by community-syndication | Jun 2, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Now you will now why I haven’t updated the tutorials in the last few weeks. We just shipped the Best Practices Analyzer, and now it is available for down load. You use the Analyzer to check your BTS installation and configuration against our list of best practices. Each issue the analyzer reports is supported by a brief article outlining how to fix and where to look for more information.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/biztalk/downloads/bpa.mspx
by community-syndication | Jun 1, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
BizTalk product team is holding a series of focus groups at Tech Ed Boston. Our goal is to have our best customers and partners have a chance to provide direct input to the BizTalk Server product group while we’re in early planning stages for future versions of the product.
There are six sessions in total. Details are provided here: http://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2006/focusgroups.mspx
We encourage you to participate and invite your colleagues and customers. We want to hear your feedback!
by community-syndication | Jun 1, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
BizTalk product team is holding a series of focus groups at Tech Ed Boston. Our goal is to have our best customers and partners have a chance to provide direct input to the BizTalk Server product group while we’re in early planning stages for future versions of the product.
There are six sessions in total. Details are provided here: http://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2006/focusgroups.mspx
We encourage you to participate and invite your colleagues and customers. We want to hear your feedback!
by community-syndication | Jun 1, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
BizTalk Server 2006 Best Practices Analyzer is used to automatically examine a BizTalk Server 2006 deployment and generate a list of issues pertaining to best practices standards for BizTalk Server deployments. The primary use of this tool is to examine BizTalk Server production and staging environments, although it will still be useful on Dev machines.
The Best Practices Analyzer performs configuration-level verification by reading and reporting only. The Best Practices Analyzer gathers data from different information sources, such as Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) classes, SQL Server databases, and registry entries. The Best Practices Analyzer uses the data to evaluate the deployment configuration.
Downloads (live on 6/2):
- Live Download Center URL: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DDA047E3-408E-48BA-83F9-F397226CD6D4&displaylang=en
- Technet Page: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/biztalk/downloads/bpa.mspx
by community-syndication | Jun 1, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
The BizTalk Server 2006 Best Practices Analyzer automatically examines a BizTalk Server 2006 deployment and generate a list of issues pertaining to best practices standards for BizTalk Server deployments. The primary use of this tool is to examine BizTalk Server production and staging environments, though it will still be useful on Dev machines.
You can donwload it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DDA047E3-408E-48BA-83F9-F397226CD6D4&displaylang=en….(read more)
by community-syndication | Jun 1, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
I found an interesting thing about Biztalk 2006 map backward compatibility with Biztalk 2004. As you cannot install both Biztalk 2006 and Biztalk 2004 on the same box, I am sometimes left with a Biztalk 2006 map on a Biztalk 2004 machine.
I had a few maps which were initially developed in Biztalk 2004 and migrated to Biztalk 2006. I had made a few updates to the maps using Visual Studio 2005. If you try to open the Visual Studio Solution file created with VS2005 in VS2003, it would not open the project, However I found that you can open the “.btproj” project file in Visual Studio 2003 (Biztalk 2004 Machine) and make changes to the map/Schema. This backward compatibility was neat and helped me a lot!!
Thought this might be useful to somebody who works both on Biztalk 2004 and 2006 at the same time 🙂
Note: If you add any Biztalk 2006 Specific Functoids (for ex: Assert Functoid), this would not work.
by community-syndication | Jun 1, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
I love the new-to-06 BizTalk admin console. I’m on my 3rd project with 06 and couldn’t imagine going back to 04. But… I find myself navigating left-to-right an awful lot while working with the BizTalk admin console. Specifically my scenario is try something, figure where it breaks, terminate the suspended services, and then try something else. The horizontal navigation comes when I click on the BizTalk group in the left tree, then have to click the “Run Query” button all the way over on the right before I can scroll to the bottom and terminate the suspended instances. Why can’t this button be left side of the query expression? I guess I can hit F5 to refresh, but I don’t think keystrokes are consistent with the rest of the admin console usabilty….
by community-syndication | May 31, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
If you have installed BAM (BizTalk Server 2004 or BizTalk Server 2006), you may have noticed that a web service called the “BAM Query Service” got installed. As its name hints, this web service allows the BAM Portal to retrieve BAM instance data without…(read more)
by community-syndication | May 31, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
If you have installed BAM (BizTalk Server 2004 or BizTalk Server 2006), you may have noticed that a web service called the “BAM Query Service” got installed.
As its name hints, this web service allows the BAM Portal to retrieve BAM instance data without connecting directly to a SQL server.
This web service is intended to be called by the BAM Portal only. Therefore, it is not documented and Microsoft will not support code which makes direct calls to this web service.
A long time ago, when we designed…(read more)
by community-syndication | May 31, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Enterprise Library 2.0 was released early this year. The library consists of several application blocks for so called enterprise level applications; logging, data access, security, configuration, exception handling, and so on.
BizTalk Server 2006 provides a great tool for BizTalk Server configuration, but it doesn’t seem to have any tool for the application configuration running on BizTalk Server.
Of course, you can use the configuration application block included in Enterprise Library 2.0, but you should touch the BTSNTSVC.exe.config file that is a system-wide resource. Otherwise, you can use the SSO store to manage the configuration, but you still need to make a custom management tool, and it couldn’t be well integrated with Enterprise Library 2.0. .
I thought the best way to solve these problems should be to implement a SSO configuration source for Enterprise Library. In this way, you can use the Enterprise Library configuration tool to save your configuration information, and the application blocks in Enterprise Library can be more seamlessly integrated into the BizTalk Server 2006 applications.
How to install the SSO configuration source:
1) Download the SsoConfigurationSource.VSTS solution and unzip it to the C:\BizTalkServer2006RTWSamples folder.
2) Compile the sample solution. It is recommend downloading Enterprise Library 2.0 from the Microsoft patterns and practices Web site, but you don’t need to do that because this sample includes all of the executables in the EnterpriseLibrary2.0Signed folder.
3) Run the following command to create the SSO application for the application blocks in Enterprise Library: DummyApp.xml is in the TestData folder of the SsoConfigurationTest project.
ssomanage -createapps DummyApp.xml
How to test the SSO configuration source:
4) Open EntlibConfig.exe that is the configuration tool for Enterprise Library 2.0, which is included in the EnterpriseLibrary2.0Signed folder.
5) Open DummyApp.config using EntlibConfig.exe. DummyApp.config has a full sample configuration information for Enterprise Library. You can pick up just a few of the application blocks as you need.
6) Create a new Configuration Sources.
7) Remove System Configuration Source, and then add Sso Configuration Source.
8) Set the ApplicationName property to Dummy, and then set the SelectedSource property of the Configuration Source node to SSO Configuration Source.
9) Save it. It will save the configuration information in the file to SSO. (You can also create configuration information from scratch or export the existing configuration data in SSO to an external file.)
Now, you can use Enterprise Library in the BizTalk Server applications like:
Database db = DatabaseFactory.CreateDatabase(“Dummy Connection String1”);
db.ExecuteNonQuery(commandType.Text, “Delete Orders”);
I’m now writing documentation for this sample component, which will be published at end of June. I’m going to update the codes as well until that time. But, if you have any opinions, or feedbacks for this component, please let me know. I’d like to keep updating this component even after it is published.
