A few months ago Kent Brown and I presented on Dublin (the new enhancements to Windows for Workflow Hosting, Monitoring, and Tracking) at the 2009 SOA and Business Process Conference in Seattle Washington. This session was recorded and is now online.  You can view this video here: http://soaconference2009.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!FA6FC7F5DB1C07!135.entry The abstract for the session is below. Abstract:  Dublin is the code name for the new Windows Application Server features inside Windows...

I’m back in the action again working on a large BizTalk Healthcare project after some time off. This is the first time I’ve worked with HIPAA transactions like 270, 271, and others and so far I have learned a lot. Like other projects I have worked on in the past, one of the first things I do is create projects and namespaces for the new code we have to build. This is usually something you did not have to put much thought into.  But with transactions like 270 I went to make a namespace like BizTalk...

A few days ago BizTalk 2013 Beta was announced and released for download .  The plan is to make this available as a Windows Azure Virtual Machine Image just like the CTP but it has not yet been released.  Since the prebuilt image is not available, I wanted to try to manually install BizTalk Server 2013 Beta on a Windows Azure Virtual Machine. I did the same thing with the BizTalk 2010 R2 CTP without any issues. Below is a quick overview of BizTalk 2013 and my experience trying to get this...

After starting off strong for the first part of 2011 with a major site upgrade to BizTalkGurus.com, blogging more frequently, and sending out new editions of The BizTalker, I have really dropped the ball for the past 6 months. But let me explain. In the past 6 months my life has changed. We had our first baby on 2-9-11. His name is Westin. While a new baby in itself takes a lot of work Westin is very special. A few weeks after birth we noticed Westin just was not eating enough to put on any weight...

On Thursday June 4th I will be presenting in Sweden to the BizTalk Users Group . I am excited to be making the trip to Sweden and it will be great to see so many BizTalk enthusiasts all in one place.  I will be presenting two sessions both on Microsoft's new Window Application Server Enhancements – known as “Dublin”.  The details of the sessions are below.  If you are in Stockholm and want to attend you can get information on the BizTalk Users Group home page.  Meeting Title...

These three topics could be entire blog posts on there own. In this case, I’ll briefly cover all three and show how to use them all together. Start Orchestration – This shape give you the ability to asynchronously start a new Orchestration. You can pass in all types of parameters but you can not return parameters like the Call Orchestration Shape. Passing Configured Port Parameters – This is an input parameter type for Call and Start Orchestrations. This can be used to pass in already...

This is a follow-up to my post and video on Creating a BizTalk 2010 R2 CTP Virtual Machine in Windows Azure.  I hope most of you have reviewed my earlier posts on Creating a Windows Azure Virtual Machine running BizTalk Server 2010 R2 CTP. So now what? You can create a Syspreped image of the Virtual Machine to be used over and over again to create new BizTalk instances. This would be very handy if you wanted to role this out to 20 new developers on a project (more detail on this here ) with...

I need to start off with a note about the Parallel Sequential Convoy sample that I am working on. I am still working on it and it will probably be a few weeks before it is ready to be posted. I have a sample working that does Parallel Sequential processing of a single message type. I am now trying to get that to work with multiple message types in a single Orchestration, although I think this breaks one of the rules of convoys. In any case, please check back later for that sample. In the mean time...

Topics Covered: - Custom promoted properties inside a pipeline - Schema Property: “Property schema base” - Direct binding to the message box I have spent a lot of time in the past few weeks working with promoted properties through property schemas. I was using the standard approach, to simply set the promoted properties inside the schema. This, in turn, would allow the properties to be promoted inside the pipeline with no additional effort on my part. This led me into working with custom...

Recently the Windows Azure Storage API’s were updated to include the ability to do cross account, asynchronous blob transfers. This means it was no longer necessary to download the blob in order to upload it to a different Windows Azure account. You can read all about this here . Over the past few weeks I have been working with the Windows Azure Virtual Machine feature that is currently in preview mode. I talked in a past blog post and video about using the Gallery to create a BizTalk 2010...

I have been spending a lot of time the past few weeks working with the Windows Azure Virtual Machines that are currently available as a Preview Feature. The ability to be up and running with a custom hosted Virtual Machine in a matter of minutes without any extra onsite hardware costs still amazes me, although this concept has been around for a while now.  It is ever better that I can use the Virtual Machine for a few hours and then throw it away at a net cost to me of only a few cents. ...

Scott posted a message back in June about untyped receive ports inside on Orchestration. Untyped Messages means you receive or send a message as System.Xml.XmlDocument rather then a specific schema type. This is an incredibly powerful feature in BizTalk 2004! Business Case : Lets say you want to have one Orchestration (i.e. a single business process) to process many different types of messages all in the same way. Additionally, say you want to change some values in your message and send all of your...

Tired of having to go into BizTalk Server Admin and terminate any suspended Orchestration instance before you want to redeploy? Scripting this task is very simple using WMI. Just create a file called Terminate.vb and copy in this code: TerminateAllOrchs Sub TerminateAllOrchs Query = "SELECT * FROM MSBTS_ServiceInstance where ServiceClass = 1" Set InstSet = GetObject("Winmgmts:!root\MicrosoftBizTalkServer").ExecQuery(Query) For Each Inst In InstSet Inst.Terminate Next End Sub Running...

Did anyone read Kevin Smith’s blog on ACK/NACK and run out to try it? Well, I did and found it a more time consuming then I expected. I have put together a sample that shows how to catch the SOAP exception and get access to the error message. I hope that after looking at this sample Kevin’s excellent post on NACK’s will make a little more sense. It did for me. DOWNLOAD: Get the sample here! Set-up is easy, just unzip the SampleNACK folder and put it on your C: drive. Then, build...

Recently I was testing a BizTalk map inside Visual Studios. The input schema was auto generated using the SQL Adapter and the output was a simple text file. I was using a sample file provided to me from a past generation from the schema (or so I thought) to test the map. When I was testing, I keep getting a blank file as output and a strange error. The error was: Native serialization error: Root element is missing. I had both input and output validation turned on and the input sample file was passing...

Direct binding in Biztalk Server 2004 can be used to send messages from one Orchestration to another. It can also be used to send messages directly into the message box, but that is not the focus of this post. Direct binding is easily misunderstood, specifically Partner Port binding since can be somewhat confusing to set up. I will walk through the 4 simple steps to set up direct binding using partner ports. It is important to note direct binding still uses the publish and subscribe system in Biztalk...

Windows Azure has a few different, somewhat disjointed, toolsets available to create new artifacts and maintain existing ones.  The best known is the Web Portal.  Very quickly when working with the web portal you discover the portal is not able to do all the tasks needed to support development and maintenance.  This brings into play Windows Azure PowerShell Commands, a .Net SDK, and REST API.  If you are new to working with the Windows Azure REST API or if you are looking for...

Some enhancements were made this weekend to the Windows Azure Preview Portal.  With these enhancements is the addition of Service Bus features and I think the ability to create Containers inside a Storage Account.  I do not remember that being in place before. As it relates to Virtual Machines I noticed the following two changes: 1.  When you Capture An Image from an existing Virtual Machine you get a notice saying the Virtual Machine will be deleted. 2.  When you delete a DISK...

Today is a great day to be a BizTalk Developer! Why? Microsoft has introduced .Net 4.0, Windows Application Server (Dublin), and Microsoft’s Modeling Platform (Oslo). These new technologies compliment the existing Connection System technologies. As you look though the various technologies one thing is consistent: Take the best things of BizTalk and allow others outside of BizTalk to leverage it! I’ve put together over an hour of first look videos to help show the new features of Microsoft’s latest...

Deployment in BizTalk 2006 is a greatly improved process over that of BizTalk 2004. The typical deployment process in BizTalk 2006 goes something like this: 1. Export the MSI using BizTalk Administration 2. Move to target computer 3. Import MSI through BizTalk Administration or BTSTASK 4. Run the MSI to GAC the DLL's Simple and straight forward. But why do we need to run the MSI after we import it? This accomplishes a few things, mostly to GAC the DLL's and to have the MSI package show up under Add...