Check this out
Check out Ghenadie’s HTML Workflow Editor – http://blogs.msdn.com/ghenap/archive/2006/10/25/netfxlive-js-based-workflow-designer.aspx
Awesome.
gSOAP article
Bo Xie (IBM)wrote an interesting article about how to use gSOAP a Web Services stack optimized for C/C++. I enjoyed reading the article even though when I disagree in some topics. I don’t think that C/C++ is always the best option when comes to build Web Services with a small memory footprint. Proper memory optimization is almost always a design + algorithms decision. And nowadays Standards like MTOM and XOP can help to alleviate those challenges. Also there are another C++ Web Services platforms that perform really well Visual C++ .NET and Systinet WASP Server for C++ are just 2 alternatives to gSOAP when comes to build C++ Web Services.
Great series of posts on direct bound ports in BizTalk Server
Kevin Lam has put together a great set of posts describing the direct binding options in BizTalk Server when using messaging shapes in Orchestration. This is one of those powerful features of BizTalk that gets underutilized because people don’t understand it, or even know about it. It is also one of the areas where people get into real trouble because you need to understand it well in order to use it without getting yourself into trouble.
Info on changes in the BRE between BizTalk 2004 and 2006
I found this posting the other day and was surprised to find some things in here that I didn’t realize had changed. Not that I should be surprised, it’s hard to keep up with a big product like BizTalk. 🙂
Interesting points include a new registry entry that allows you to invoke statics without having to assert the class into the runtime; support for generics; and allowing object traversal. Unfortunately, the latter item is only available in code, which is a huge bummer since I find this to be one of the most frustrating things with the BRE composer.
There are several other interesting tidbits so be sure to check it out if you do anything with the BRE in BizTalk.
BizTalk 2006, WF and WCF Training in Australia NOV/DEC 06
There is a new series of Connected Systems and Integration Workshops (Training) being held in Australia in NOV/DEC 06. I got an update from our internal readiness team. Summary details are:
Title: Connected Systems & Integration Workshop – Primary Technology Focus: BizTalk 2006, Windows Workflow & Microsoft Communications Foundation
Time: 8:30am Registration
Dates:
· Melbourne – 28th to 30th November 2006
· Brisbane – 12th to 14th December 2006
· Sydney – 5th to 7th December 2006
Cost: $751inc. GST
Objectives:
Learn about the new features of the upcoming BizTalk Server 2006 release (and beyond).
Learn about new solutions for implementing Microsoft based workflow solutions.
Learn about taking Web services to the next level with the WCF framework.
Go here for more info: https://www.local.microsoft.com.au/australia/events/register/home.aspx?levent=974419&linvitation
Advanced BizTalk 2006 Web Services, Part II
In Part I of this two post series, I began a look at some advanced concepts around BizTalk-generated web services. In this post, we look at two additional concepts. In the last post, I demonstrated the following topics … First of all, what does the Force Request Response flag in the Web Services Publishing Wizard actually do? The idea is that you can control whether you have a one-way or request-response service. It basically adds the OneWay flag to the generated class. When I took a one way service (built using the Web Services Publishing Wizard) and then set the Force Request Response to “true”, I expected that my one way service would actually return a response. My SOAP request/response looked like this … The next “one way” operation I tried was on an orchestration that had a request/response receive port. My thinking was that maybe this flag would make the service ignore the response. That is, it would open up a one-way SOAP channel into the orchestration, but, wouldn’t wait for a response. I hypothesized that this response message might get suspended, or something like that. So, I built a service using the Web Services Publishing Wizard, flipped the Force Request Response to “no” and took a look at the output. And … it’s the exact same whether I flip that flag to “yes” or “no.” Because the service is built with a return value, apparently you can’t set the “oneway” flag to true. I tried changing that attribute in the generated service, and then my service wouldn’t come up. Once again, I have no idea how this flag is supposed to be applied. Thoughts? Now, let’s switch to something that DOES work. If you’re following best practices, you’re probably putting your external-facing schemas in one project, and your internal schemas in another. Reason being, if your vendor changes something, and you’ve been smart enough to do all your transformations at the port level, you can isolate how many assemblies you have to change. So let’s say you have a schema in this “external schemas assembly” that you’ve exposed using the Web Services Publishing Wizard by “generating web service from schemas.” Now let’s also say that ANOTHER schema in that assembly has changed, and you go ahead and redeploy a new version of that assembly and blow away the old one. Now your web service will cause your messages to be suspended. When you use the generated web services, the DocumentSpecName is set on the inbound message by the web service. You can see this value in the message context here … So how do you avoid this? What I’ve done is went into the generated web service, and changed the following value in my web method … Conclusion Technorati Tags: BizTalk, Web Services
In this post, I’ll investigate the final two points …
<soap:Body>
and the *response* looked like this …
<PostNewOrder xmlns=”http://tempuri.org/”>
<InsertOrder xmlns=”http://Microsoft.Demo.Blog.AdvancedServices.InsertOrder_XML”>
<OrderID xmlns=””>string</OrderID>
<CustomerName xmlns=””>string</CustomerName>
<ItemID xmlns=””>string</ItemID>
<Quantity xmlns=””>string</Quantity>
<Status xmlns=””>string</Status>
</InsertOrder>
</PostNewOrder>
</soap:Body>
<soap:Body>
Interesting. So it threw a response node back at me. But what’s very curious, is that when I call this method from code, I still get a void return and my input parameter does not get submitted “by reference” (which would indicate that the output is the same type as the input). Next I wondered if even though no response was returned, the HTTP 200 code would only return after the service had finished processing. But no, that wasn’t the case (and wouldn’t really make sense anyway). So, at this point, I can’t say for sure that this makes ANY difference.
<PostNewOrderResponse xmlns=”http://tempuri.org/” />
</soap:Body>
Problem is, this value is used to look up the message type, and since the DocumentSpecName contains the full assembly reference, your message will get suspended if it can’t find the specific version.
//set to *null* and comment out old value
string bodyTypeAssemblyQualifiedName = null;
// “Microsoft.Demo.Blog.AdvancedServices.VTest.NewContact_XML, Microsoft.Demo.Blog.Ad” +
//”vancedServices.VTest, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=94858e0d889683c1″;
Now, when messages come into BizTalk, the DocumentSpecName doesn’t get set and BizTalk does a lookup on the namespace#root to find the appropriate schema and assembly.
So what have we seen? First, the Force Request Response flag has no obvious use to me. Doesn’t seen to make a difference on existing one way services, and it can’t be applied on request/response services. If I’ve missed something, please tell me. Also, we’ve seen how you can modify your generated web service to insulate you against assembly version changes. Always be careful changing generated code, and clearly you want to regenerate your service if the corresponding message schemas has changed, but, this eliminates your need to regenerate the service when unrelated schemas change in the assembly. Fun stuff.
BizTalk 2006 Sharepoint Adapter talking to Sharepoint 2007!!
You dont need to wait for BTS2006 R2 to make this happen.
Basically there are several ways to approach this and one of the main exceptions is
that the corresponding BTS WSS Webservice fails when it finds the ‘new’ version of
Sharepoint on the box. (the Sharepoint apis etc. do maintain backward compatibility
for existing code)
One technique is to install Sharepoint V2, SP2 it, install BTS2006 and make sure the
WSS adapter is working. Then upgrade Sharepoint……fingers crossed.
the other simpler technique is to re-bind the BTS2006 WSS Webservice to work
with the new Sharepoint V12.0.0.0 version.
A new member of the BizTalk team Adrian Hamza – elaborates further here
Sharepoint 2007 Deep Dive course – offered by Breeze Training
We have put together a very comprehensive in-depth course on the Microsoft Sharepoint
2007 platform.
We’ve had some great scores and feedback from the 80 students trained up so far….check
out some further details….
Breeze Trainings
Microsoft Office and Sharepoint 2007 Deep Dive
The best thing we come to you!
Advanced BizTalk 2006 Web Services, Part I
I’ve recently had the opportunity to build some advanced web services with BizTalk Server 2006, and wanted to show 4 interesting use cases over this 2 part blog post. Over these 2 posts, I will demonstrate and investigate the following topics … I would venture to say that virtually no one has clicked the “Advanced” button in the Web Services Publishing Wizard and changed any of those values. The first option in that “Advanced Properties” window is SOAP Parameter Style of which your options are Default, Bare or Wrapped. A more purist approach is to change this setting in the “Advanced Properties” window to Bare so that the expected SOAP request looks like … So my next point is how to do multi-parameter web services generated by BizTalk. When using the Web Services Publishing Wizard and doing a “generate service from schema” you can only create a web service method accepting a single “part.” Now, I go ahead and make the “Receive” shape accept that multi-part message, and connect it to a “public” receive port. Build and deploy. Now, I walk through the Web Services Publishing Wizard and build a web service from the orchestration. I first kept the default SOAP Parameter Style (which is Wrapped) when publishing, and ended up with a WSDL looking like this …
This post will focus on the first two. [UPDATE: See Part II here]
This isn’t anything BizTalk specific, but a way to design the WSDL. By default, when you build your web service from code, your SOAP request bears the name of the function call as a wrapper element. For instance, if I have a method called “PostOrder” on my web service, then my SOAP request expects an input such as … <soap:Body>
Plus, if this is request/response, you end up with a response node automatically generated (method name + “response”). This is the default behavior, and thus not terrible, but arguably a bit lame (read more here and here).
<PostNewOrder xmlns=”http://tempuri.org/”>
<InsertOrder xmlns=”http://Microsoft.Demo.Blog.AdvancedServices.InsertOrder_XML”>
<OrderID xmlns=””>string</OrderID>
<CustomerName xmlns=””>string</CustomerName>
<ItemID xmlns=””>string</ItemID>
<Quantity xmlns=””>string</Quantity>
<Status xmlns=””>string</Status>
</InsertOrder>
</PostNewOrder>
</soap:Body>
<soap:Body>
Since BizTalk always deals in “messages”, this is almost always a very solid and clean approach. Why is the default value set to be Wrapped? Because it’s the safest way to go. Why? If I have *multiple* parameters, and I do a Bare service, I end up with an invalid WSDL. Let’s see that next.
<InsertOrder xmlns=”http://Microsoft.Demo.Blog.AdvancedServices.InsertOrder_XML”>
<OrderID xmlns=””>string</OrderID>
<CustomerName xmlns=””>string</CustomerName>
<ItemID xmlns=””>string</ItemID>
<Quantity xmlns=””>string</Quantity>
<Status xmlns=””>string</Status>
</InsertOrder>
</soap:Body>
Not so with orchestration. Within a BizTalk orchestration, I can easily build multi-part messages. These are messages containing one or more documents. A multi-part message can only have one “Body” but any number of other additional parts. So, I’ve built a multi-part message which has a “body” node and “attachment” node.
<soap:Body>
See that? I have *two* parameters for my web service, both of different message types. When I call this from code, it looks like …
<PostNewCustomer xmlns=”http://tempuri.org/”>
<InsertContact xmlns=”http://Microsoft.Demo.Blog.AdvancedServices.InsertContact_XML”>
<Name xmlns=””>string</Name>
<Address xmlns=””>string</Address>
</InsertContact>
<InsertContactAttachment xmlns=”http://Microsoft.Demo.Blog.AdvancedServices.InsertContact_XML”>
<Payload xmlns=””>string</Payload>
</InsertContactAttachment>
</PostNewCustomer>
</soap:Body>
//svc is the web service; “contact” and “attachment” are both messages
svc.PostNewCustomer(contact, attachment);
So everything looks good. I now have a multi-parameter web service generated from BizTalk. Lots of use cases for this. Let’s circle back, though. What happens if I do this web service with the SOAP Parameter Style set to Bare? As I mentioned above, this leads to invalid WSDL. Why? Because you’ve removed the wrapped, and provided two different root nodes in the body. When I build my service this way and view the service, I get this …
When I click the web method name, I see this SOAP request … <soap:Body>
<InsertContact xmlns=”http://Microsoft.Demo.Blog.AdvancedServices.InsertContact_XML”>
<Name xmlns=””>string</Name>
<Address xmlns=””>string</Address>
</InsertContact>
<InsertContactAttachment xmlns=”http://Microsoft.Demo.Blog.AdvancedServices.InsertContact_XML”>
<Payload xmlns=””>string</Payload>
</InsertContactAttachment>
</soap:Body>
Not good. This would be the same if you used Bare on a web method that took in two native types (e.g. pair of integer values). If you aren’t passing in a single object (native type, message, whatever), then you need to wrap it.
Conclusion
So, what have we figured out so far? The SOAP Parameter Style is a nice way to gain ownership over the WSDL and control exactly what’s in the <soap:Body> node. We also saw how you can very easily build multi-parameter web services in BizTalk using orchestrations and multi-part messages. However, be careful when mixing the two, since a multi-parameter web service must be wrapped up.
Part II coming up …
[UPDATE: See Part II here]
Technorati Tags: BizTalk, Web Services
Pipeline Testing for BizTalk 2004
Last week I finally took some time and build a version of my Pipeline
Testing library that can be used in Visual Studio .NET 2003 to test BizTalk pipelines
and custom pipeline components in BizTalk 2004. However I am not releasing it right
now, as the current version is slightly limited in functionality compared to the original
BizTalk 2006, though it’s very usable as is for most purposes.
I don’t have the time right now to spend bringing it up completely to the same level,
though hopfully in the future I’ll be able to do so.
So, if anyone is interested in it, for now, leave a comment or send me an email and
I’ll send it over.
