Microsoft Australia SOA and Business Process Conference – Thursday 30th November 2006 – SYDNEY!

by community-syndication | Nov 14, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

On Nov 30, here in Australia, we are holding a mini version of the SOA and Business Process Conference that was held in Redmond for our local audiences!! This is going to be awesome. The team here have been able to secure David Chappell to present in Australia, so we are looking forward to him reaching our shores and presenting at the conference! So, here is the email from our local BizTalk Product Marketing Manager – Katie McIntosh –

“On 30^th November we are holding the Sydney leg of the Global Roadshow – Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference.  This is a scaled down version of the recent conference held in Redmond in October.  The morning is built for Partners and the afternoon is built for Customers and Partners. 

The morning session is designed for Partners to learn about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Business Process Management (BPM) and how to improve their ability to sell BizTalk based engagements. It is being delivered by International Keynote Speaker David Chappell, Principal, Chappell & Associates, who delivered the same sessions in the US conference.  (www.davidchappell.com)

The afternoon sessions are designed for Customers and Partners.  The afternoon starts with Keynotes by David Chappell and Microsoft’s Steve Sloan discussing the Industry and Microsoft perspectives on SOA and BPM followed by additional sessions discussing RFID, Software as a Service and Demystifying Workflow, plus SOA and BPM sessions for industry segments: FSI, Public Sector and the Communications Sector”

PARTNERS Register HERE: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032318079&Culture=en-AU

CUSTOMERS Register HERE: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032318088&Culture=en-AU

SharePoint 2007 Workflow Persistent Service

by community-syndication | Nov 14, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Office 2007 Client Applications Available on MSDN

by community-syndication | Nov 13, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I just got back from an extended week in Barcelona, so I don’t know how long this thing is already available but you can download the Office 2007 Client Applications from the MSDN Subscribers Downloads!

Welcome to Microsoft%u00ae Office Professional 2007, the suite of Microsoft Office system products designed with business professionals in mind. Office Professional 2007 helps business professionals save time and stay organized with powerful and easy-to-use tools for managing customer information and marketing activities, analyzing and reporting business information, and producing professional-quality communications.

• Office Professional 2007 includes the following Microsoft Office system programs:
• Microsoft Office Access 2007
• Microsoft Office Excel%u00ae 2007
• Microsoft Office Outlook%u00ae 2007 with Business Contact Manager
• Microsoft Office PowerPoint%u00ae 2007
• Microsoft Office Publisher 2007
• Microsoft Office Word 2007

Let’s wait for the server components!

Pluralsight at TechEd Europe

by community-syndication | Nov 13, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

• DEV401 — BizTalk Server 2006 for XML Developers
• DEV402 — Web Services on Steroids aka BizTalk Server 2006
• PRE007 — What’s Coming in .NET 3.0 (WCF session)

WCF (Indigo) ships with .NET 3.0

by community-syndication | Nov 13, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

"XML does not conform to the BizTalk Server 2006 Bam Definition Schema" Error

by community-syndication | Nov 12, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

If you encounter the following error when trying to [Save] or [Export XML]:
This XML does not conform to the BizTalk Server 2006 Bam Definition Schema.
…(read more)

BAM Add-On Error: "XML does not conform to the BizTalk Server 2006 Bam Definition Schema"

by community-syndication | Nov 12, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

If you encounter the following error when trying to [Save] or [Export XML]:
This XML does not conform to the BizTalk Server 2006 Bam Definition Schema.
…(read more)

Crossroads – Nant vs MSBuild

by community-syndication | Nov 12, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

After a few months of being NAnt infected, I’m at another crossroads. Now that we are starting up on the .NET 2.0 world and are seriously considering the whole VSTS package, MSBuild is a big contender for the building and CI backbone. We didn’t actually get round to using CC.NET in the first phase of our integration project as the team was new to unit testing and automated builds etc, but we’ve made some good progress and have more or less sorted out an automated build and CI is the next step so Team Build may have its uses there.

We took inspiration from Scott Colestock’s deployment framework and built a decent build and deploy engine and are now refactoring it to be more generic. In the beginning, since Nant was quite new to us, I didn’t make complete use of Scott’s tool as-is, because it would have been a big learning curve and with multiple solutions I didn’t like to have to put the deployment framework folder in every single solution. I guess I could have modified it to take stuff from a central location, but hey, those were early days and I was moving away from a batch file centric BTS deployment that I had used till then. Ironically, while generalising the engine now, we are finding that it looks very much like Scott’s, so maybe we’ll move back to Scott’s tool and he has upgraded it to work with v2006 as well.

But that brings us to the crossroads now. Do we throw away our investment in Nant and move off wholesale to MSBuild? What does MSBuild have that could make it worthwhile?

On the surface, it seems like there isn’t very much going for MSBuild. The Nant community is very strong and there are heaps of tasks for various things. Added to that, I think the script is quite expressive and although I haven’t written custom tasks yet, I gather that they are quite easy to write. However, the UK SDC of Microsoft has been going hammer and tongs on this aspect and the Enterprise Solution Build Framework is quite impressive. Guy Smith-Ferrier showed some of the tasks in the SBF at the recent VBUG conference and I was surprised to see how big the task library has grown. The MSBuild script is very similar to Nant too, so if we needed to convert, we could write XSLT and convert most of it.

From the Biztalk aspect, there are a ton of tasks that are coming out from MSBuild. Stephen Thomas deals with some of them in his article here. Since our architecture revolves around Biztalk, this will be a key factor. Right now its all command line based and having to explicitly start, stop and remove ports associated with orchestrations is mind numbingly painful and very difficult to keep in sync. We were planning to take some of the examples shown in the MS Applied Integration Baseline (which contains a C# deployment engine for BTS) and write more custom tasks to slim down the Nant files and make them more reliable, but the MSBuild library is very tempting indeed. Hmm how about a Nant container for MSBuild tasks? (!!)

One of the irritating things about Biztalk is that you cannot build it without Visual Studio, so there’s no option but to call DEVENV from the command line and that slows down compilation of large solutions. The problem still exists with MSBuild, and that’s a real minus, in my book, for the BTS and VS teams. They should have done better. Well, there’s still time. MSBuild is only v1.0 and maybe the BTS team will get this sorted. (Another annoyance is that if you want to change the assembly version or file version, you have to crack open the btproj file cos theres no AssemblyInfo.cs file for BTS. We are going to use the Nant xmlpoke task to do this).

There are some irritants though, with MSBuild. Steve St.Jean has written about its failure to work properly with secondary references. Actually if you haven’t seen that article, check it out. Apparently MS recognises the limitation, but, get this, instead of enhancing MSbuild, they want to dumb down VS so that VS stops recognising secondary references. Doh!!! Homer Simpson moment for MS !!

Theres an interesting discussion on Nant vs MSbuild at the MSDN Forums. In particular, Faisal Mohamood’s post there is a nice explanation of the positioning of MSBuild. But the forum posts also reveal problems such as the limitations with solution file structure and so on.

So, its rather tricky right now. If VSTS plays nicely with Nant (and I don’t see why it shouldn’t, but you can never tell) I might just stick with Nant for the next few months and undertake to write more custom tasks for biztalk or convert the MSBuild tasks to work with Nant (hope that isn’t unethical?) and eventually when MSBuild matures and there are tools which can help us with the migration, I may switch over to MSBuild.

Do feel free to comment if you want to share your thoughts on the subject. 

Techniques for Reusable Business Processes with BizTalk Server Presentation

by community-syndication | Nov 12, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of presenting on Techniques for Reusable Business Processes with BizTalk Server at the first ever Twin Cities Code Camp.

I covered some basic techniques for making business processes more reusable including:

• Canonical Schemas and Receive Port Maps
• Multiple Receive Locations
• Calling out to .NET Components in Orchestrations
• Send Port Groups
• BRE Usage
• Role Links

It is pretty basic BizTalk stuff for people that have worked with BizTalk for a while but I still had a good time and I had the opportunity to do an extended 30 minute demo as part of the presentation.

BizTalk 2006 sample code can be found here and here.  The presentation can be found here.

Batch files to start and stop BizTalk 2006, SQL Server 2005 (and related) services

by community-syndication | Nov 12, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I previously posted here about 2 batch files for starting and stop BizTalk 2004 and SQL Server 2000 services.  The ones in this post, below, are for BizTalk 2006 and SQL Server 2005.  I use these for quickly and easily reducing memory usage (usually when I need to use VPC).  Enjoy!

StartBTSServices:

net start MSSQLServer
net start SQLSERVERAGENT
net start MSSQLServerOLAPService
net start NS$BAMAlerts
net start SQLBrowser
net start msftesql
net start MsDtsServer
net start ReportServer
net start MSDTC
net start RuleEngineUpdateService
net start ENTSSO
net start BTSSvc$BizTalkServerApplication
IISRESET /START
pause

StopBTSServices:

net stop BTSSvc$BizTalkServerApplication
IISRESET /STOP
net stop ENTSSO
net stop RuleEngineUpdateService
net stop MSDTC
net stop SQLSERVERAGENT
net stop NS$BAMAlerts
net stop MSSQLServer
net stop MSSQLServerOLAPService
net stop SQLBrowser
net stop msftesql
net stop MsDtsServer
net stop ReportServer
pause