by community-syndication | Oct 29, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
While I was over in Redmond a couple of weeks ago, I caught up with Ginny Simmons from QuickLearn. I have been wanting to bring QuickLearn back to Australia / NZ to deliver some deep dive BizTalk 2006 courses, but really need to get some momentum here locally (i.e. partners and customers registering their interest / willingness to attend)! What struck my interest was the BizTalk courses they now have on offer….
- Building SOA Solutions
- BizTalk Server 2006 Quickstart
- BizTalk Server 2006 DeepDive (R2)
- BizTalk Server 2006 RFID QuickStart
I’m really keen to try and organise an RFID course here locally in Aus….. I need to liaise with Ginny to determine when the schedule starts, but please let me know if you are keen and I’ll see what I can get organised. Check out the brochure here
by community-syndication | Oct 29, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Visual Studio 2005 IDE Enhancements are a set of Visual Studio extensions that are designed to make you more productive. These enhancements are directly integrated into the Visual Studio IDE. This set of enhancements includes Source Code Outliner, Visual C++ Code Snippets, Indexed Find, Super Diff and Event Toaster tools. All these tools except the IDE Event Toaster can be invoked from Visual Studio’s View.OtherWindows menu group. The Event Toaster tool can be configured from the Tools Options dialog under the PowerToys node. The Visual C++ Code Snippets can be invoked on any C++ source file. Previously, these enhancements were only available via the Visual Studio 2005 SDK. This installation does not require Visual Studio 2005 SDK.
Source Code Outliner : The Source Outliner tool is a Visual Studio extension that provides a tree view of your source code’s types and members and lets you quickly navigate to them inside the editor.
Visual C++ Code Snippets:The Visual C++ Code Snippets tool lets you insert snippets in your code by using a pop-up menu that contains programming keywords. VB.NET and C# languages have this functionality in Visual Studio 2005.
Indexed Find : The Indexed Find tool is a Visual Studio extension that uses the Microsoft Indexing Service to provide improved Search capabilities to the integrated development environment (IDE). It sends the results of a search to the Output Window.
Super Diff Utility: The Super Diff Find tool is a Visual Studio extension that compares text files. It uses color coding and graphics to show the difference between the files in deleted text (red), changed text (blue), inserted text (green).
Event Toaster Utility: The Event Toaster tool is a Visual Studio extension that notifies users about specific events within the Visual Studio IDE.
Link
by community-syndication | Oct 28, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Ah, the joys of the mighty incomparable Visual Source Safe. In combination with VS2003 Web Projects and IIS it can send any developer over the edge of Mount Doom. It wields more power and more malice than Sauron himself.
Sometime ago we had so many problems with VSS and web projects we were actively considering moving to Subversion (this is at my client site, in my own company we saw the light long ago and moved out of VSS to CVS and now SubVersion, but thats another story). Im keen on using TFS but thats in an evaluation phase now and since we are still working on a .NET 1.1 project (with Biztalk04) we had to make do with VSS. Just when we were about to setup the SVN repository some of the folk on the team felt comfortable that we had found a workaround with VSS web projects and so we dropped the move. Bad mistake. Now we are sort of nearing the end of the current phase of the project and were working on the build scripts. We are not yet into the CI world, its still in the automated build stage (or actually, the half automated build stage because of the aforementioned glorious product). The scripts reported some build failure in one application so we happily opened VS to check it. Boom.. first error. VSS doesnt like you opening solutions directly like that. It has to be done through the “Open From Source Control” mechanism. This messed up the solution for a bit but we eventually got a few projects open and corrected some of the issues. For instance I couldnt keep my solution files in their own folder because there was a MSI project in the set and it complained that the MSI project was in a different part of the structure from the solution, so i had to recreate the entire source tree for that section. Thank goodness for the GDN SourceSafeBindingRemover app. It let us make several passes at re-setting up the tree.
Set the build up again and yet another crash. This time, no matter how we tried to open the solution, IIS wouldnt let us. It just kept throwing vague errors about being unable to find the csproj file. We tried for 4 hours (including reinstalling IIS) but no luck. So finally we gave up and for that one project we put in a file copy task to get the code from a file system backup. It was rather sad and we didnt wanna do that, but there was no way to get beyond this error. The build scripts are back on track and we’ll keep them that way till we can move to TFS or maybe back to SVN. Anything to get away from this monster.
One thing i hate most about VSS is the way its a sort of control freak. As long as you let it dictate the place you store your web app files (and keep them in wwwroot, away from the rest of your code base) and let VS create the solution folders in whatever way it knows best, its all fine. The moment you try to create a disciplined source tree and keep your web projects together with the rest of the code, thats the start of all suffering. I used SVN in a previous project and never heard a murmur from the system. It just worked!! In the old days, when i started out, (in 1996) we used VC 1.52c and VB4 and VSS was fine for all that (with small teams of course), but when web apps came out, they should have done some thorough revisions, especially when you have seriously good open source competition. Its amazing that after so many years, MS still hasnt managed to get VSS to work decently with web projects. And now, the only MS option is the costly TFS. Just google for VSS and web apps problems and you’ll probably get a million results. I nearly laughed out loud when i saw one of the results was an old teched hands on lab for setting up a “builld lab” with VSS and VS2003!!
yeah, i know, someone is going to reply saying RTFM, theres a way to work with web projects, there are workarounds and all that. I’ve heard it all before. There is just no reliability with it. An automated build should at least let you sleep easier at night not keep you awake fretting about what new horrors the results of the build will reveal and what new workarounds you should find.
VSS RIP can never come too soon for me. !
by community-syndication | Oct 28, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Since I always have a hard time remembering where it is and what to run, there are two scripts that you can run in your non-production region that can clean up currently running orchestrations that you have already terminated and it is waiting to clear it up.
You will first need to go and create the real stored procedure bts_CleanupMsgBox (this replaces the shell that is there).
The instructions are as follows to clean it up:
- Stop BTS.
- Do IISRESET if you are using web services.
- Run “bts_CleanupMsgbox” on your message box database. This will mark your instances for deletion and it will not actually delete it.
- Run “bts_PurgeSubscriptions” on your message box database. This will purge all your messages marked for deletion.
- Restart your BTS.
by community-syndication | Oct 28, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Hi All,
Iwrote an article recently onBRE’s enhancements and new features available with BizTalk Server 2006.This article can be found at thefollowing link:
https://www.biztalkgurus.com/newsletter/TheBizTalker-volume-07.html
Please do read this article and send in your comments.
by community-syndication | Oct 27, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/905290/
Fix 245451: BRE caches XML fields incorrectly
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/905571/
Fix: 245450: The Rule Engine is not honoring rule priorities correctly in high load
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920136/
FIX: Some Business Rule Engine values in the Windows registry are reset to the default values in BizTalk Server 2004
For all the bugs fixed in BTS 2004 SP2, see
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924330/
by community-syndication | Oct 27, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/905290/
Fix 245451: BRE caches XML fields incorrectly
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/905571/
Fix: 245450: The Rule Engine is not honoring rule priorities correctly in high load
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920136/
FIX: Some Business Rule Engine values in the Windows registry are reset to the default values in BizTalk Server 2004
For all the bugs fixed in BTS 2004 SP2, see
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924330/
by community-syndication | Oct 27, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Another common ask is a summary of the EDI features supported in R2.
Instead of writing it out, I thought it would be more interesting to the audience to read about it via a review. So here is a link to the review, in form of a blog. This person compiled this review based of my session at TechEd in Boston in June 2006 and has done a great job in crisply presenting an overview of the product!
https://www.biztalkgurus.com/blogs/biztalksyn/archive/2006/06/16/EDI-Features-in-Biztalk-Server-2006-R2.aspx
Nameste!
Suren
by community-syndication | Oct 27, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
One of the readers needs a recommendation on the best practices to support EDI code lists. In addition to responding directly, I deemed it an important enough clarification to post here in the blog.
The code lists are associated with the ID Data Type in the Data Element definitions and obviously there are many ways of supporting code lists. Two common approaches are: as a code list in an mdb file; or including the code list values as an enumeration/collection within the XSD schema itself. Both approaches have pros/cons.
The most efficient way of processing enumeration values/code lists at run time is to include them in the schema/definition (managed via the Enumeration Editor in Visual Studio/BTS Schema Editor) itself, as per screen shot available as an attachment with this Blog entry.
Namaste!
