional Design you describe how solution will work, which service it will call, what type of message’s it excepts, processes and sends. You can use notation symbols found in EAI Patterns site and create a functional model for your BizTalk solution (see example below).

You can also use UML like state diagram to depict process that is implemented in BizTalk solution (see picture below).

Besides diagrams, you will also document specifications for messages (data types, restrictions, e.a.), security settings, protocols, message patterns, and so on.

Finally Technical (design) documentation of BizTalk solution and its configuration is fairly simple as you use BizTalk documenter for it. This is tool found on codeplex that can automatically generate a document (compiled chm, and even HTML for 2010 version).You can start documenter and following screen will be shown.

Click Next, Select if you want to completely document entire configuration of specific BizTalk application.

Click Next, you can select (this is new with BizTalk 2010 documenter) SSO configuration e.a.

Click Next, choose output options.

Finally you can click Generate Documentation and documentation will generated for you in desired format.

As you can see working with documenter is pretty straight forward and type of documentation can be realized with minimal effort. You can keep this documentation easy up to date when changes are made to BizTalk solution. Versioning your solution and its documentation is very important here! Documentation of BizTalk environment will take more effort and will be done in MS Word with perhaps drawings from Visio (there are BizTalk stencils, see post by Sandro). Functional documentation regarding your BizTalk solution will also require some effort, but vital before implementing your solution. Usually MS Word and Visio are used here as well.

Comments are welcome as I am interested in your view on documenting BizTalk.

Cheers!

BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns by Dan Rosanova

2011-09-07T01:54:00.001+02:00

Currently I am in Toronto staying at friend enjoying some free time before heading to San Francisco, and SoCal for the Windows Build Conference. Still I find some time to write this post, which I wanted to as BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns book is there for pre-order. A new BizTalk book written by Dan Rosanova, two time MVP BizTalk Server, and over a decade over of experience delivering solutions on Microsoft platforms in different branches. It is published by PACKT and reviewed by myself, fellow MVP Randal van Splunteren and Rene Brauwers, basically an all Dutch BizTalk Technical Review team.

I enjoyed reviewing it and found that the author has put in tremendous effort together with a lot of people at PACKT and fellow reviewers to be able to publish such a fine book. I realize it may sound/read like I am shamelessly plugging/promoting this book, but I really mean it. Therefor I am going to tell you why I mean it and why as an professional integration professional, consultant or architect in Microsoft space need to buy this book.

First of all it is a great book, and in first part it extensively details the important parts of BizTalk, how to structure your solution, XLANG, architecture and its components like BAM, artefacts (i.e. orchestrations, pipelines, maps), operation architecture (i.e. scalability, availability), (unit) testing and messaging concepts. The second part the focus shifts from theory to practice and will be very appealing for professionals that develop BizTalk solutions. This part delivers you the skills to error handling, WCF-SQL Adapter capabilities, BRE (i.e. policies, vocabularies and rules), dealing with flat files and bindings, BAM, SQL Broker (Notifications), SharePoint, orchestration patterns (i.e. conveys), handling zombies and some other concepts.

Second reason is that this book neatly fits in with other BizTalk books published by PACKT like :

Third and final reason you will be a better BizTalk professional or architect, when applying the knowledge found in BizTalk Patterns book and others. Who wouldn’t want that!

Book is available through Amazon and PACKT is self, so go to either of one and order it!

Cheers, and now I am off to diner.

Proef Ordina! Aangenaam kennis te maken

2011-09-06T10:36:00.000+02:00

Proef Ordina! Zomer editie geeft je donderdagavond 22 september een kijkje in de keuken van Ordina. Je bent bij Ordina thuis uitgenodigd! In een ongedwongen sfeer kun je kennismaken met Ordina als werkgever en ontdekken wat ‘jouw toekomst bij Ordina’ is.

Want bij Ordina is de zomer nog niet voorbij! Samen maken we deze avond tot een groot succes: barbecue, inhoud en een spetterend optreden van talenten van de Voice of Holland Pearl, Rafaella en Bart.

Tijdens de avond krijg je onder andere een kijkje in de keuken van de Excellence Centers van Ordina. Zowel professionals als leden van het management zijn aanwezig om je te informeren over de diensten en producten die wij aan onze klanten leveren. Via demo’s, presentaties en gesprekken hoor en zie je wat voor moois er allemaal gebakken wordt in de keuken van Ordina.

Kijk voor meer info op http://www.proefordina.nl/

What new Training Kit BizTalk 2010

2011-08-26T15:30:00.001+02:00

There is a new training kit for BizTalk 2010. It contains:

Hands On Labs

Creating BizTalk Maps with the new Mapper
Consuming a WCF Service
Publishing Schemas and Orchestrations as WCF Services
Integrating with Microsoft SQL Server
Integrating using the FTP Adapter
Developers - Create a Role and Party-based Integration Solution
Exploring the New Settings Dashboard
Monitoring BizTalk Operations using System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2
Administrators - Create a Role and Party-based Integration Solution

Presentations and Videos

Introduction and New Features Overview
The New and Improved Mapper
Updated Adapter Features
Trading Partner Management
Configuring Performance and Application Settings
Monitoring BizTalk Using Operations Manager

BizTalk 2010 Environment

You will be needing a BizTalk 2010 environment to do the labs and for that you have a couple of options:

a) Create an environment yourself if you access to resources like MSDN

b) Download the virtual disk contain BizTalk environment. You will need Window 2008 Hyper V for that. Workaround is that after downloading the VHD you convert it to VMDK and mount in VMWare workstation.

c) Download the BizTalk Administration Kit Virtual Hard Disk also containing training for administrators. Apply same workaround if you want it in VMWare workstation.

Success!

BizTalk RFID and StreamInsight Talk

2011-08-23T09:19:00.001+02:00

Coming Monday I will present together with my colleague Wouter on BizTalk RFID and StreamInsight (Complex Event Processing). It is what my company calls a “Innoveer jij mee sessie” and these talks are about innovation. I did similar talk a few months back on BizTalk AppFabric Connect. Talks are in Dutch and hosted at or Headquarters in Nieuwegein. It is open for public and you are free to register here.

If you cannot make it the talk following resources will cover what we will talk about:

TechEd 2010 StreamInsight Session and Demo
Microsoft StreamInsight: Introduction to Complex Event Processing with SQL Server 2008 R2 StreamInsight
The Eco System for RFID in BizTalk (google download PDF)

If you can make it and looking forward seeing you at presentation.

Cheers!

Learn about the BizTalk Business rules Engine

2011-08-16T00:02:00.006+02:00

One of the strong points of the BizTalk Server Integration suite is the inclusion of a very versatile, flexible and extendable Business rules engine.

This versatility, however, is the same thing that makes it widely underused in deployments using BizTalk Server. Even today, being on the market in various versions for more than 6 years, I see people often struggle with it.

The root problem: the same flexibility and versatility comes with a rather steep learning curve to master.

To help you get started, Microsoft has packed a hands-on learning guide into a Virtual Lab. You can get to it here.

Try it, you won't be disappointed.

BizTalk 2010 : Line of Business System Integration

2011-08-04T16:08:00.001+02:00

Packt Publishing has released another great BizTalk resource by title of Microsoft BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Integration.

Authors have done an excellent job detailing integration with Dynamics (CRM,AX), SalesForce, SharePoint, and SAP. There was not much documentation on integration with Dynamics for instance and most it was out dated. Currently there a couple of BizTalk books out there and all they focus mainly on out-of-box features and capabilities. None of them really talked about capabilities offered by BizTalk Adapter Pack that has been out there a couple years now. Line-Of-Business adapters in this package enable integration with SAP, Oracle, Oracle eBusiness Suite, Siebel and and SQL Server. This book does deal with integration with a couple of these LOB systems.

Besides that it shows how to integrate with SharePoint, and Dynamics two other Microsoft Products, which may seem that that easy to integrate with. It isn't, as it can be quite complex, but with guidance provided in this book it will make life easier for you. If professionals like yourself are facing issues on current projects with these systems, or need guidance on how prepare yourselves before going to do integration project, or want more background/knowledge than this book will be extremely useful for you.

I myself have bought the book and promoted it during a talk on Sales Force integration I gave to BizTalk Dutch User Group as it was a great resource for preparation and leveraging samples.

The Future of Middleware and the BizTalk Roadmap

2011-07-14T22:19:00.001+02:00

If you are interested in future of BizTalk you can view session from World Partner Conference 2011 in Los Angeles by Tony Meleg: AP03 The Future of Middleware and the BizTalk Roadmap

Detail:
If you have a development practice or you are an ISV and you create complex solutions for customers, you need a number of middleware capabilities at your disposal. BizTalk Server has been at the center of Microsoft’s Middleware platform for a number of years, to provide many of these capabilities. AppFabric, both on-premise and on Windows Azure provides additional capabilities as well as some overlapping ones. So what is the strategy here, what is Microsoft up to long term and short term? How will this affect solutions you create and what opportunities will it create for your company? In this session, you will get the answers to these questions.

BizTalk AppFabric Connect Article

2011-04-08T11:28:00.002+02:00

My article on newest feature of BizTalk Server 2010: AppFabric connect is now online on Dutch .NET Magazine website. .NET Magazine is a great resource for Microsoft technology. It is printed version is limited in space though, so not every article can be published in there. Fortunately the website doesn't have that limitation and every good article can be published there too. Thanks Gerard (Microsoft) for publishing the article online.

Steef-Jan co-elected BizTalk MVP of the year

2011-03-03T21:49:00.000+01:00

During the MVP summit in Redmond our collegue Steef-Jan Wiggers is, together with Stephan W. Thomas and Richard Seroter, elected by his fellow BizTalk MVP's as BizTalk MVP of the year. Steef-Jan said about this 'For me this is an enormous boost, since I am a MVP for only a year (which, according to some, in itself is already special). Although this is great, I prefer to stay modest as in my view many MVP's are doing a great job as well. I will stay focused and commited to BizTalk, my employer Ordina and my clients'.

Further Steef-Jan will become a moderator of the BizTalk forums (General, Adapter Pack, etc.) at MSDN.com.

In his column 'Four questions with...' Richard Seroter interviewed Steef-Jan. You can read this interview here. His blog 'SOA Thoughts, EAI Challenges', can be found here.

@Steef-Jan: Your BizTalk collegues and the management team at Ordina congratulate you, with the deepest possible respect. It must be amazing to hear your name called in one sentence with uber-BizTalk gurus Stephan W. Thomas and Richard Seroter.

BizTalk Server 2010 certification is coming

2011-02-19T00:37:00.000+01:00

March 30 the certification for BizTalk 2010 comes available. Check it out at the Microsoft Learning site.

BTSDecompress is on CodePlex

2011-02-14T21:47:00.000+01:00

The utility to decompress BizTalk Messages and their context, discussed here, is published on CodePlex.

Hope you'll enjoy it!

Masterclass BizTalk en AppFabric bij Ordina

2011-01-26T14:50:00.001+01:00

Op dinsdag 15 februari a.s. geeft Steef-Jan Wiggers bij Ordina een masterclass.

Gedurende het programma is er aandacht voor de nieuwste versie van BizTalk Server. Wat is BizTalk Server, wat is er nieuw en hoe evolueert het zich richting de toekomst.
Daarnaast zal AppFabric aan bod komen, zowel de Server als Cloud variant. De functionele als technische kant van BizTalk Server en AppFabric zullen worden belicht.

Voor meer informatie/aanmelden: http://iturl.nl/sncK0

Since this post is aimed at the Dutch community, it is published only in Dutch.

Installing Windows SharePoint Services Web Service Adapter BizTalk Server 2010/SharePoint Foundation 2010

2010-12-24T19:00:00.001+01:00

I think a lot of you have read the excellent series ShareTalk Integration (SharePoint/BizTalk) by Kent Weare. Focus was on BizTalk 2009 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. Now with BizTalk 2010 you are able to configure SharePoint adapter to Windows SharePoint Services like previous 2009 version.BizTalk Server 2010 supports two versions of WSS:

SharePoint Foundation 2010
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with SP2

Latter is explained in detail by Sandro Pereira, BizTalk 2010 Installation and Configuration – Install and Configure Windows SharePoint Services. In this post I like to share how to configure BizTalk SharePoint Adapter with SharePoint Foundation 2010.

Installing and configuring Windows SharePoint Services consists of the following procedures:

Install Windows SharePoint Services
Configure Windows SharePoint Services
Extend the Default Web Site as a virtual server

Install Windows SharePoint Foundation 2010

First step of installation is to install prerequisites. In my situation I am installing SharePoint Foundation on virtual machine (Windows Server 2008R2 x64, 4 core’s 4 Gb memory) following the installation manual for BizTalk Server 2010 called: Installing BizTalk Server 2010 on Windows Server 2008 R2 and 2008 (see BizTalk Server 2010 documentation).

When installing software prerequisites you just have to click Next a few times (it is pretty straight forward).

After this it installing SharePoint Foundation itself.

This involves also a couple of steps, where you have to make some choices.

Installation depends on if you want to do a standalone or server farm.

A Stand-alone installation configures a single computer with all the necessary files and settings to create a fully functioning SharePoint implementation, including Web server, application server, and database. SQL Server Express 2008 is installed and configured to provide data storage capability. SQL Server Express is based on the Microsoft SQL Server architecture, but it has the following limitations:

lack of enterprise features support;
limited to one CPU;
one gigabyte (GB) memory limit for the buffer pool;
databases have a 4 GB maximum size;
SQL Server Express will not support a server farm configuration or a multi-processor computer.

In addition to the SQL Server Express limitations, the inherit SharePoint Foundation Standalone configuration limitation is that you cannot add servers to create a SharePoint farm. If you need to add another SharePoint 2010 Web Front End later than you won’t be able to. If you anticipate the need to scale up to a larger or more robust installation, choose the Server Farm option.

SharePoint Foundation 2010 Server Farm will install all components. You can add additional servers to form a SharePoint farm, including load balanced SharePoint 2010 Web Front End servers. The Complete option installs a Web server and configures the computer to provide application server functionality. The SharePoint Foundation 2010 Complete install option does not provide database functionality. If you continue with this option and your server does not belong to a domain, for instance just a workgroup you will see error if you proceed with steps below.

For development purposes, proof-of-concepts or demo it is better to choose Standalone. If you opted for this then the SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard will immediately begin the ten step configuration process.

After you have let the wizard run through, you should automatically be directed to a default SharePoint Foundation 2010 site that looks a lot like the screen below.

Install Windows SharePoint Services Adapter

As soon as this has been done you can proceed with next steps installation manual. It then comes down to installing BizTalk. When you select components you will see that you can install Windows SharePoint Services Adapter.

As you can see it is a simple process of installing the Windows SharePoint Services Web Service Adapter when SharePoint Foundation 2010 is installed. Do bear in mind that SharePoint Foundation only install on x64!

Technorati: biztalk server 2010

BizTalk-version table

2010-12-11T22:15:00.002+01:00

3.0.1764.0 - BizTalk Server 2000 SP1a
3.0.2023.0 - BizTalk Server 2002 SP1
3.0.4902.0 - BizTalk Server 2004
3.0.5204.0 - BizTalk Server 2004 Rollup Package 1
3.0.6070.0 - BizTalk Server 2004 SP1
3.0.7405.0 - BizTalk Server 2004 SP2
3.5.1602.0 - BizTalk Server 2006
3.6.1404.0 - BizTalk Server 2006 R2
3.6.2149.10 - BizTalk Server 2006 R2 SP1
3.8.368.0 - BizTalk Server 2009
3.8.454.2 - BizTalk Server 2009 Cumulative update package 1
3.9.469.0 - BizTalk Server 2010
3.9.522.2 - BizTalk Server 2010 Cumulative update package 1
3.9.530.2 - BizTalk Server 2010 Cumulative update package 2
3.9.542.2 - BizTalk Server 2010 Cumulative update package 3

Migrating BizTalk 2006R2 sources to BizTalk 2010 without (too much) pain

2010-12-11T00:28:00.004+01:00

====================================
I originally posted this here but decided to repost here also because I believe this to be a real timesaver.
====================================

I ran into it. You probably did too. You tried to convert your BizTalk 2006R2 solution to BizTalk 2010 (or 2009) and found that your solution was OK, your C# libraries went just fine, but none of your BizTalk projects had been converted.

Then, when you retried this from the converted solution, or tried to load a .btproj directly, you got that dreaded message: Error converting project file. The element <BIZTALK> beneath element <VisualStudioProject> is unrecognized.

I 'blame' the BizTalk Deployment framework for this as Microsoft clearly thought no-one would ever try to move away from the suggested Deployment and Development build configurations. So if you, as we did, change it to Debug and Release when we moved to the BTDF, you are in for a bit of work.

Now I have for you the best way to get going. I found it just out of sheer desperation trying to get things working the way they should.

The best part? It takes just about 5 minutes per solution, independent of the size of it!!. It has worked for all solutions I have tried so far.

Now, How to do it.

1) Make sure you have a backup of your solution file BEFORE trying any conversions. You need the clean 2006R2 version (or : you can of course also use an Undo Pending Changes option of your TFS when the time comes to revert the solution file in step 7).

2)Just open the solution in Visual Studio 2010 as you want to. This will prompt the upgrade wizard to do what it does best.

3)Review the loaded solution. You should have a converted solution, loaded C# libraries and unloaded BizTalk projects.

4) Close all windows in Visual Studio.

5) Right-click each unloaded project file and select Edit to open it in text mode. You now should have all files open in text mode.

6) Using basic search and replace do a replace on all open documents replacing Name = "Debug" by Name = "Development" and replacing Name = "Release" with Name = "Deployment". Each replace should give a count of items replaced equal to the number of open BizTalk projects.

7) Now the big trick: Either close your solution and put back the backed up .sln file you made earlier and then re-open your solution OR just select Undo Pending changes on your solution file (AND JUST THE SOLUTION FILE...)

8) The Migration Wizard will trigger again and now will convert your BizTalk projects as expected.

9) Now we are almost done, except that you BizTalk project has a configuration base (Deployment/Development) that has not been defined in the solution (Release/Debug).

You need to get this back in sync. To do this, unload all BizTalk projects from the solution (right-click, select unload) and once again open them in textmode (all other windows closed)

10) Now reverse the replace: replace "Development" with "Debug" and replace "Deployment" with "Release". Save all files, then close all files.

11) Close and reopen you solution, as for some reason, Visual Studio complains about reloading projects that are already opened under the solution if you try to reload them now. Even when they are closed...

12) Reload all BizTalk projects in the solution, save and we are done.

So. I hope this just will get you going. Any comments, as always, are appreciated to make this work better, make note of exceptions to the rule etc etc.

Happy converting

C# solution to decompress BizTalk messages and their context

2010-12-08T18:15:00.003+01:00

As most of you will know BizTalk messages and context are stored in the MessageBox and the Tracking database as Image types. By several people a number of posts have been written about decompressing BizTalk messages and their context and here's another one!

When we had an incident with quite some suspended (not resumable) instances, we needed to retrieve message content and context. This information should be used to take appropriate actions for damage elimination.

After a search I found this great article from Thiago Almeida. It even contains a sample solution! Good news though for an intermediate developer as me!
The last couple of days I've been working on the solution and made it use just the SQL method. My goal was to create functions in C#, that would decompress the fields that contains the message and the context and enable the user to use these functions in SQL queries they entered in a textbox.

It ended up with the screen you find below.

Click the image to enlarge it

After selecting the database server which contains the BizTalk databases, you select the MessageBox database. In the Query textfield you can enter your SELECT query. As you might have noticed already, there are 2 non-SQL functions in the currently entered query, namely:

@MessageToText() - used to decompress messages
@ContextToText() - used to decompress message context

These are the functions I designed to decompress the message content and context. Before the SQL query is fired at the database, the application will strip these functions (and their optional parameters) for later use, when the resultset is returned from the database.
So basically all you have to do is write a SQL query and when you have a field which contains message content or message context, surround that field with the appropriate function to have the message content or context returned from you MessageBox!

Since messages can be pretty large and you might not need the entire XML from it, or maybe you are not interested in all the context properties, I extended the functions to show just certain XML and/or certain properties from the message context.

Show just a part of the XML message
When you just need a certain part of the XML, you can enter a XPath query and the message will return just that XML. When the message doesn't contain the nodes, elements or attributes mentioned in th XPath query, an empty string is returned.

The @MessageToText() function than becomes called as follows:

@MessageToText([field that contains the message];"[XPath query]")
Example: @MessageToText(imgPart;"//CustomerInfo")

Show just certain context properties
When you just need certain context properties, you can select them by entering them in a semicolon seperated list, like this:

@ContextToText([field that contains the message context];[Context property];[Context property])
Example: @ContextToText(imgContext;MessageType; PortName; OrderType)

You can enter as many or little properties you need. Entering non existant (or typos) properties has no negative side effects.

Other features
Further I built a couple of small features.

Just like in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), when you select a part of the query, only that part is fired at the database.
When you have a decompressed a message and want to create a XPath query, you can copy the XML from the message, hit the Parse XML... button, paste the XML in the dialog that appeared and experience with the XPath query. When you're done testing the XPath query, you can copy it, close the dialog and paste the XPath at the appropriate position in the Query field.
To get a 'clean' resultset, you can choose to hide the Outer XML tag and/or the name of the context properties.
You can choose whether you want to see the field names in the resultset.
For better readability you can add whitespace between the records in the resultset
Word wrap is supported in the Output box
To protect you and your MessageBox from heavy load, only the top xx number of records will be returned, depending on the value selected in the dropdown box.

Recommendations on accessing the BizTalk databases
There are a couple of guidelines when accessing the BizTalk databases directly from SSMS:

Only do this when no other options are available
Just do SELECT queries
Don't forget the WITH(NOLOCK) hint
Never change existing BizTalk tables, indexes, triggers, SP's, etc...

If you call in Microsoft for help and they find modified BizTalk objects, you will be fully charged for fixing the problems.

Enjoy the tool and if you have any questions or comments, don't hesitate!

Here's the download: BTSDecompress solution

Prerequirement
The decompressing is done by the so called BTS Accessor. This standard BizTalk DLL needs to be installed on the machine where you run the decompress tool.

@Thiago: thanks for having me use your solution!

SQL query to view all Instance Subscriptions and their expressions

2009-02-26T16:47:00.004+01:00

From the Group Hub in BizTalk 2006 you can have a look at all existing subscriptions. However to have a look at the expression which is related to the instance, you have to open the Subscription Details screen and go to the Expression tab page.

At my current customer we needed to know which (and how many) subscriptions still exists from the previous version of our application, so we can take the appropriate action on them before migrating to the next version of our application.

Based on the BizTalk Server 2006 - Internals session, Lee Graber gave at TechEd 2006 in Barcelona, I took a backup from the Messagebox and Mangement database and in a offline situation, I did some investigation in the MessageBox-database tables which led to the following SQL query.

SELECT distinct
m.nvcName,
sub.dtTimeStamp,
sub.uidInstanceID,
ds.msgtype,
eq.vtValue
FROM Services s
INNER JOIN Modules m
ON s.nModuleID = m.nModuleID
INNER JOIN Subscription sub
INNER JOIN PredicateGroup pg
ON sub.uidPredicateGroupID = pg.uidPredicateORGroupID
INNER JOIN EqualsPredicates eq
ON pg.uidPredicateANDGroupID = eq.uidPredicateGroupID
ON s.uidServiceID = sub.uidServiceID
INNER JOIN BizTalkMgmtDB.dbo.bt_DocumentSpec ds
ON eq.uidPropID = ds.id
WHERE uidInstanceID is not null -- (not interested in the Activation subscriptions)
order by sub.dtTimeStamp

It is far from complete and I left out the matters which are only relevant to my customer (just some WHERE clauses), but perhaps this query is helpfull to others as well.
The Modules table contains the available BizTalk Applications, it relates to the Subcription table via the Services table.
Basically the Subscription part of the data model uses the following tables:

- Subscription
- PredicateGroup
- BitwiseANDPredicates
- EqualsPredicates
- EqualsPredicates2ndPass
- ExistsPredicates
- FirstPassPredicates
- GreaterThanOrEqualsPredicates
- GreaterThanPredicates
- LessThanOrEqualsPredicates
- LessThanPredicates
- NotEqualsPredicates

Depending of the operator used in the expression of the subscription, information is placed in the Predicate tables.

NOTE: take extreme care when querying the BizTalk database. Although possible it is not recommended to do updates to the BizTalk databases with self-created SQL queries.

Enjoy!

Ordina organises the first annualy international SOA Symposium for practitioners in Amsterdam

2008-06-20T21:44:00.000+02:00

In early October 2008 the first annualy international SOA Symposium will be held in the Amsterdam Arena. A lot of international speakers will be there, amongst them Thomas Erl and Brian Loesgen!

There are 40 speaker sessions across the following 10 tracks:
- SOA Architecture & Design
- Service Modeling & BPM
- SOA & Business
- SOA & REST
- SOA & Web 2.0
- SOA Governance
- SOA Programming
- SOA Innovations
- SOA Infrastructure & Technology
- SOA Project Delivery & Methodology

Post-conference there will be three five-day certification workshops:
- Certified SOA Consultant
- Certified SOA Architect
- Certified SOA Analyst
The workshops are organised by SOASCHOOL.com.

The symposium and the workshops look great, so I'm really looking forward to going there!

Two great articles about the Oracle adapter

2007-04-13T17:43:00.001+02:00

Last week I had to help a collegue with the Oracle adapter. To get started I used the following 2 articles:

Richard Seroter's Walkthrough

Wilfried Mausz's Oracle adapter demo

These two articles and some general BizTalk knowledge helped me to understand most of the Oracle adapter in very little time.

Sharing knowledge rocks! Thanks guys!

Another new book: 'First Steps: Developing BizTalk Applications'

2007-04-13T10:53:00.000+02:00

Apress released another book about BizTalk.

Here's the description:
First Steps: Developing BizTalk Applications is a primer to most other introductory Biztalk books. If you feel like traditional beginning books are too abstract, and that you are mired in detail and missing the "big picture," check out this book. It's not a reference -- it's a jumpstart to learning Biztalk. You learn about the product in a phased approach. This way, you learn just what you need to know, when you need to know it. And the entire book is example-based: you learn by doing. Each phase provides detailed instructions for creating, deploying, and testing a BizTalk project. Through the book's projects, you will be exposed to orchestrations, pipelines, maps, schemas, messages, ports, shapes, the BizTalk Server Administration console, and the Health and Activity Tracking (HAT) tool.

UK SDC BizTalk 2006 Documenter: '192' is not a valid value for Microsoft.Sdc.BizTalkOM.TrackingType

2007-04-09T23:11:00.001+02:00

As stated by other BizTalk developers as well, I think the UK SDC BizTalk 2006 Documenter is a great tool! It creates a good looking .CHM file which documents your entire BizTalk installation.

Unfortunately I found another error, or actually Brent Anderson did. He found out that when you have either or both Track Message Properties enabled on a Send port, the Documenter does not generate the documentation.

fig. 1 – Send Port Properties

The Documenter shows the following popup:

fig. 2 – Error popup

Under the hoods (with DebugView), the UK SDC Documenter gives more information:

TraceErr : Microsoft.Sdc.BiztalkDocumenter.Documenter.GenerateDocumentation: System.InvalidOperationException:

There was an error generating the XML document. ---> System.InvalidOperationException:

Instance validation error: '192' is not a valid value for Microsoft.Sdc.BizTalkOM.TrackingType.

Research learned that the values from the Track Message properties, don't match the values from the enumeration Microsoft.Sdc.BizTalkOM.TrackingType, resulting in the error above.

Depending on which of the Track Message Properties are checked, another value will appear in the error message.

The consequence of this is that, until the bug is solved, it is not possible to use the documenter as long as you have one of the Track Message Properties checked.

I can't wait for the next release J

Error while using the UK SDC Documenter as a Post build event

2007-04-09T14:17:00.000+02:00

We were contacted by Brent Anderson from RBA Consulting. He ran into some errors while using the UK SDC BizTalk 2006 Documenter as a post build event.

Error initialising documentation publisher
Brent found out that using the documenter in a post build event works fine, as long as you just use the /def[ault] parameter.
When we tried to use the /o[utput] parameter (to set another output directory), we were confronted with an 'Error initialising documentation publisher'. We also tried other parameters, but that resulted in the same error.

Solution
After some research we found out that when you want to use other parameters, than the /def[ault] parameter, you must supply the /p:chm parameter to make sure the document publisher can be initialized.

New version of BizTalk 2006 documentation PDF

2007-03-27T22:14:00.000+02:00

Microsoft released a new version of the core documentation PDF. It comes as one self extracting zip from 55MB.
Although this results in giant one PDF file from 117MB containing almost 20000 pages, I like the fact that it is only one PDF.

Download the documentation here.

Visual Studio 2005 Template for BizUnit test projects

2007-03-16T11:42:00.000+01:00

For my own conveniency I created a VS 2005 project template for BizUnit test projects.
The project already contains references to the NUnit and BizUnit assemblies. Also a class file is added with template code for BizUnit.

All you have to do is:
- download the Zip file here
- place it in your `My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Templates\ProjectTemplates` folder
- start using it!

Getting started with NUnit and BizUnit

2007-03-14T14:40:00.072+01:00

When it comes to testing your BizTalk applications, NUnit and BizUnit are often used. Where NUnit is a unit-testing framework for .NET languages, BizUnit can be used for testing your BizTalk 2004/2006 solutions. This article describes which tools need to be installed and helps you to setup your first test project.

What is NUnit
As stated, NUnit is a unit-testing framework for .NET languages. The test cases you create with BizUnit are added to and executed from the NUnit user interface. The results from the test runs can be viewed in NUnit as well.

What is BizUnit
The test cases you need to test your BizTalk solutions are created with BizUnit. Although you need to create a Class library in Visual Studio to be able to have the test cases executed, most of the test case creation is done with XML files. With these XML files you can prepare your test environment, execute your tests and cleanup your test environment. You can setup tests for the following adapters: FILE, HTTP, SOAP, MSMQ, MQSeries and POP3. Further BizUnit allows you to perform multiple kinds of validation and load data in the context. It's also possible to query the EventLog.

What do you need to install
The two most recent BizTalk versions are supported by NUnit and BizUnit.

For testing BizTalk 2004 applications you need to install:

NUnit v2.2.9 .NET 1.1 (download)
BizUnit v2.0.1062.0 (download)

For testing BizTalk 2006 applications you need:

Nunit v2.2.9 .NET 2.0 (download)
BizUnit v2.2.1003.0 (download)

Install both tools keeping the defaults for the installation directories.

The sample orchestration
For this article I created an orchestration that will be tested. I have a simple scenario which contains the following steps:

receive a message on a file location
log to the EventLog that the message is received
send the message to another file location
log to the EventLog that the message is sent

The orchestration looks as follows:

Fig. 1 - The orchestration which will be tested

Setting up your test environment
During the setup of a test project a number of artifacts is created. Since it is convenient to have everything at one place, we need a folder structure, which will contain all these artifacts. For this sample this structure looks as follows:

Fig. 2 – Folder structure of the test environment

The C:\NUnitBizUnit folder contains:

BizTalkia folder (Visual Studio solution which contains the sample BizTalk project and test project)
Receive folder (Receive file Location for the orchestration)
Send folder (Send file location for the orchestration)
TestCases (test case configuration files)
BizTalkia.dll (the Test project assembly which we will create in Visual Studio)
BizTalkia.nunit (NUnit project file for this sample)
Microsoft.Services.BizTalkApplicationFramework.BizUnit.dll (referenced from BizTalkia.dll)
nunit.core.dll (referenced from BizTalkia.dll)
ReceivedFileInstance.xml (used to kick off the orchestration)

At this moment you might not yet be familiar with all the artifacts mentioned above, but most of them will be explained in this article.

Create a Test project in Visual Studio
We need a C# Class library project, which will contain the Test project. It must have references to the following binaries:

C:\Program Files\NUnit-Net-2.0 2.2.9\bin\nunit.core.dll
C:\Program Files\NUnit-Net-2.0 2.2.9\bin\nunit.framework.dll
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Services\BizUnit 2.2\bins\ Microsoft.Services.BizTalkApplicationFramework.BizUnit.dll
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Services\BizUnit 2.2\bins\ Microsoft.Services.BizTalkApplicationFramework.BizUnit.MQSeriesSteps.dll (only in case you will have to test MQSeries) .

Fig. 3 – Solution Explorer with newly added references and class

The Class library has a class file which will hold the test code. The following code can be used as a template for the class file:

using NUnit.Framework;
using Microsoft.Services.BizTalkApplicationFramework.BizUnit;
namespace <namespace>{

[TestFixture]
public class <class name>
{
[Test]
public void <method name>()
{
BizUnit bizunit = new BizUnit(@"<location/name configuration file>");
bizunit.RunTest();
}
}
}

Replace <namespace> by a namespace that suits you. I add my test projects to the same solution which contains my BizTalk project(s). So I derive the namespace for my test project from the namespaces I use for my BizTalk project.

Also replace <class name> with a convenient and descriptive name. Both the class names and method names will show up in NUnit.

The code in my sample project looks as follows:

namespace BizTalkia.Test
{
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using NUnit.Framework;
using Microsoft.Services.BizTalkApplicationFramework.BizUnit;
[TestFixture]
public class BizUnitTestClass
{
[Test]
public void Test_01_SubmitFile()
{
BizUnit bizunit = new BizUnit(@".\TestCases\BizTalkia.Test.SubmitFile.xml");
bizunit.RunTest();
}
[Test]
public void Test_02_CheckFileReceived()
{
BizUnit bizunit = new BizUnit(@".\TestCases\BizTalkia.Test.CheckFileReceived.xml");
bizunit.RunTest();
}
[Test]
public void Test_03_CheckSentFileExists()
{
BizUnit bizunit = new BizUnit(@".\TestCases\BizTalkia.Test.CheckSentFileExists.xml");
bizunit.RunTest();
}
}
}

As you see there is one class with 3 methods. Each method defines a test case. These test cases are described below. You are free in creating more than one class, as long as each class is public and has the [TestFixture] attribute. Each method must be public as well and must have the attribute [Test]. The methods are numbered from 01 to 03. This is necessary, since otherwise in NUnit the methods will show up alphabetically, which will process your test cases in the wrong order. Further you see that each method refers to a test case configuration file of its own.

Build the test project
Now that we have described the class library the test project can be build.

Fig. 4 – Build the test project

The assembly needs to be copied to the C:\NUnitBizUnit folder, along with its references.

Test case configuration files
The test case configuration files (which are stored in C:\NUnitBizUnit\TestCases) define the test cases. Before going into detail, first let's have a look at the structure of the configuration files. We therefore use the first test case configuration file of this sample, namely BizTalkia.Test.SubmitFile.xml.

<TestCase testName="BizTalkia.Test">
<TestSetup>
<TestStep assemblyPath="" typeName="Microsoft.Services.BizTalkApplicationFramework.BizUnit.FileDeleteMultipleStep"> <Directory>C:\NUnitBizUnit\Send</Directory>
<SearchPattern>{*}.xml</SearchPattern>
</TestStep>
</TestSetup>

<TestExecution>
<TestStep assemblyPath="" typeName="Microsoft.Services.BizTalkApplicationFramework.BizUnit.FileCreateStep"> <SourcePath>C:\NUnitBizUnit\ReceivedFileInstance.xml</SourcePath> <CreationPath>C:\NUnitBizUnit\Receive\InFile.xml</CreationPath> </TestStep>
</TestExecution>
<TestCleanup>
</TestCleanup>
</TestCase>

This test case file has a TestSetup, TestExecution and a TestCleanup node. The goals of these nodes are obvious: the TestSetup node is used for setting/preparing up your test environment, the TestExecution node contains all your test steps and the TestCleanup node is used for cleaning up your test environment. The TestSetup and TestCleanup nodes are optional.
Each of the nodes can contain one or more test steps. Check the BizUnit documentation for the available test steps.

Submitting a file
Since SubmitFile is my first test case, inside the TestSetup node some cleanup of the test environment is done. In this case any existing files in a particular folder are deleted. Therefore the FileDeleteMultipleStep test step is used.

The sample orchestration is kicked off by submitting a file on a File Receive Location. In the TestExecution node I use the FileCreateStep test step to have a file created in a particular folder. The SourcePath node is used to determine which file is used as a template for the file that needs to be created. With the CreationPath node I determine where a copy of the file mentioned in the SourcePath node will be placed. So actually a file copy is done. The CreationPath node should contain the path to your Receive Location as it is configured in BizTalk.

Check if the file is received
Now that we have taken care of instantiating the orchestration, let's check if the orchestration really has received the file. The orchestration writes an EventLog entry to confirm that a file is received. Therefore in the next test case we query the EventLog to check if the orchestration did write that EventLog entry. The code in the Expression shape that writes to the EventLog looks as follows:

// Write to EventLog
System.Diagnostics.EventLog.WriteEntry("BizTalkia", "File received", System.Diagnostics.EventLogEntryType.Information, 1);
In test case file CheckFileReceived.xml we query the EventLog. Since this test case does not need setup or cleanup of the test environment, the nodes TestSetup and TestCleanup are left out. Quering of the EventLog is done with the EventLogCheckStep test step.

<TestCase testName="BizTalkia.Test">
<TestExecution>
<TestStep assemblyPath="" typeName="Microsoft.Services.BizTalkApplicationFramework.BizUnit.EventLogCheckStep"> <DelayBeforeCheck>10</DelayBeforeCheck> 
<Machine>BIZTALK2006</Machine>
<EventLog>Application</EventLog>
<Source>BizTalkia</Source>
<Type>Information</Type>
<EventId>1</EventId>
<FailIfFound>True</FailIfFound>
</TestStep>
</TestExecution>
</TestCase>

The DelayBeforeCheck node is used to set the number of seconds to wait, before the EventLog is queried. This way you give BizTalk some time to retrieve the message and write to the EventLog. The FailIfFound node is used to determine if the test case should fail, in case that the EventLog entry is not found. The other nodes are used to query the EventLog. Although the test case does not query the actual message which is written to the EventLog ("File received"), also this can be queried with a regular expression validation.

Check if the file is sent
The orchestration now should send the message to another file location. With BizUnit we can check if a file exists in a certain folder. This test is done in test case file CheckSentFileExists.xml.

<TestCase testName="BizTalkia.Test">
<TestExecution>
<TestStep assemblyPath="" typeName="Microsoft.Services.BizTalkApplicationFramework.BizUnit.FilesExistStep"> <Timeout>3000</Timeout>
<DirectoryPath>.\Send</DirectoryPath>
<SearchPattern>*.xml</SearchPattern>
<ExpectedNoOfFiles>1</ExpectedNoOfFiles>
</TestStep>
</TestExecution>
</TestCase>

In this test case BizTalk is given some time (by means of the Timeout node) to send out the message, before the existance of the file is checked.
With the DirectoryPath node and the SearchPattern node we determine where and what we are looking for.

So far the description of the test cases and steps.

Creating a NUnit project
Most of the work is done by now. NUnit works with project files which contain references to the assemblies which contain the test project.
The image below shows the NUnit interface with the dialog to create a new project file.

Fig. 5 – Create a new NUnit project

The NUnit project is stored in C:\NUnitBizUnit. Test projects assemblies must be added to the project. This can be done by navigating in the menu to Project, Edit… In the dialog that appears select the Assemblies tab page, click Add Assembly… to add the assembly.

Fig. 6 – Add the assembly

Run the test
The test environment is now set up and ready to run the test! In the Tree view you see the structure of the assembly. By selecting (the class) BizUnitTestClass and clicking Run, all underlying tests are executed. The bullets can have the following colors:

gray: not yet executed
green: tested successfully
yellow: test not run
red: tested unsuccessfully

The test results can be viewed on the tab pages.

Fig. 7 - NUnit project before run

Fig. 8 – NUnit project after (successful) run

Conclusion
Both NUnit and BizUnit are still under development. So bugs become solved and functionality is added. In this article I wanted to give you a quick start with using NUnit and BizUnit.
Hopefully I succeeded in that goal. Please feel free to give any comments.

The solution can be downloaded here.

New great site

2007-03-07T22:23:00.001+01:00

Biztalk 24 * 7 is an attempt by a Microsoft Biztalk server enthusiast Saravana kumar to put pointers to all the available resources for Biztalk under one roof.

http://www.biztalk247.com/v1/default.aspx

Documentation tool for BizTalk 2006

2007-03-06T11:08:00.000+01:00

Although this tool is not new, I blog about it because it is a must-have for every BizTalk developer:

The tool is called UK SDC BizTalk 2006 Documenter (you can download it here) and builds documentation of your BizTalk application(s). It uses reflection to find all information, therefore the BizTalk application(s) you want to document need(s) to be deployed.
One cool feature is the ability to create JPG's for orchestrations.

New BizTalk documentation

2007-03-02T09:40:00.000+01:00

This week Microsoft updated the BizTalk Server 2006 documentation. You can download it here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=3294ddaf-9f67-409f-a92d-2f6070dc0d1a&displaylang=en

Failed while creating a B2BOrchestrations.B2BProcess service

2007-02-27T11:15:00.000+01:00

I received the following error in the group hub while testing the solution build in Microsoft tutorial 3, lesson 3: “Failed while creating a B2BOrchestrations.B2BProcess service”

After 30 minutes I finally found the solution. BizTalk does not refresh the new deployment automatically. You should first restart the BizTalkServerApplication Host instance from the “Platform Settings - Host Instances” node in the BizTalk Server 2006 Administration Console.

If that did not do the trick, you can also try to remove the orchestration from the GAC, redeploy it and then refresh the BizTalkServerApplication Host instance.

BIA meeting - 7 February

2007-02-09T11:03:00.000+01:00

Last Wednesday the BIA group came together again. We welcomed a new member, David, to our team. David worked for years with Usoft and now he is joining our team because at his project they start a BizTalk trial in which he participates. Main goal of his work will be to migrate from a BizTalk 2002 environment to the new BizTalk 2006 Server.

We discussed the possibility to become Microsoft ESB partner as we have an opportunity to use the ESB Guidance kit in a customer’s project. As a group we believe in the possibilities that the ESB Guidance package offers and we hope that we can join the 0.8 “beta” program.

One of the things that will be possible with the ESB Guidance is to implement UDDI inside the orchestrations to mange resources. We had an interesting discussion about the possibilities that this would offer. We think that it will be useful to do some sort of Load Balancing or Version management. If you have suggestions about the usage of UDDI inside a BizTalk orchestration feel free to share it with us in a comment.

BizTalk 2006 Recipes – A problem-solution approach

2007-01-13T19:39:00.000+01:00

I would like to mention that there is a great book available about BizTalk 2006. It is called “BizTalk 2006 Recipes”, published by Apress and written by Mark Beckner, Ben Goeltz, Brandon Gross, Brennan O’Reilly, Stephen Roger, Mark Smith and Alexander West. (ISBN 1-59059-711-7)

In the book you will find a comprehensive guidance on working through complex deployment challenges, including tested, reusable code snippets for use in production, enabling faster deployment and minimal post-implementation engineering support.I already did a quick read in the book during my BizTalk 70-235 study, the book gives a detailed step by step overview of solutions (with lots of images) on how to work with BizTalk. The authors really did a good job to provide you with solutions that work, but best of all that works well.

In the next month(s) I will read this book and try to run all the provided solutions. I will post feedback about this book on my personal blog.

Some items in the removed assembly are still being used by items not defined in the same assembly

2007-01-12T15:25:00.000+01:00

When trying to redeploy a BizTalk 2004 solution I received the following error message:

"Some items in the removed assembly are still being used by items not defined in the same assembly, thus removal of the assembly failed. Make sure that items in the assembly you are trying to remove fulfill the following conditions:
1. Pipelines, maps, and schemas are not being used by Send Ports or Receive Locations
2. Roles have no enlisted parties."

When you execute the following query against the configuration database, the result gives you the name(s) of the BizTalk artifact(s) which block(s) the deployment of your solution:

select 'RcvPort' PortType, r.nvcName Port, item.name MapName,assem.nvcName Assembly, nSequence, indoc_docspec_name, outdoc_docspec_name from bts_receiveport_transform rtinner join bts_receiveport r on rt.nReceivePortID = r.nIDinner join bt_mapspec ms on ms.id = rt.uidTransformGUIDinner join bts_assembly assem on ms.assemblyid = assem.nID inner join bts_item item on ms.itemid = item.id
union
select 'SendPort' PortType, r.nvcName Port, item.name MapName, assem.nvcName Assembly, nSequence, indoc_docspec_name, outdoc_docspec_name from bts_sendport_transform rtinner join bts_sendport r on rt.nSendPortID = r.nIDinner join bt_mapspec ms on ms.id = rt.uidTransformGUIDinner join bts_assembly assem on ms.assemblyid = assem.nID inner join bts_item item on ms.itemid = item.id
order by PortType, Port, nSequence

In my case a Send Port with a filter (which contained a reference to a schema) blocked redeployment. Removing the filter from the Send port was enough to be able to redeploy.

XML Notepad 2007

2006-12-29T10:38:00.000+01:00

Microsoft released an editor for XML files, you can download it here.

Handy features include:
- Tree View synchronized with Node Text View for quick editing of node names and values.
- Incremental search (Ctrl+I) in both tree and text views, so as you type it navigates to matching nodes.
- Cut/copy/paste with full namespace support.
- Drag/drop support for easy manipulation of the tree, even across different instances of XML - Notepad and from the file system.
- Infinite undo/redo for all edit operations.
- In place popup multi-line editing of large text node values.
- Configurable fonts and colors via the options dialog.
- Full find/replace dialog with support for regex and XPath.
- Good performance on large XML documents, loading a 3mb document in about one second.
- Instant XML schema validation while you edit with errors and warnings shown in the task list window.
- Intellisense based on expected elements and attributes and enumerated simple type values.
- Support for custom editors for date, dateTime and time datatypes and other types like color.
- Handy nudge tool bar buttons for quick movement of nodes up and down the tree.
- Inplace HTML viewer for processing xml-stylesheet processing instructions.
- Built-in XML Diff tool. New features included in this version:
- Added keyboard accelerators for find again (F3) and reverse find (SHIFT+F3).
- Added support for loading IXmlBuilder and IXmlEditor implementations from different assemblies using new vs:assembly attribute.
- Made source code localizable by moving all error messages and dialog strings to .resx files.
- Added a default XSL transform.

New icons, a play on the Vista "Notepad" icons. Bug Fixes included in this version:
- Fixed install on Windows Vista machines using Windows Installer XML 3.0.
- Performance of expand node when validating.
- Fixed bug where changed schemas and transforms were not being re-loaded.
- Fixed spurious warnings about file being changed on disk.
- Fixed handling of very long text nodes.
- Fixed round trip of DTD content in tags.
- Fixed validation of elements with xsi:type attributes.
- Scroll bar not updating when node expanded/collapsed in some cases.
- Tree view needs horizontal scrollbar.
- When XML Notepad is minimized and file changes on disk, the file reload prompt is confusing. - Notepad should be restored first.
- XSL output window should pick up new xsl-transform based on input document.
- Fixed unhandled exception when closing a group of XML notepad windows.
- Added registration of "Edit" action for .xml file extension.
- Move source code to CodePlex.

Passed 70-235

2006-12-29T09:32:00.000+01:00

Last week I passed the 70-235 exam. The day after that my collegue Bas de Gier passed as well.
Today 2 other collegues (Suresh Booms and Edwin Vriethof) took the exam as well and passed! Congratulations to all!

Besides project experience and many hours of self study, the BizTalk 2006 Recipes book by Apress helped me a lot to get at the level to pass the exam.

Interesting book coming up

2006-12-22T11:26:00.000+01:00

Pro WCF: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation
http://www.apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=10185

Requested registry access is not allowed

2006-12-08T16:41:00.000+01:00

At the project I am working on I mainly use the Event Log to write progress statements from my orchestrations. On my develop-machine I ran into the error message 'Requested registry access is not allowed'.

It appeared that the user account under which the processing host runs, did not have enough authorisations to access the Event Log.

This can be fixed by giving that user account full control to a certain Registry Key.
To achieve this you must start the Registry Editor (regedit.exe) and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\EventLog. Right click on the node and click 'Permissions...'.
Next add the user account under which the processing host runs and give this user full control.
Close the dialog and the Registry Editor and finally restart the processing host.

You should now be able to write to the Event Log.

Failed to open BAM Excel workbook file: Old format or invalid type library

2006-10-23T10:54:00.000+02:00

While trying to deploy a BAM workbook I created with Excel 2002, I received the following error message:

Since I was using an older version of Excel (2002) I thought that installing the 2003-version would fix my problem. Unfortunately it did not...

After some Googleing I found the blog from Don Glover, a Programming Writer for the BAM feature of BizTalk Server. He states that localization was the problem:

"BAM is made up of a number of separate components, SQL, web services, custom tools, and more. In order for each of the components to operate together effectively, they must all be set to the same locale/culture. In addition, your system and user locale/culture should match those set for BAM."

In my case it was enough to change my 'Regional options' from Dutch to English (US).

After firing the deployment command again, all went well.

Thanks Don!

BizTalk 2006 R2

2006-07-07T09:10:00.000+02:00

Microsoft has introduced BizTalk 2006 R2. This product refresh includes a number of interesting features and enhancements to improve compatibility with Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007. Let’s have a look.

· Microsoft EDI Solution for BizTalk 2006
Microsoft’s EDI Solution for BizTalk adds full featured EDI capabilities to BizTalk 2006 with over 6000 schemas that include HIPAA, X12, and EDIFACT support.
Microsoft is highly committed to the B2B space with a dedicated team focusing on B2B messaging solutions integrated with the BizTalk Architecture. This EDI solution joins a group of solutions delivered with BizTalk 2006 including HIPAA, HL7, SWIFT, RosettaNet, cXML, and xCBL.
Microsoft’s goal is to drive Customer value by:
• Reducing TCO of managing B2B relationships
• Increase agility in establishing new B2B relationships
• Improve the timeliness and effectiveness of B2B decision making
Find more info at: Microsoft EDI Solution Infosheet

· Microsoft RFID
The Microsoft RFID Infrastructure Services in BizTalk 2006 R2 provide device abstraction and manageability to RFID-based solutions. An integrated engine for rich data filtering, enrichment, and transformation allows for sophisticated applications for different automation scenarios. Application developers can also integrate with advance technologies such the as the Business Rules Engine, Windows Workflow Foundation, and Windows Communication Framework to create state-of-the-art business end-to-end systems.
Find more info at: BizTalk 2006 R2 - RFID Support

· BizTalk Adapter for Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
The BizTalk WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) Adapters align BizTalk with Microsoft’s Web Services strategy by exposing WCF channels to BizTalk processes.

The BizTalk R2 will contain the following WCF Adapters
· WsHttp Adapter – provides the WS-* standards support over HTTP transport. WCF-WsHttp adapter provides a transport/protocol stack implementation compatible with other next generation Web Services (platforms that also implement the same Web Services Architecture standards). It provides full access to SOAP security, reliability, and transaction features. This adapter uses the HTTP or HTTPS transport, and messages have a text or Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM) encoding
· NetTcp Adapter – provides the WS-* standards support over TCP transport. WCF-NetTcp adapter provides efficient communication in a .NET to-.NET environment. It provides full access to SOAP security, reliability and transactions features. This adapter uses the TCP transport and messages have binary encoding.
· WCF-NetMsmq Adapter – provides queued messaging using MSMQ transport. WCF-NetMsmq adapter provides queued communication in a .NET-to-.NET environment. It uses MSMQ transport, and messages have a binary encoding
· WCF-BasicHttp – compatible with first generation web services. WCF-BasicHttp adapter provides a transport/protocol stack implementation compatible with first-generation Web Services. This adapter uses the HTTP or HTTPS transport, and messages have a text encoding.
· WCF-NetNamedPipe – provides cross process messaging using NamedPipes transport. WCF-NetNamedPipe adapter provides efficient cross-process communication in a .NET-to-.NET environment. This adapter provides full access to SOAP reliability and transaction features. The adapter uses the named pipe transport and messages have a binary encoding. This adapter cannot be used in cross-machine communication.
· WCF-Custom – provides customization for using WCF components (bindings, behaviors and binding elements). WCF-Custom adapter is used to enable usage of WCF extensibility components in BizTalk Server. The adapter enables complete flexibility of the WCF framework. It allows users to select and configure a WCF binding for the receive location/send port. It allows users to set the endpoint behaviors and security settings.
· WCF-CustomIsolated – provides customizations for using WCF components (bindings, behaviors and binding elements) and using the HTTP transport. WCF-CustomIsolated adapter is used to enable usage of WCF extensibility components in BizTalk Server, but out of proc in IIS. The adapter enables complete flexibility of the WCF framework. It allows users to select and configure a WCF binding for the receive location/send port. It allows users to set the endpoint behaviors and security settings. This adapter should only be used by transports than can be hosted in IIS.
Find more info at: BizTalk WCF Adapters

· R2 Adapter Framework for .NET 3.0
The framework provides a common basis for building integration adapters that can be consumed by a variety of client applications (BizTalk, Office, .Net, etc) and usage scenarios via .NET 3.0 (formally WinFX). The Adapter Framework aligns the adapters strategy with Microsoft’s Web Services strategy by exposing integration adapters as WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) channels.
Find more info at: R2 Adapter Framework for .NET 3.0

· R2 Line of Business (LOB) Adapters for .NET 3.0
The WCF LOB adapters deliver application, database and transport adapters to customers, implementing a common Adapter Framework, which in turn is built on top of the Windows Communication Framework (SAP, Siebel, Oracle DB, and TIBCO RV).
An adapter is fundamentally a module that bridges a client program and an external system, exposing well-defined and standardized interfaces over various programming models to the client program while internally mapping them to proprietary interfaces and protocols supported by the external system.
Application adapters provide an interface to Line-of-Business (LOB) systems like SAP, Siebel, Oracle Financials, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards. Database adapters provide an interface to database systems like Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase and DB2. Transport adapters provide an interface to transport protocols like HTTP and FTP and message-oriented middleware (MOM) like Tibco, Websphere MQ and MSMQ.
The R2 LOB Adapters deliver application, database and transport adapters by implementing a common Adapter Framework, which in turn is built on top of the Windows Communication Framework (WCF). Technically the R2 LOB adapters are exposed as WCF transport channels to clients, enabling connectivity, metadata exchange and business data exchange with external systems.
The R2 LOB adapters make line-of-business applications, databases and messaging platforms visible and interoperable with standard business processes, workflows and .NET applications They promote reusability and “plug ‘n play” across disparate applications. Different programming models can be built on top of the WCF adapter framework giving client programs the choice of programming models based on business needs. ADO.NET, WCF proxy programming and WCF channel (message-level) programming are a few programming models. The adapter framework eases adapter development in terms of providing simplified abstractions that handle common infrastructure and plumbing aspects of adapter building besides providing common runtime services. This enables adapter writers to focus on business logic required to interface with and surface external system functionality. It also empowers partners to develop custom adapters. The choice of WCF is essentially inline with Microsoft’s next generation communication framework optimized for the web services enabled world. It automatically web service enables external systems that are being adapted using R2 LOB adapters.

· BAM interceptors for Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and WCF

How do I Participate in the BizTalk R2 TAP?
If you are interested in participating in the BTS 2006 R2 TAP please review the Program Description and submit a completed BizTalk 2006 R2 Nomination Form and a TAP Program Manager will contact you. Once you have been accepted in to the TAP you will be able to download all R2 beta builds.
Nomination forms will be reviewed and BTS 2006 R2 TAP participants will be selected by July 31st, 2006.

What is a TAP (Technology Adoption Program)?
The BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Technology Adoption Program (TAP) is an “early adopter” program intended to validate the quality of the new features included in BTS 2006 R2 as well as give Customers and Partners early access to these features in order to validate functionality and quality prior to release.

In order to provide the best support possible during BTS 2006 R2 TAP we will be limiting the number of customers that we accept into this program so that we can maintain the highest possible quality for our participants.

· Program Participation
Registration for the BTS 2006 R2 TAP program is available by invitation of Microsoft account team members or by submitting a completed Nomination form that is available on the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 TAP website welcome page (also available in Downloads section)

Customers are then selected based on acceptance criteria as follows:
· A funded project that incorporates BizTalk Server 2006 R2 features
· The ability to commit the resources required to design and implement a solution using BizTalk Server 2006 R2 features
· The ability to release the solution to production 6 weeks prior to BizTalk Server 2006 R2 releases
· Provide high-quality feedback on BizTalk Server 2006 R2 features
· Ability to attend regularly scheduled calls (bi-weekly)
· Potential to participate in a Lab Engagement in Redmond, WA

All BizTalk Server 2006 customers are eligible to participate in this Technology Adoption Program and we are interested in your participation if you meet the criteria listed above.

Customers and Partners who enjoy being on the cutting edge of technology and who can benefit from these new features will find value in taking part in this TAP program.

· Program Structure
Nomination - Customers can nominate themselves on the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Connect website by completing the TAP Nomination Form found on the welcome page (also available in Downloads section). The BTS R2 TAP Team will review all Nomination forms that we receive and will contact candidates as their Nominations are accepted/rejected.

Note that a Premier Support Agreement is required for participation on projects going into production.

Engagement - After being accepted into BizTalk Server 2006 R2 TAP, the TAP Team will work with TAP Participants to review architecture, test, and project plans. During this time most of the documentation and legal paperwork is signed. In addition, the TAP Participant’s expectations of the program are clearly documented and provides a means to clearly evaluate success.

Development / Test – Selected builds will be delivered to TAP Participants for testing and development. Issues brought by TAP Participants are handled by a trained Support Specialist and members of the Product Team. In some cases, developers or testers of a specific feature will work with a TAP Participants to ensure that technical issues are resolved accurately and timely.
Production Roll-Out – TAP Participants should plan on deploying their BTS 2006 R2 project to production no later than 6 weeks prior to the scheduled RTM date and be prepared to sign-off on production worthiness 2 weeks prior to RTM.

For customers that have a premier support agreement, support resources are available “7x24.”

Post-Mortem - When the program draws to a close, your feedback regarding the program in which you took part is critical to our ability to continually improve future programs.

BizTalk's mapper allows drag and drop replace

2006-04-09T09:01:00.000+02:00

I learned a little trick the other day about the mapper which I have never seen documented. It works for BizTalk 2004 and also 2006.

Have you ever had to change a functoid and gone thru the task of dragging the new functoid onto the grid and then reconnecting all of the lines, then having to check to make sure you got them all in order?

Well, what I realized quite by accident is that you can actually just drag the new functoid over the one you want to replace and all your links will maintain themselves. The old functoid will disappear and be replaced by the new one.

Of course there is a limitation when you have different maximum inputs, etc, but for the most part this works with everything else.

You can evaluate dates using the Cumulative Maximum Functoid

2006-03-16T07:09:00.000+01:00

Dates you say? Stop the press! Hoist the mizenmast!

I had a situation where there was a node whose max occurs is unbounded and I needed to extract a single node from it to map to a destination node whose max occurs is one.

The problem was that I had to choose the node to map with the highest (newest) date:
<root>
<data>
<testdate>01-01-2000<testdate>
<testdata>a<testdata>
</data>
<data>
<testdate>01-01-2002<testdate>
<testdata>c<testdata>
</data>
<data>
<testdate>01-01-2001<testdate>
<testdata>b<testdata>
</data>
</root>

In the case above, I want the node with the highest <testval>, or 01-01-2002, therefore I want to map <testdata>c<testdata> to the destination node.

This can actually be done.

What I did was convert my date to ticks in a scripting functoid:

public string toTicks(string param1)
{
DateTime dt = DateTime.Parse(param1);
return dt.Ticks.ToString();
}

Afterwards I connected the scripting functoid to the cumulative max functoid.

Then I evaluate the output of the scripting functoid with the cumulative max functoid with an Equals functoid.

This should work for any set of repeating dates.

One or more instances of the orchestration still exist

2006-02-27T22:33:00.000+01:00

Lately I tried to redeploy a BizTalk 2006 solution from Visual Studio 2005. Unfortunately I was confronted with the following error message “Could not change the bindings for orchestration '.', Version=1.0.0.0,Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=c380e04620d206e8' as one or more instances of the orchestration still exist”.
When I tried to Unenlist and delete the Orchestration from the BizTalk Administration tool, I received the same error.

I found out that I had a few suspended instances. These instances need to be terminated before you can undeploy/redeploy the orchestration.

Terminating instances can be done in several manners:
- the polite manner: by terminating the instances using the BizTalk Administration Tool
- the not so polite manner: by using a Stored Procedure to clean up the MessageBox

Removing instances using the BizTalk Administration Tool
In the BizTalk Administration Group click in the left pane on ‘BizTalk Group [Name of Computer/Name of Management database]’. In the right pane the ‘Group Overview’ appears. Click on the tab page ‘New query’ to create a query that searches for the suspended instances. In the ‘Query Expression’ grid the first Search field is already selected, namely ‘Search For’, also the ‘Equals’ operator is already filled in in the second field. All we have to do in the ‘Value’-field is search for suspended instances. And… lucky us: when we open the dropdown box we see that ‘Suspended Service Instances’ is one of the values we can choose! Next, we run the query by hitting the button with the label 'Run Query'. The grid ‘Query results’ now contains all suspended instances found. All we need to do is select all suspended instances, right click on the selection and choose ‘Terminate Instances’. The BizTalk Administration Tool asks for confirmation and removes the instances. When you rerun the query, the instances will be removed and the orchestration can be undeployed/redeployed. So far for the polite manner.

Removing instances using a Stored Procedure
The less polite manner to remove suspended instances is by running a Stored Procedure which will clean up the MessageBox. Attention: this is NOT a recommended procedure on production environments!
Open the SQL Server Management Studio and connect to the database server. In the left pane expand the server-node and the Databases-node. Next, click on the MessageBox-database (BizTalkMsgDb) and hit the ‘New Query’-button in the toolbar. In the right pane you can enter SQL commands. Since you selected the MessageBox-database in the left pane, the commands are executed against that database. Now type: 'exec bts_CleanupMsgbox 0' (without the quotes) and hit the ‘! Execute’-button in the toolbar. All suspended instances will now be removed. You can now undeploy/redeploy the orchestration.

New contributor on board

2006-02-27T13:27:00.000+01:00

Hi all,

My name is Lex Hegt and from now on I will try to do regular postings on this blog as well. Just like Isaac and Randal I work for The Vision Web. On this blog I want to document/share problems and solutions I run into.

Please feel free to react on my postings!

Lex

XSLT performance when mapping large documents in BizTalk

2006-02-08T19:44:00.000+01:00

Recently I had to map a document with many thousand rows. I could not split the document because before I could split it, the document’s nodes had to be sorted.

With such large files you generally test it using a small subset to avoid waiting for maps to complete, I built an XSLT which worked great, I thought.

When you use a select filter such as "not(KeyValue=preceding-sibling::row/ KeyValue)" you end up with a huge performance hit the larger the document gets. My map went from 2 seconds for 50 rows to 10 minutes for a few thousand.

How to improve performance when you have large XML files to map that you can’t split? Try using xsl:key instead, which builds an index of keys from which you can much more efficiently select.

Here is a sample XSLT that demonstrates how to use the xsl:key:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0" xmlns:ns0="http://Conversion.schemas">
    <xsl:output method="xml" indent="no" />
    <xsl:key name="NumberKey" match="/*[local-name()='top' and namespace-uri()='http://biztalk/Conversion.schemas']/*[local-name()='row' and namespace-uri()='']"
        use="keyValue" />
    <xsl:template match="/">
        <ns0:Rows>
            <xsl:for-each select="/*[local-name()='top' and namespace-uri()='http://biztalk/Conversion.schemas']/*[local-name()='row' and namespace-uri()='' and generate-id(.) = generate-id(key('NumberKey', keyValue)[1])]">
                <xsl:variable name="current_Number" select="keyValue" />
                <Data>
                    <keyValue>
                        <xsl:value-of select="$current_Number" />
                    </keyValue>
                    <xsl:for-each select="//row[keyValue=$current_Number]">
                        <Part>
                            <PartID>
                                <xsl:value-of select="nr_data" />
                            </PartID>
                        </Part>
                    </xsl:for-each>
                </Data>
            </xsl:for-each>
        </ns0:Rows>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Customizing the WSDL generated by the‘BizTalk Webservice Publishing Wizard’

2006-01-23T09:31:00.000+01:00

Exposing BizTalk interfaces as webservices is very easy using the ‘BizTalk Webservice Publishing Tool’. In almost all cases this tool generates a correct functioning web service which does not need any code modification.

However, there are situations where tweaking the code of the generated web service is necessary. Recently I needed two different BizTalk interfaces to expose the exact same WSDL. Because the two interfaces had different names for namespaces and artifacts, the generated webservices and WSDL were not the same.

You can solve this by using the SoapExtensionReflector. The BizTalk Webservice Publishing Wizard generates a class called ‘WsdlExtensions.cs’ for every webservice that is generated. By including this file in the generated VS.Net webservice project and adding the type in the 'soapExtensionReflectorTypes' section of the web.config (see header comments of
WsdlExtensions.cs), you’re able to control the generated WSDL for the webservice.

By default this file is generated with code for XML schema replacement in the WSDL, but you can use this to change other parts. For example, to override the SOAP service name, you can use:

public override void ReflectMethod()
{
          ProtocolReflector reflector = this.ReflectionContext;
    reflector.Service.Name = "MyNewServiceName";
}

After recompiling the web service the service name in the WSDL is changed to the new value.

Biztalk Host Manager 2004

2006-01-10T13:07:00.000+01:00

Since Isaac is publishing post after post I thought it is time for me to also post something.

I developed a useful tool, called the Biztalk Host Manager (BTSHostManager), which we use in our development team to be able to quickly stop, start and especially restart BTS host instances.

Because all our developers found it a helpful tool we thought we would make it available for download.

Some features:
- It monitors background service state change of host instances (not by default, use options to enable) .
- It works for Biztalk 2004 and 2006.

- A seperate Biztalk 2006 version (compiled against 2.0 framework) will be available soon.
- This is not the final release version. We are still testing it, so please mail me any bugs you find.

Mapping complex conditions in BizTalk with XSLT

2006-01-05T20:06:00.000+01:00

Recently I found myself in a situation where I needed to evaluate a set of complex conditions that I could not use the Business Rules Engine for. The BizTalk mapper was able to achieve the conditionality by chaining a series of about 21 functoids together but this became very unmanageable especially since I was combining false statements to see if both were false, then returning a true to an “And” functoid (&) which evaluated another branch as true and passed a result to the node in the destination schema, you get the idea.

An easier way is to plug in XSLT. There are disadvantages to doing this, the main one being its maintainability and transparency but when faced with the daunting set of functoids described above, it looked a decent option.

The XSLT function that I used was the <xsl:choose> statement, inside the statement was a set of conditions which, if true, would return a value/values to the destination schema. In the last part of the statement was the <xsl:otherwise> condition which could set values if the conditions presented were not valid and you had a default you wanted to present in that event.

<xsl:variable name="var:vAnnuity" select="count(/*[local-name()='InternalSupport' and namespace-uri()='http://internal_support']/*[local-name()='LoanPartItems' and namespace-uri()='' and Method='Annuity'])" />
<xsl:variable name="var:vLinear" select="count(/*[local-name()='InternalSupport' and namespace-uri()='http://internal_support']/*[local-name()='LoanPartItems' and namespace-uri()='' and Method='Linear'])" />
<xsl:variable name="var:vTotalCount" select="count(/*[local-name()='InternalSupport' and namespace-uri()='http://internal_support']/*[local-name()='PartItems' and namespace-uri()=''])" />
<xsl:variable name="var:vHasValidEndowment" select="count(/*[local-name()='InternalSupport' and namespace-uri()='http://internal_support']/*[local-name()='LoanPartItems' and namespace-uri()='' and isValid ='true'])" />
<xsl:variable name="var:vHasValidId" select="count(/*[local-name()='InternalSupport' and namespace-uri()='http://internal_support']/*[local-name()='Ready' and HasValidId ='true'])" />
<xsl:element name="LeningSoort">
    <xsl:choose>
        <xsl:when test="$var:vAnnuity = $var:vTotalCount">
            <xsl:value-of select="1" />
        </xsl:when>
        <xsl:when test="$var:vLinear = $var:vTotalCount">
            <xsl:value-of select="2" />
        </xsl:when>
        <xsl:when test="($var:vHasValidEndowment = $var:vTotalCount) and ($var:vHasValidId = $var:vTotalCount)">
            <xsl:value-of select="3" />
        </xsl:when>
        <xsl:otherwise>
            <xsl:value-of select="4" />
        </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
</xsl:element>

Of course each specific case requires different XSLT, but this should provide a framework of how to do this within a functoid.

To set up the XSLT:

• Create XSLT similar to the one above which meets your needs
• Drop a scripting functoid on your map
• Connect the output parameter to the node you want to create
• Note: do no include any input parameters, the XSLT is setup already to look them up
• Open the scripting functoid’s, click the (…) inside “Configure Functoid Script”
• Under “Script type” choose “Inline XSLT”
• Paste your XSLT snippet in the text box

Remove empty nodes in BizTalk by using XSLT

2006-01-03T19:42:00.000+01:00

If you have ever had a map which begins to look unmanageable with tons of value mappings or extra functoids to simply manage empty nodes you don’t want in your output then you should consider using an XSLT mapping to clean the document up for you.

This involves actually making 2 mappings instead of one, but the upside is faster development with a nominal performance cost. Instead of adding functoids, testing and retesting the output, let the mapper generate the empty nodded and then add an extra mapping step with the following XSLT embedded in it:

<?xml  version="1.0"  ?>
<xsl:stylesheet  xmlns:xsl="@@ YOUR NAMESPACE @@"  version="1.0"  xmlns:ns0="http://Stater.Isvcs.Iface.BO.GetLoanData.ElfV2">
    <xsl:output  method="xml"  indent="yes"  />
    <xsl:template  match="node()">
           <xsl:if  test="count(descendant::text()[string-length(normalize-space(.))>0]|@*)">
               <xsl:copy>
                  <xsl:apply-templates  select="@*|node()"  />
               </xsl:copy>
           </xsl:if>
    </xsl:template>
    <xsl:template  match="@*">
           <xsl:copy  />
    </xsl:template>
    <xsl:template  match="text()">
           <xsl:value-of  select="normalize-space(.)"  />
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Save this snippet (or download it here) into your project (open the XSLT and change the namespace!) then create a new map. Make your source and destination schemas the same and in the map properties add your XSLT in the “Custom XSLT path” setting. Place the new map after the “dirty” map; the output should give you an XML document free of extra nodes and a map free of extra functoids.

Of course, if you are doing a strictly messaging based implementation then you are out of luck unless you chain ports together but within an orchestration using XSLT to remove empty nodes might work well for you.

Blogging about BizTalk? Then this is a must have tool

2006-01-02T20:21:00.000+01:00

I’ve found a tool recently that will make blogging about BizTalk easier. It’s been around for a while but if you are like me and have never heard of it before, CopySourceAsHtml is very useful.

If you have been in the situation of wanting to post a code or XSLT snippet onto your blog and found yourself writing HTML to make it look like it does in Visual Studio (or resort to screen shots) then fret no more, CopySourceAsHtml will take anything that you can open in VS (source code related) and convert it to HTML for you.

The tool is written by Colin Coller and can be downloaded on the CopySourceAsHtml homepage. In addition, Colin has a blog which updates progress on the tool. I read that a VS 2005 version is soon to be ready.

A couple of tips when using it:

After installing you should be able to open any C# source code page, highlight and right click a code snippet and see a new “Copy as HTML” item on the menu. But, if for example you want to copy XSLT, the item doesn’t show up. Use the edit menu instead.
When you copy something as HTML, under general, uncheck the “Number lines from:” box unless you really want them and also check the “Embed styles” box since blog tools/some browsers wont recognize the style sheet that gets created. Embeding the style makes it a simpler operation.

How to stop applications from unloading inBizTalk 2004

2005-12-28T20:02:00.000+01:00

Recently we developed a time sensitive BizTalk application where a simple set of processing steps were invoked via a web service.

The external calling application (the application calling the BizTalk process) had just 5 seconds to complete its task. Since the BizTalk part was not very complex or resource intensive, we were achieving response times of 1 second, well within the 5 second margin.

During testing, though, we were getting intermittent timeouts because the BizTalk application was unloading itself from memory and causing the calling application to timeout. Basically it took more than 5 seconds for the unloaded BizTalk application to start itself up again and caused a failure.

BizTalk relies on a configuration file to store its application information. This config file contains settings for unloading an application from memory and is located at \Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004\BTSNTSvc.exe.config. Full documentation can be found at Microsoft’s website but here is a working example you can download.

By default BizTalk has 2 shutdown settings which are:

SecondsIdleBeforeShutdown = 1800 (seconds, or 30 minutes)
SecondsEmptyBeforeShutdown = 1200 (seconds, 20 minutes)

The link below is a sample config file that never shuts down. We are isolating these “hot” processes on a separate server from the “cold” processes (processes that can safely unload). You can run hot and cold side by side as well but that requires more changes in the config file. If you set the SecondsIdleBeforeShutdown and SecondsEmptyBeforeShutdown to -1 they will always stay in memory.

Note that this is increasing the load on the server but for time sensitive situations this could save you a rash of intermittent errors in production. Note also that you shouldn’t do this unless you really need to, unloading saves resources and with most integration scenarios the few seconds it takes to start up are minor.

You can backup your current file, download this BTSNTSvc.exe.config zip file and extract it, then stop and start your BizTalk host to see it work.

Fully qualified name differs for XSD’s withmultiple root nodes in the Business Rules Engine

2005-12-27T19:58:00.000+01:00

One of the most common problems that exist when using the business rules engine is forgetting to use the fully qualified name from a schema in definition of the rule.

Posts like this on Google Groups can clarify what I mean if what I am talking about is not clear.

I have discovered something new regarding the fully qualified name which caught me out this morning and I thought I’d mention it here in case you have the same problem.

If you are using the fully qualified name of a schema with multiple root nodes in the BRE, the fully qualified name must include the name of the root node. When you go to your orchestration and try to feed a rules shape your XSD you will find it won’t recognize it (no drop down appears).

For example you can have a schema with multiple root nodes with a fully qualified name such as schma_name_fully_qualified which, with a single root node, would work just fine. But if the schema has multiple root nodes you must append the specific root node to this qualification for the orchestration to recognize the rule.

So if you had the fully qualified name schma_name_fully_qualified, look at your orchestration view, click on the message you are using and look at the message type: you will find that you must use something like schma_name_fully_qualified.header to properly identify the schema when creating your business rules. Changing this should then allow you to select a message type in your orchestration.

"multiple schemas match the message type"may be caused by web services

2005-12-22T21:07:00.001+01:00

I was stuck recently with what seemed like a pair of contradictory errors.

I had an application deployed which was exposed as a web service. To test the application we built a test harness which picked up a flat file and called the web service for us and then dumped the result on the file system to see the result.

This testing system worked fine until I needed to use that same deployed schema to do some additional messaging. I wanted to route a message via a receive port and have a send port subscribe to it, then map the message to a new format and deliver it to a destination. Pretty simple, right?

Well, no. When I have my project deployed I got the following error when routing:

There was a failure executing the receive pipeline: "Microsoft.BizTalk.DefaultPipelines.XMLReceive" Source: "XML disassembler" Receive Location: " D:\dat\FileReceive\RoundTrip\*.xml Reason: Cannot locate document specification as multiple schemas match the message type "http://BO.Get.EV2#Method".

That error left me scratching my head. It means I probably have the schema deployed twice, right? I didn't, so I thought. When I undeployed the application the messaging engine could no longer match my message type:

There was a failure executing the receive pipeline: "Microsoft.BizTalk.DefaultPipelines.XMLReceive" Source: "XML disassembler" Receive Location: "D:\dat\FileReceive\RoundTrip\*.xml"
Reason: Finding document specification by message type "http://BO.Get.EV2#Method" failed. Verify that the schema is deployed properly.

When I deployed the project with the schemas, everything suddenly worked fine. That means that, somewhere, the schema was again deployed.

So I looked thru the BizTalk Server Assemblies viewer and discovered that the web reference which existed in my test harness was the culprit. The messaging engine recognized the web reference as a second deployment of my schema. This was technically accurate but rather frustrating to find. I've seen so many of these errors posted on the newsgroups that I thought I'd mention this as a possible cause.

If you are using test harnesses coupled with web services be aware that your schema is actually deployed twice.

Easier way to add a DLL to the GAC

2005-12-16T12:39:00.000+01:00

Often in BizTalk you’ll need to add assemblies to the Global Assembly Cache. In the past I had used a shortcut on my Quick Launch toolbar which opened the GAC, then I’d drop the assembly inside, but there is an easier way.

A registry key can be created which allows you to right click the DLL and “GAC it” in one click.

The text for the key is below; simply copy/paste it into notepad and save it as a registry file (.reg). Then double click the file to add it to the registry.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\dllfile\shell\gacutil\command]
@="c:\\windows\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v1.1.4322\\gacutil.exe /i \"%1\""

You can also download the Gacutil right-click key as a zip file here.

BizTalk exception handling with web services

2005-12-10T09:15:00.000+01:00

Recently I needed to include exception handling in a web service call to an external party. I learned a couple of things and thought I’d highlight them here.

Exception handling doesn’t always behave the way you expect when you are trying to catch exceptions when calling a web service. While using one is very useful some things must be considered or you will not get the result you wanted.

Here is one way to do it as well as a few things to keep in mind when you want to set one up:

Include the external web service call (both send and receive shapes) in either a non-transactional scope shape or a long running transaction.
Decide if you need to catch any specific exceptions, if you don’t, using the General Exception will suffice. If you need to catch specific errors, you can use multiple catch exception blocks.
It may sound obvious to say this, but make sure your orchestration doesn’t have a timeout that is the same length (or shorter) than the timeout of your scope transaction.
Most important: in your send port which holds the reference to the web service, make sure you are not using any retries (unless, of course, you explicitly need to). If the web service fails with an error such as “There is an error in XML document (5, 10)” and you have retries enabled you will only see warnings in your event viewer (which means the exception block won’t be activated until the SOAP timeout).

Solving BizTalk "error X2044"

2005-12-01T09:32:00.000+01:00

I encountered a strange compilation error recently in BizTalk 2004 when importing a web service.

While I can’t put my finger on the exact cause yet, I do have a fix that works.

When you see an error message like:

C:\Project\Web References\ExtRef\MyOrch.odx(445,23): error X2044: symbol '@@@@' is already defined; the first definition is in assembly @@@.dll : It may be possible to disambiguate by using fully qualified names.

The way to fix this error is to do the following:

Open the orchestration in Notepad (In my case MyOrch.odx)
Do a find (Ctrl+F) for “#endif // __DESIGNER_DATA”
Delete all the code below that line
Save your file in Notepad
Say yes when Visual Studio asks if you want to update your file
Recompile

Note: The code will not be regenerated until you edit an expression shape, etc. Add a “//” or something and you will then see the code re-appear when you open it in Notepad again.

I hope this may serve to save someone time, it took a while for me to figure it out.

Passed the BizTalk 74-135 certification

2005-11-12T10:04:00.000+01:00

Randal and I have passed the BizTalk Server partner exam (74-135) "Developing E-Business Solutions Using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004". It, as many have commented, was a rather difficult exam that has no real preparation materials to help get thru it.

For anyone interested in taking the exam it's recommeneded that you have lots of hands on experience with BizTalk.

Please note, this exam is designed for Microsoft Certified Partners, so unless you work for such a company the exam is not available.