BizTalk Gurus

BizTalk WCF Adapter Pack Articles on TopXML.com

Connected Thoughts — Thu, 15 May 2008 22:06:09 GMT

Richard Seroter has finished writing his articles on TopXML.com about BizTalk and WCF. He goes into a lot of detail on all that can be done with the WCF adapters in BizTalk and also the WCF Adapter Pack for Line of Business Applications. If you work with BizTalk and are interested in WCF the articles are a [...]...(read more)

Material from San Diego .NET User Group Presentation

Richard Seroter's Architecture Musings — Thu, 15 May 2008 15:15:23 GMT

Earlier this week, I grabbed a couple new CDs, hopped in the car, and drove down to San Diego to present at the .NET User Group’s Connected Systems meeting. The topic was the BizTalk Adapter Pack and I outlined what the BAP is, what the core use cases are, and demonstrated how to build a [...]...(read more)

Service Name Not Available and Commerce Server Import Directory BizTalk Issues

Stephen W. Thomas — Thu, 15 May 2008 14:32:15 GMT

Recently I have gotten a rare chance to step away from writing word documents and working with Visio to get to do some exciting BizTalk testing.

As part of my testing, I was pushing BizTalk and various Adapters until they failed. In doing so, sometimes this caused some odd side effects.

Recently, I was seeing thousands of Active Service Instances in BizTalk Administration that looked like this:

The Service Name was simply "Name is not available". To make matters worse, I was not able to terminate the instances. I tried stopping and restarting the hosts, restarting the applications, restarting the Server, but nothing seemed to work.

Out of pure luck, I decided to check the SQL Agent Jobs... and sure enough the SQL Agent was not running. During all my performance testing none of the Message Box clean-up jobs ran and that left BizTalk in an undesirable state. I started the SQL Agent, gave the jobs a few minutes to run, and then was able to clean out the Active service instances.

So the moral of the story, if you see odd BizTalk behavior make sure you check your SQL Agent to ensure it is running and the jobs are completing successfully.

Another minor item I ran into deals with the Commerce Server Catalog Adapter. It has a property called "Import Directory". The Adapter uses this as a temporary file store when submitting messages. This means the BizTalk Host will need read /write access to this location. This is something that can be easily forgotten... like I did.

So what happens if you forget to update this property or to give the folder the correct permissions?

Bad Things. And in BizTalk world, bad things translates into 4 Error Messages per input message in the event log.

Why we get so many errors - I do not know. If I remember correctly, none of them were very useful in correcting the problem.

My Double Life!

Jeff Lynch [MVP] — Thu, 15 May 2008 06:41:14 GMT

As most of you know, during the day I’m a mild-mannered .NET developer using all things Microsoft. But I lead a double life! Before my (still undiagnosed) illness came upon me suddenly last year, most of my free time was spent with my family or playing golf at some of the country's best daily-fee courses here in Houston. I really enjoyed the fresh air, exercise and competitive nature of the sport. Unfortunately, my current condition makes playing golf almost impossible and much too risky...(read more)

BizTalk Does Not Validate My Message?!?!

BizTalk lessons from the field — Wed, 14 May 2008 19:40:15 GMT

The ability to rigidly define the content of a data field is an essential element in any structured data definition. It is no surprise therefore one can define data constraints on elements and attributes in a schema through the means of various facets, such as enumerations, min length, regular expressions, and many more. The implementation of facets in a schema provides a large amount of value in terms of the data aspect of the contract to be used in an integration. Whether the...(read more)

Article on Choosing Service Implementation Strategy with WCF

Richard Seroter's Architecture Musings — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:24:46 GMT

Michele recently wrote a lengthy but deliciously thorough article on MSDN (hat tip: Lynn) called Application Deployment Strategies which identifies five core scenarios for using Windows Communication Foundation within a distributed application. Those scenarios include: Enterprise web services. Think secure, interoperable services that may also utilize new-ish WS* standards such as WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-ReliableMessaging. Web 2.0 services. [...]...(read more)

DataContracts and object references

Service Station, by Aaron Skonnard — Wed, 14 May 2008 09:44:00 GMT

Another new WCF feature that's part of .NET 3.5 SP1 has to do with better support for object references. DataContractSerializer has always supported serializing object references and dealing with graphs, including cycles, and not just simple trees. But doing so is not the default behavior -- you have to tell DataContractSerializer that you want it to preserve object references when you instantiate it. Let's look at a simple example. Supposed that you have the following cyclic object graph...(read more)

Bootstrapping BizTalk: Dynamically creating receive locations

Brian Loesgen's Blog — Wed, 14 May 2008 05:06:13 GMT

I came across an unusual requirement earlier this year while at a leading golfing industry company: We needed to retrieve current tournament standings from the PGA Web site, pulling scores and statistics from them by FTP every 2 minutes while the tournaments were in progress. Ultimately, the standings would trickle through to a data-driven Web site. The interesting part here was the pickup location, there was a predefined FTP folder structure, with a separate folder for each tournament (the files...(read more)

WCF: Technique of debugging inconsistency in Wsdl and Response messages.

Leonid Ganeline — Tue, 13 May 2008 23:36:15 GMT

WCF: Technique of debugging inconsistency in Wsdl and Response messages. I have consumed several WCF services where WSDLs do not conform the Response messagess (See below. I’ve bolded the sample text related to one issue.). We can fix the issues by changing proxy code. It’s not a big issue but now we must manually change proxy every time we have updated the proxy of this service. Here the checklist how we debug this case: [I’ve created the proxy for the web-service using any method in Visual Studio...(read more)

Add to the Global Assembly Cache on MSI Imports

Blog BizTalk — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:44:01 GMT

If you want all resources of your BizTalk application to be registered in GAC on MSI import, it is necessary, prior to exporting BizTalk application to MSI file, to check ‘Add to the global assembly cache on MSI imports (gacutil)’ option in Modify Resources dialog box. This option is unchecked by default. To avoid the [...]...(read more)

DataContracts without attributes (POCO support) in .NET 3.5 SP1

Service Station, by Aaron Skonnard — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:50:00 GMT

One of the new WCF features in .NET 3.5 SP1 is that DataContractSerializer now supports serializing types that aren’t annotated with any serialization attributes like [DataContract] or [Serializable]. If you were using DataContractSerializer prior to SP1, you had to follow the rules outline by Sowmy here . These rules illustrate that for custom classes you have a few choices. You can annotate the class with [DataContract] and [DataMember] to define an attribute-based mapping or implement IXmlSerializable...(read more)

SharePoint Placeholders Explained

Mick's Breeze Blogs - Biztalk/Sharepoint/... — Tue, 13 May 2008 13:37:37 GMT

Clayton sent through a great picture that explains what the main placeholders are on SharePoint Master Pages. Well done CJ - thanks!...(read more)

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta is available Now!

Its my Place at my Pace.... — Tue, 13 May 2008 10:59:41 GMT

Hi, Microsoft has released .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 for VS 2008 and this has been announced in Soma’s blog and this service pack is not just a bug fix patch but has new features and extensive support for asp.net as listed here. Ta!...(read more)

Is support coming for BizTalk builds on TFS?

Matt's Musings — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:54:00 GMT

According to Brian Harry[1] , he has been working with the BTS folks to get this put in place. He has been assured that this will be part of the R3[2] release of BizTalk Server that is due out next year. Finally, automated builds for BizTalk without all Read More......(read more)

Not just a service pack (VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 SP 1)

Matt's Musings — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:50:00 GMT

Microsoft has rolled out the beta of SP1 for .NET Framework version 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. Now don't get confused, this is not just a simple set of bug fixes, this thing is big! Entity Framework and LINQ to entities ADO.NET Data Services (formerly Read More......(read more)

Spaghetti Code Podcast - Connected Systems

Matt's Musings — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:56:00 GMT

I got a chance a few weeks ago to sit down with Jeff Brand at the local Microsoft office and talk about something I love - Connected Systems. We discussed Workflow and Biztalk, WCF and web services and how it all fits together. Jeff is fun to talk to Read More......(read more)

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta

ScottGu's Blog — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:51:33 GMT

Earlier today we shipped a public beta of our upcoming .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 releases. These servicing updates provide a roll-up of bug fixes and performance improvements for issues reported since we released the products last November. They also contain a number of feature additions and enhancements that make building .NET applications better (see below for details on some of them). We plan to ship the final release of both .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 this summer as free updates...(read more)

Claims based security at the Web Services Security Summit

Jesus Rodriguez's WebLog — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:26:00 GMT

This Wednesday I will be speaking at the Web Services Security Summit in Baltimore, MD. My session is about web Services security patterns and I will be specifically exploring how the principles of claim based security can be applied in trust, federation...( read more )...(read more)

WCF features/improvements in .NET 3.5 SP1 & VS 2008 SP1

Service Station, by Aaron Skonnard — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Scott Guthrie announced the availability of .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 today. If you read his entry , you'll see this release is packed with new features, many of which revolve around the Ajax, MVC, and ADO.NET improvements they've been working on. However, this release also contains some new WCF nuggets including the following: New Hosting Wizard for WCF Service projects. Enhancements in Test Client such as support for RM Sessions, Message Contract and Nullable types enables...(read more)

Auckland Connected Systems User Group - Creating and Consuming RESTful Web Services with WCF - Ron Jacobs

Connected Thoughts — Mon, 12 May 2008 01:51:44 GMT

It is my pleasure to to introduce you to the Auckland Connected Systems User Group. This is a new .NET User Group in Auckland, New Zealand. The meetings will be held at Datacom and at Microsoft (our sponsors), we try to meet once every two months unless we have an impromptu speaker. The technologies covered will be [...]...(read more)

A Web based version of the BizTalk Rules Composer

BizTalk, Toronto and PK — Sun, 11 May 2008 03:55:00 GMT

As part of a proof-of-concept I was working on last year, we needed to show that the BizTalk Business Rules could be created and managed via a Web Application instead of through the standard Business Rules Composer tool that we provide out of the box. The client had certain requirements that meant that using the standard Composer just wasn't viable. Therefore, I replicated a portion of the Composer as a Web based application. I thought I'd post some images from the app and see if this is...(read more)

Speaking at KNUG - Karlstad .NET User Group

.RICHARD — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:05:53 GMT

Yesterday I presented the MasterData Management using BizTalk 2006 R2 talk (I’ll soon have a post out with the presentation in English) I recently held at Developer Summit at the local .NET user group in Karlstad (KNUG). KNUG is a new .NET user group that I actually helped start a couple of months ago. This [...]...(read more)

Don't forget the BOM!

Commonality - BizTalk — Fri, 09 May 2008 00:03:59 GMT

If you're writing text files in an encoding that supports a Byte-Order Mark , you should always try to make sure that you include it, unless you have a protocol in place that precludes you from doing so (such as a legacy application that doesn't know how to deal with them). One of the reasons you should always remember the BOM is that many applications can use it to try to guess what encoding they should use when trying to read the text you're feeding them. Encoding detection based on...(read more)

BizTalk Server R3 trickle feed

Connected Thoughts — Thu, 08 May 2008 22:19:49 GMT

Isn’t it fun how Microsoft trickle feeds us BizTalk information hungry souls with details about BizTalk Server R3? It is already in a TAP program so surely they know a lot about it… Like Nick Heppleston’s “BizTalk to Incorporate Covast B2B Capabilities” post I am also concerned about them acquiring Covast’s B2B capabilities. It is on one [...]...(read more)

Article Series on BizTalk and WCF: Part IX, BizTalk Adapter Pack BizTalk Patterns

Richard Seroter's Architecture Musings — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:30:59 GMT

Whew. My 9th and final article for TopXML.com on integrating BizTalk Server and WCF is now published. This one looks at the BizTalk Adapter Pack and how to consume the Oracle adapter from inside BizTalk Server. I demonstrated how to insert multiple records at once, call stored procedures, build a database polling solution, and how [...]...(read more)

Commerce Server 2007: Importing Excel Catalog Data

Jeff Lynch [MVP] — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:07:30 GMT

This just came up in the Commerce Server forums and I wanted to remind everyone that FarPoint Technologies has an Excel parser component ( FarPoint Spread for BizTalk Server 2006 ) that can be used to create a simple process for uploading Excel catalog data into Commerce Server 2007. The FarPoint website contains training videos, the case study I participated in, and lots of other technical information on this very cool tool! If you missed my previous posts, you should take a look! BizTalk Server...(read more)

Creating Hierarchical Menus with a CustomAction in SharePoint

Jan Tielens' Bloggings — Thu, 08 May 2008 05:14:00 GMT

It’s a fairly known technique to make use of CustomActions to add elements to the out-of-the-box user interface of SharePoint: you can add menu items to the Site Actions menu, you can add links on the Site Settings page, etc. The following piece of XML is the manifest of a feature that will add a new menu item to the Site Actions menu: <Elements xmlns=" http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/ "> <CustomAction Id="{B0B5A0CB-7FBE-4dd6-9B2A-2B1E1321B8F9}" Location="Microsoft...(read more)

Creating Custom Application Pages that look like OOB Application Pages

Jan Tielens' Bloggings — Thu, 08 May 2008 05:13:00 GMT

Juist a quick post so I won't forget this link: http://graegert.com/?p=505 Steve Graegert has written a great post on how you can work with the SPPropertyBag to store configuration settings. Of course that's very interesting, but in this post he also describes how you can build a custom Application Page that looks like it's an OOB Application Page. The trick is to know the SharePoint user controls that are responsible for building the UI, like InputFormSection and InputFormControl. Once...(read more)

New Release of the SmartTools for SharePoint

Jan Tielens' Bloggings — Wed, 07 May 2008 19:41:30 GMT

I just uploaded a new release of the SmartTools for SharePoint to the CodePlex site. Currently the SmartTools project has two components: What's New web part : show new or modified data on SharePoint sites Autocomplete Text Field : AJAX autocomplete lookup field Changes in this release: What's New v1.1 Fixed issue with Link items Added option to Excluded or Include a list of content types Autocomplete Text Field v1.1 Fixed an issue if the field was used as a Site Column Added configurable...(read more)

BizTalk database sizing statistics

Be Logical - writings by Johan Hedberg — Wed, 07 May 2008 19:15:00 GMT

In the hope that this might help someone who is tasked to estimate the size of BizTalk Server 2006 databases, I'm offering a few statistics. These statistics comes from a current engagement that uses very few orchestrations and more or less does messaging...( read more )...(read more)