Fixing ’The default web application could not be determined’ when deploying a .NET BCS Connectivity Assembly in SharePoint 2010

Overview
The following error was received when attempting to deploy a .NET BCS Connectivity Assembly to our SharePoint 2010 Farm:
Error occurred in deployment step ‘Add Solution’: The default web application could not be determined. Set the SiteUrl property in feature *Model Name*_Feature1 to the URL of the desired site and retry activation. […]
Blog Post by: Michael Gerety

SharePoint BCS Links

Overview
While investigating how to create and deploy custom .NET BCS Connectivity Assemblies, I came across a ton of good links that helped out with some specific issues, and I wanted to share them.
Clearing BCS Service Application Database
The following link describes a method of clearing out the BCS database in order to redeploy BCS custom assemblies […]
Blog Post by: Michael Gerety

Measuring Ecosystem Popularity Through Twitter Follower Count, Growth

Measuring Ecosystem Popularity Through Twitter Follower Count, Growth

Donnie Berkholz of the analysis firm RedMonk recently posted an article about observing tech trends by monitoring book sales. He saw a resurgence of interest in Java, a slowdown of interest in Microsoft languages (except PowerShell), upward movement in Python, and declining interesting in SQL. While on Twitter the other day, I was looking at […]
Blog Post by: Richard Seroter

Being selective about when your pre/post processing scripts execute during BizTalk installs

Being selective about when your pre/post processing scripts execute during BizTalk installs

Nothing quite beats a totally scripted BizTalk installation. It might not be a one click install (unless you’re using advanced tools such as the BizTalk Deployment framework) seeing as there are quite a few screens to get through in the BizTalk msi import/install wizards, but you sure can make it a brainless task. Some common […]
Blog Post by: Johann

BizTalk Server Performance

Have you ever wanted to evaluate the performance of your Biztalk installation?
Evaluating your performance could be done by analyzing quite some counters in the performance monitor of Windows. Or maybe by using the Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) Tool.

However I just found a recently released tool to benchmark your biztalk environments.
The tool is called blogical and can be found on codeplexe here.

How it works:

  1. After the user has started the application and specified the BizTalk Group, the tool analyzes its configuration, finding all the BizTalk servers, Messageboxes etc.
  2. Secondly, the user gets to select one of two scenarios: Messaging or Orchestration. Each scenario has a set of tested environments such as
    • “Single server (2*Quad CPU, 4GB RAM)”
    • “1*BTS (1*Quad CPU. 4GB RAM) + 1*SQL(1*Quad CPU, 8GB RAM)”.
    • “2*BTS (2*Quad CPU. 8GB RAM) + 2*SQL(2*Quad CPU, 16GB RAM)”.
  3. The user selects the environment which most resembles his/her own.
  4. The user then starts the Indigo Service, a console application hosting a service which will be called from the BizTalk Send port.
  5. As the user clicks “Run test”, the tool continues to start ports and orchestrations. It will also start the Perfmon collector sets if the user has chosen to create those.
  6. As the test proceeds the user can monitor the counter values through the gauges (CPU utilization, Received msgs/sec and Processed msgs/sec). The default test duration is 30 minutes, with a warm-up of 2 minutes.
  7. Finally, the user is presented a result, which is either Succeeded or Failed.

For more information:
Benchmark your BizTalk Server (Part 1)

How to install:
Benchmark your BizTalk Server (Part 2)

BBW Drill Down:
Benchmark your BizTalk Server (Part 3)

High Scores:
http://blogical.se/bbw

Another thing I wanted to share with you regarding performance of Biztalk installations is the Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 Performance Optimization Guide .
This guide provides in-depth information for optimizing the performance of a BizTalk Server solution.

Also check BizTalk Health Check post on Technet Wiki. It’s a list of checkpoints that should be covered when performing a health check

Top 10 ways you can improve BizTalk Server performance with less effort

In this article we are going to look at 10 tips you can perform on your BizTalk environment with less effort and maximize your performance.  Often times it may be too late to impose some best practices on your BizTalk solutions, things like orchestration best practices like reducing number of persistence points, Pipeline best practices […]
Blog Post by: Saravana Kumar

Contest Winners: (MCTS) Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 (70-595) Certification Guide book

Contest Winners: (MCTS) Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 (70-595) Certification Guide book

Thanks to all participants, there were many participants, in a total of 20 different countries, which may demonstrate the good acceptance of this new book by the BizTalk community. But only two could be the winners, so congratulations to: Lisa Edwards from USA, winner of the book (printed copy) And Jonathan Maes from Belgium, winner […]
Blog Post by: Sandro Pereira