Commerce Server 2007: Max’s Image Management Add-On

by community-syndication | Oct 15, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Max Akbar, the Commerce Server Product Manager, has begun a series of posts on developing a catalog Image Management Add-On to Commerce Server 2007. Way to go Max!

Adding Image Management to your Commerce Site Part(II)

Technorati Tags: Commerce Server

Professional BizTalk Server 2006 Update

by community-syndication | Oct 15, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I thought those of you that still read this rather poorly-updated blog might be interested in the current state of play with my BizTalk Book!  It's been taking every spare moment of my life hence the blog has had to take a back-seat, plus I need some content for the book 🙂

The end is in sight with all chapters due to be submitted to the publisher by the middle of November and it shaping up to be better then I ever imagined!  There's still some hard work required in the coming weeks though.

As you already know I brought Kevin Smith on-board a few months back and he's just submitted his draft of the Testing chapter, it covers some fantstic content you won't find anywhere else, including BizUnit, LoadGen, BizTalk Code Coverage and Profiling and a whole load of techniques and best practice that we have developed with numerous customers over the years.

I've also just brought Ewan Fairweather on-board to write the Administration chapter, Ewan has been "doing BizTalk Administration/Support" initially as a Dedicated Supportability Engineer (DSE) and now as a Rapid Response Engineer (i.e. when it breaks – he comes and fixes it!) for over two years.   Ewan is far better then little old developer me who typically just "throws it over the fence" 🙂  His most recent content list has blown me away and it's shaping up to be the bible of BizTalk Administration!  No pressure Ewan!

I've just submitted the Rules Engine chapter which was really hard work given the subject-matter but I'm really pleased with how it's turned out, I know I'm biased but it looks like the best and most approcable resource on the Business Rule Engine that I've seen, covering how it works, facts, interceptors, long term fact retrievers, etc.

I have just started on the Performance and Scalablity chapter which is covering all of the key things required to get your BizTalk envrionment correctly tuned and then a guide on which perforamance counters to monitor, what they mean, how to tune BizTalk, etc.    I'll provide another update in a few weeks! 

The current chapter list is as follows

* Chapter 1: Technical Primer
* Chapter 2: BizTalk Architecture
* Chapter 3: Adapters
Chapter 4: Pipelines
* Chapter 5: Orchestration
* Chapter 6: Business Activity Monitoring
* Chapter 7: Rules Engine
* Chapter 8: Testing
Chapter 9: Performance and Scalablity
Chapter 10: Low Latency
Chapter 11: Administration
Chapter 12: End to End Scenarios
Chapter 13: BizTalk Patterns
Chapter 14: Windows Workflow and BizTalk

Publication date is still set for March, I know it's a little while but I promise it'll be worth the wait!  I'm desperate to ship the book, that way I can finally buy my Xbox 360 that I've been putting off purchasing because I know I'll spend valuable book writing time playing on it otherwise!

As ever, if you've any content suggestions please let me know and I'll see what I can do!

Thanks for all your support (and patience) so far!

EDI support in BizTalk Server (BTS) 2006 R2

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

Hello all:

BTS2006 R2 provides for design and run time support for six encoding standards and includes over 8000 ’standard’ XSD schemas ‘in the box’ ready for implementation. Please do understand that these schemas will only operate with EDI systems in BTS 2006 R2 and are not compatible on Base EDI Adapter (BTS 2004 and 2006 versions). In forthcoming topics I will include documentation on how to modify/customize these schemas.

One of the most asked question is the on a listing of the Version/Release schemas supported in BTS2006 R2 – Microsoft EDI. So here goes:

            * included in Beta 2 release.

Is there a version/release that your customer uses that is not included above – please let me know via the comments section.

Namaste! 

Suren

Welcome to the BizTalk B2B WeBlog

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

This blog focus is around Microsoft’s BizTalk Server support of B2B Transactions while predominantly focused around EDI!

BTS Dev Tip: Reduce Cache Refresh Time

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

Here’s one small tip that can make your life a little bit easier when developing on
BizTalk Server: Reduce the cache refresh time.

Many developers get sometimes frustrated when they make a change to their BizTalk
configuration (such as changing the pipeline used by a send port) and BizTalk does
not seem to pick it up. They will waste valuable seconds (minutes in some cases) restarting
their BizTalk Hosts trying to get it to pick up any changes. This makes life harder
than it needs to be.

The reason this happens is that to improve performance, BizTalk will cache in memory
a lot of the configuration settings. This cache is only refreshed periodically, so
configuration changes do not take effect right away, but only when the cache is refreshed.
By default, the cache refreshes every 60 seconds, which is enough to ensure performance
is decent, but long enough to give the developer the impression that BizTalk is not
picking up his changes and thinking it requires a restart to do so.

 Fortunately, you can change the configuration cache refresh rate pretty easily
from the BizTalk Administration Console (both in 2006 and 2004). Expand the node for
your BizTalk group, right click on it and select the Properties option from the popup
menu. You’ll find the cache refresh option there (the dialog is a little bit different
in BizTalk 2004, but the option is there alright).

I usually change it to 5-10 seconds on my development machines, which for all purposes
makes it seem like the  configuration options indeed happened instantaneously.

InfoWorld Product Review of BizTalk Server 2006

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

InfoWorld has posted their product review of BizTalk Server 2006 and awarded the product with the highest rating.   This article is called BizTalk 2006 deftly connects enterprise apps. 

Leaving for Tulsa TechFest

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

A free day of training, talks by Ron Jacobs, Carl
Franklin, Marcus Egger, Chip
Wilson, Shaun Walker, Mark
Miller … and that’s just the Keynote track of 12 tracks
of training!

The Team System track has talks by the Eds or EdSquared.com and
I’m speaking in the Open Source track and the Unit Testing track.

If you’re anywhere in the greater Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas area and not doing
something this Saturday, get your way to Tulsa and join us all.  Did I mention
it was free?

Oh and I suppose you could wish me a Happy Birthday as well, since today (10/13) is
my birthday as well.

Simple Script to Terminate All Orchestration Instances

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

This one is really useful information that I was looking for. It’s bothersome to delete all of suspended messages by hand. Time saving tip.

Simple Script to Terminate All Orchestration Instances by Stephen W. Thomas

Performance counter for Biztalk Server

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

Isn’t performace all about Biztalk Server?

Performance Counters in BizTalk 2004 by Stephen W. Thomas is defenitely worthwhile to read.

TimRayburn.CustomFunctoids – Logical String Functoids

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

This
will be the first drop of the functoids to add more the one functoid, and with good
reason.  Today we add a set of three functoids based on methods of the System.String
class in .NET.

• Logical Contains
• Logical Starts With
• Logical Ends With

These functoids, as you expect, determine if the first parameter provided either contains,
starts with or ends with the second parameter provided.  Like the previous functoids
we’ve kept the coloring the same as the other Logical functoids, except that they
have a blue border to indicate they are in an external assembly.  The code can
be downloaded below, as always, but this is one portion which I want to call out. 
I implemented Logical Contains in a non-standard way:

 public string LogicalContains(string fullString, string subString)
{ // I
realize this could be fullString.Contains(subString) // but
doing that means this could not be compiled // under
.NET 1.1 for BizTalk 2004  if (fullString.IndexOf(subString) > 0) return "true"; else return "false";
} 

>

As noted in the comments, this could be done as String.Contains() in .NET 2.0, but
that method is not available in .NET 1.1 and one of my goals is to make these functoids
backwards compatible to BizTalk 2004 whenever possible.

Download
TimRayburn.CustomFunctoids v1.0