Before we start with the actual post, I’d like to introduce a new brand we will be developing. This is the first official post with the “It’s not Rocket Science!” brand.
With this concept, we intend to explain how some procedures are not as complicated as you may think and that they’re not Rocket science. I’m open to suggestions on posts to demystify Azure Logic Apps and other Azure services.
So, welcome to a new concept and I hope you find it useful.
Azure Functions: Moving from Azure Portal to VS
Creating Functions in Portal presents some challenges, like lack of Intellisense, which, as we know, helps a lot. Not having CI/CD is also a concern and of the worse case scenarios:
Someone deleting you function by mistake!
Panic!, all hell broke loose. I tried to apply the same method as I did with the Logic Apps accidental delete recovery, but the “Change history” tab isn’t available for Functions. You end up losing your code, your executions and maybe some sleep over this.
The obvious next step is to get your backup from your repository and re-create the function. IF you have it in a repo.
We can’t prevent someone deleting our resources, everyone makes mistakes. But you can prevent letting your code sit in Azure Portal without version control, CI/CD and repository control.
So, the best way to do this is to migrate it to a VS solution. In this post, I will use VS2019, but VSCode is also available as others IDEs. You can do this right from the start by choosing another development environment besides the Portal.
With an existing Function, you’ll need a few things before you can migrate it. Besides your VS with an active subscription, you will also need the Azure SDK feature. This can be installed using the Installer you’ve downloaded from MS or in VS itself, in the “Tools”-> “Get Tools and Features” menu.
After a fresh install of Windows, I didn’t installed the Azure SDK, so I had to download it and install. According to the setup, it should take about 6,5GB.
If you had to install the SDK, Updates are also important, keep that in mind.
Lets return to the code.
The good thing about VS is that you don’t need to reference the required DLLs, they will probably already be there.
So you need to create a new Solution, with an Azure Function project.
Small note: you can also create a project using VB instead of C#, but… VB…
You can either choose a template with a trigger already created or you can choose an empty project, but when you try to Add a function, it will ask you again what template you want to use.
You can also add an empty class, but you will be missing some references.
As you can see, there are quite a few differences between the Class and the Function template.
I recommend you use the same template as the one you used to build your function, you will get more references that will be necessary for your code to work.
And now comes the easiest part. You can just copy-paste your code into VS, but leave the usings out. Most likely, if you haven’t used anything outstanding, they will already be there.
Now you have you code in VS, ready to run. Is it working properly? Well, you can just debug it locally, when pressing F5, the Azure emulator will start and you will be able to test your function like it was on the cloud.
You can just use your Postman or another web request tool to test your project.
Once you’ve tested everything and are ready to deploy to your subscription, you’ll need configure the publishing profile.
You have two major ways of doing this. You can choose the blue pill and configure your connection by hand or you take the red pill and download the profile from the existing FA.
My advice, get the publish profile. Saves you time and it’s Plug’n’Play.
And that’s it. Your newly migrated function is now ready for your CI/CD and you can manage and version it with VS and DevOps.
Now, this does have a catch, or not depending on how you look at it. Because we deploy using a Zip file, the code is no longer available in the Portal, you must now always use VS to view it.
I like this, because it means that from a Security perspective, noone will be accessing the source code through the Portal and it forces new Devs, and old ones too, to join the best practices policy and have everything in a proper Repo and version controlled.
Do you feel difficult to keep up to date on all the frequent updates and announcements in the Microsoft Integration platform and Azure iPaaS?
Integration weekly updates can be your solution. It’s a weekly update on the topics related to Integration – enterprise integration, robust & scalable messaging capabilities and Citizen Integration capabilities empowered by Microsoft platform to deliver value to the business.
A few days ago, I release the latest version of the BizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter optimized for BizTalk Server 2020. Today I merged the changes and improvements made on that version and made it available for BizTalk Server 2016.
What is new?
New schedule capabilities:
Capability to set DateTime you want to use on the Timespan schedule type: DateTime.Now or DateTime.UtcNow
By adding this capability to chose between DateTime.Now or DateTime.UtcNow, it will address and solve the issues reported regarding unlimited messages being triggered if you are using a different timezone than UTC.
The functionality always to trigger the message at 00 seconds and respect the original time set was added again to the Timespan schedule type. The GetNextActivationTime method was improved to fix all these unexpected behaviors reported that indeed was a feature by design.
BizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter
The BizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter is an in-process receive adapter that executes a prescribed task on a daily, weekly or monthly schedule. The adapter is configured entirely within BizTalk, all configurations are stored within the SSODB and can be exported and imported via binding files.
The schedule capabilities are similar to those available with the Windows Scheduled Task Service.
Four simple tasks are included:
XmlStringStreamProvider – generates a BizTalk message from a configured Xml string
FileStreamProvider – generates a BizTalk message from the contents of a file
HttpDownload – generates a BizTalk message from data downloaded from a web site
SQLStreamProvider – generates a BizTalk message from the contents of a SQL Query (similar to the old SQL adapter) – Since version 3.0
Custom tasks can be created. Any .NET class that implements the appropriate interface can be scheduled.
Big thanks to Pedro Almeida, my team member, that took 95% of my work and finalize this version!
Download
You can download this “new” version of the adapter in BizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter from GitHub:
Please feel free to use the adapter, and If you find any problems or bugs, please open an issue on the adapter GitHub site: https://github.com/sandroasp/BizTalk-Scheduled-Task-Adapter and help evolve this community adapter. You can also suggest new features, and I am also open to new ideas.
Do you feel difficult to keep up to date on all the frequent updates and announcements in the Microsoft Integration platform and Azure iPaaS?
Integration weekly updates can be your solution. It’s a weekly update on the topics related to Integration – enterprise integration, robust & scalable messaging capabilities and Citizen Integration capabilities empowered by Microsoft platform to deliver value to the business.
Recently while I was testing an integration solution on a client that uses WCF-SQL to insert data on a SQL Server database I got the following error:
System.NotSupportedException: The SqlDbType “” is not supported. Modify your table, view, stored procedure, or function definition to avoid having parameters or columns of this type.
This was a surprise since everything was working properly in the development environment.
Cause
In this solution, we were doing bulk insert on a SQL Server database by using a User-Defined Types as the input to the stored procedure, in our case a User-Defined Table Type. There are other ways to do a SQL Server bulk insert or update in BizTalk Server but definitely, this is the best approach. And this is one of the reasons why we are getting on the error message with the keyword: SqlDbType.
This problem occurs because the user account that you used to access the database, in my case the BizTalk Host Instance Account, don’t have permissions on the User-Defined Type associated to the Store procedure that we were invoking.
Solution
To solve this issue, you must give access to the user, in my case BizTalk Host Instance Account to properly execute the stored procedure, you must:
Open SQL Server Management Studio and connect to your server.
In the Object Explorer, select and expand the desired database and expand the Security folder and then the Users.
Right-click on the User, BizTalk Host Instance Account, and choose Properties.
On the Database User windows, choose the Owned Schemas tab, and then on the Schemas owned by this user panel select the schema bind to your User-Defined Table Type.
In our case: Material
Click OK and try again to send the data to your SQL Server. It should work.
Do you feel difficult to keep up to date on all the frequent updates and announcements in the Microsoft Integration platform and Azure iPaaS?
Integration weekly updates can be your solution. It’s a weekly update on the topics related to Integration – enterprise integration, robust & scalable messaging capabilities and Citizen Integration capabilities empowered by Microsoft platform to deliver value to the business.
It has been a while since I didn’t follow carefully all the comments or issues posted on my blog or GitHub regarding BizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter. It was not by lack of interest but instead due to my lack of free time or just because I was focused on other projects or contributions.
Since I recently (7 days ago) publish I new version of the adapter with some further improvements and optimized it to BizTalk Server 2020. And I have a brand new environment that I need to install this adapter. I decided that it was an excellent opportunity and time to read the existing feedback and address, once and for all, all the reported issues or unexpected behaviors:
Using the Timespan schedule type may trigger unlimited messages;
Using the Timespan schedule type, if the time is set to past time, the task will not be triggered in certain cases.
Using the Timespan schedule type, when stopping the receive locations or stop/restart the host instances, you start to get a time drift from the original time set.
What is new?
New schedule capabilities:
Capability to set DateTime you want to use on the Timespan schedule type: DateTime.Now or DateTime.UtcNow
By adding this capability to chose between DateTime.Now or DateTime.UtcNow, it will address and solve the issues reported regarding unlimited messages being triggered if you are using a different timezone than UTC.
The functionality always to trigger the message at 00 seconds and respect the original time set was added again to the Timespan schedule type. The GetNextActivationTime method was improved to fix all these unexpected behaviors reported that indeed was a feature by design.
BizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter
The BizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter is an in-process receive adapter that executes a prescribed task on a daily, weekly or monthly schedule. The adapter is configured entirely within BizTalk, all configurations are stored within the SSODB and can be exported and imported via binding files.
The schedule capabilities are similar to those available with the Windows Scheduled Task Service.
Four simple tasks are included:
XmlStringStreamProvider – generates a BizTalk message from a configured Xml string
FileStreamProvider – generates a BizTalk message from the contents of a file
HttpDownload – generates a BizTalk message from data downloaded from a web site
SQLStreamProvider – generates a BizTalk message from the contents of a SQL Query (similar to the old SQL adapter) – Since version 3.0
Custom tasks can be created. Any .NET class that implements the appropriate interface can be scheduled.
Big thanks to Pedro Almeida, my team member, that took 95% of my work and finalize this version!
Download
You can download this “new” version of the adapter in BizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter from GitHub:
Please feel free to use the adapter, and If you find any problems or bugs, please open an issue on the adapter GitHub site: https://github.com/sandroasp/BizTalk-Scheduled-Task-Adapter and help evolve this community adapter. You can also suggest new features, and I am also open to new ideas.
Do you feel difficult to keep up to date on all the frequent updates and announcements in the Microsoft Integration platform and Azure iPaaS?
Integration weekly updates can be your solution. It’s a weekly update on the topics related to Integration – enterprise integration, robust & scalable messaging capabilities and Citizen Integration capabilities empowered by Microsoft platform to deliver value to the business.
Once again, after many requests and many postponements, due to my unavailability and free time to take these tasks, BizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter is finally officially available and optimized for BizTalk Server 2020 on GitHub!
The BizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter is an in-process receive adapter that executes a prescribed task on a daily, weekly or monthly schedule. The adapter is configured entirely within BizTalk, all configurations are stored within the SSODB and can be exported and imported via binding files.
The schedule capabilities are similar to those available with the Windows Scheduled Task Service.
Four simple tasks are included:
XmlStringStreamProvider – generates a BizTalk message from a configured Xml string
FileStreamProvider – generates a BizTalk message from the contents of a file
HttpDownload – generates a BizTalk message from data downloaded from a web site
SQLStreamProvider – generates a BizTalk message from the contents of a SQL Query (similar to the old SQL adapter) – Since version 3.0
Custom tasks can be created. Any .NET class that implements the appropriate interface can be scheduled.
What is new?
New schedule capabilities:
HTTPDownload task was changed and improved to control timeouts better and to avoid the receive locations disabling themselves automatically (Contribution made by Rickard Karlmats)
HTTPDownload task was changed and improved to support REST/JSON (Contribution made by Pedro Almeida)
Improved and optimized to BizTalk Server 2020 but it will also be compatible with BizTalk Server 2016
You can download this “new” version of the adapter in BizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter from GitHub:
Please feel free to use the adapter, and If you find any problems or bugs, please open an issue on the adapter GitHub site: https://github.com/sandroasp/BizTalk-Scheduled-Task-Adapter and help evolve this community adapter. You can also suggest new features, and I am also open to new ideas..
