February, 2012

While configuring BizTalk features (BAM Tools or Sharepoint Adapter), you may have issues getting the cofiguration process to succeed with the error below: “Overlapped I/O operation is in progress” Certain blogs suggest that registry changes be made to force it to work. This is a bit risky once it comes to prod environments. The best [...] Blog Post by: DipeshA

Overview When deploying reports to an SSRS server, the server creates a record in the Catalog table.  this table holds the report location, the binary data for the report, as well as parameter and property information, among other things.  On deployment, various report properties are extracted and added to the Properties column of the Categories table [...] Blog Post by: Michael Gerety

When using BizTalk to send and receive from a file share is usually pretty simple. However when you combine this with a DFS network file share, it gets a little bit more complex. We found our receive location was not starting, and simply failing to work. So we did mange to get this to work here is how: You firstly need to have the right share, as some users will use \\machinesname1\share$ and others something else. The correct share to use is the DFS defined share, so when the DFS storage moves the...

I’ve just published a web-browsalbe version of “ Windows Azure Service Bus Developer Guide ”. “The Developers Guide to AppFabric” has been re-branded, and has a new title of “Windows Azure Service Bus Developer Guide”. There is not that much new in the...

Just a few more days before companies using BizTalk EDI may see a brief but definite lapse in their EDI coverage to observe leap year. Unless they apply this hotfix for resolving a leap year bug: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2435900. This fix must be applied before 2/29/2012 or you will not be able to process EDI messages on [...] Blog Post by: clineer

Here I'm writing this post from my hotel in Bellevue, I'm here to attend the MVP Global Summit 2012 . It's one of the very important event for us from BizTalk360. Anniversary of BizTalk360 is inline with the MVP summit. The initial idea of BizTalk360 was originated from 2010 summit while having dinner with some of the great BizTalk MVP folks in Redmond. The original idea was to build some web based administration console for BizTalk server. Like any typical chit-chat over coffee, after...

I have a new story for BizTalk Community Series before I will be heading of to the MVP Summit . Currently I am staying with Kent Weare in Calgary and yesterday did a presentation at his company on versatile adapter pack capabilities. Kent and Bil Simser did presentations on Service Bus, Queues, Topics and SharePoint 2010. It was pretty amazing. Ok now to the story. Recently I have had a chat with DPS Bali , an active BizTalk forum member and blogger. Like me he likes to play field hockey , so I finally...

As you may have heard, there is an issue in the BizTalk 2006 R2 and 2009 EDI Engines that results in a failed EDI transaction if the EDI message contains a date node that has a leap year value - for example 2/29/2012. This issue and hotfix is documented at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2435900 . With 2/29/2012 just days away, this is a big deal and you will want to address this issue in your environment ASAP. You can also get some great information about this issue at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/biztalkcrt...

This post is about an error we encountered during the installation of the Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Leap Year Date Hotfix (See KB article 2435900 for details). The hotfix requires a certain product version key for Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2, while this product version key is too low when the necessary prerequisites are installed. In this post you can also see the workaround I've found to deal with this error.

Folks I’ve decided to list some useful links and tips that I’ve come across as part of our work we do. This list will grow and expand as time goes on. Design/Pre Work Azure Naming conventions for Services, Containers, Blobs, Metadata , Naming and Registry Hosted Service Names are < 63 chars (previously there was a bug with service names over 24 chars and not being able to rdp, not sure if this is fixed) Azure Icons for use in Visio and the like - http://davidpallmann.blogspot.com.au/2011/07/windows...

While currently setting up a BizTalk 2010 developer machine, I’ve got to do a couple of others to do also for the team. I figured ‘we surely can copy/clone this’ – here’s a handy link for SysPrep and we use files from the BizTalk SDK to work the magic. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee358636.aspx Looking forward to it. Enjoy. Blog Post by: Mick Badran

This post outlines the various extensibility options of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and how this can be integrated with the Azure Service Bus to integrate with on premises applications. This is part 1, focusing on the out of the box capabilities.

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 ships with some assemblies that assist you with the administration and deployment of your BizTalk environment. There was a small challenge to dynamically detect the BizTalk Servers of a BizTalk Group, during an automated deployment.

I recently hit an issue while configuring a sql job to process my BAM cubes by running the BAM_AN_* packages with the following error: Code: 0×00000000 Source: Set global connection string variables Description: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. I later found that this was due to the user under which [...] Blog Post by: DipeshA

Folks, here’s a great page showing which Azure OS and SDK applies to what version. One to keep handy – get prepared for a v1.7 SDK release http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee924680.aspx Blog Post by: Mick Badran

There was a question in Microsoft BizTalk Server General Forum where the requirement was to promote values on the messages extracted from a batch of messages using orchestration. How it could be implemented? To promote the properties in orchestration one need to initialize the correlation set as demonstrated by Sarvana Kumar in his blog. But you can initialize the correlation set only once

As Mexia starts doing more and more Azure work, I am getting asked more frequently about firewall rules for accessing the Azure Service Bus. At first this seemed a weird question to me, to communicate with Azure Service Bus it is all outbound traffic, but more and more companies lately are restricting outbound traffic, for example the default Microsoft Threat Management Gateway (TMG) outbound rule only allow 80 and 443. So for my own reference and for others that may get asked the same question,...

Read what auto certificate rollover in AD FS is and how it can impacts your services. Also learn how to prevent this feature of having impact on your services.

In .NET, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) provides all the support you need to build distributed service-oriented data access solutions. You can certainly work with WCF directly to create custom services and expose data from an Entity Data Model (EDM) with the ADO.NET Entity Framework, or from any other data access layer (DAL) of your choosing. [...] Blog Post by: Lenni Lobel

A few of our teams have been using the EMC (formerly Conchango) Scrum for Team System process template for TFS.  We’re doing a migration at a client over to TFS 2010 from TFS 2008, and were attempting to move to the newest version of the process template along with it.  Project Portal Problems TFS 2010 ships [...] Blog Post by: Michael Gerety