If you’ve attended my R2 jumpstart training you’ve seen me use the phidget device.
Irving is the author of the provider – watch his blog as well – but I’ll post here
when he posts it (which he says will be RSN) – http://blogs.msdn.com/irvingd/
Check out Clemens Vasters and Stephen Forte comments about BizTalk Services….(read more)
Over the past couple of months, I have mentioned (in passing) to many of you about the Microsoft Business Process Alliance (which was recently launched). I have been surprised that not many people have actually heard about it….
Essentially, the Microsoft Business Process Alliance is comprised of a set of Industry ISV (Independent Software Vendors) who further enable the Technical BPM (Business Process Management) story on the Microsoft Platform. There founding / launch partners comprised of:
AmberPoint, Ascentn, Fair Isaac, Global 360, IDS Scheer, InRule, Metastorm, PNMSoft, RuleBurst, and SourceCode/K2.
It’s trying to make technology side of BPM (remember that BPM is really more of a methodology) somewhat more cost effective by reducing the effort around building BPM solutions. There is a really good site that explains the partners here: http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/solutions/bpm/bpapartners.mspx . I’ve taken some detail from that site:
AmberPoint
AmberPoint is the SOA runtime governance authority. Its software system brings real-time visibility and control to services and applications at each stage of the SOA life cycle. AmberPoint utilizes a policy-based approach to governance to manage the health and well-being of SOA applications. It is also the runtime governance of choice for commercial organizations, federal agencies, and software vendors alike. More than 100 customers-including Best Buy, H&R Block, MedicAlert Foundation, Motorola, and the U.S. Department of Defense-have chosen AmberPoint for its comprehensive capabilities, its non-invasive approach, and its native support for both Microsoft .NET and Sun’s Java.
Ascentn Corporation
Ascentn Corporation is a leading .NET BPMS ISV which provides SOA-aligned, pure .NET-based BPMS solutions to deliver business agility and manage an expanded spectrum of business processes. The Ascentn AgilePoint Suite provides an open, scalable and robust BPM and SOA platform that leverages and integrates with Microsoft products and technologies. AgilePoint delivers a full lifecycle BPM solution with an n-tier process architecture. Through reuse of IT assets as process descriptions, AgilePoint enables business managers to create, improve and execute end-to-end business automations that support both human workflow and automated processes and is free of rigid code generations that constrain the degree of run-time adaptability.
Fair Isaac Corporation
Fair Isaac Corporation makes decisions smarter. The company’s solutions and technologies for Enterprise Decision Management give businesses the power to automate more processes, and apply more intelligence to every customer interaction. Through increasing the precision, consistency and agility of their decisions, Fair Isaac clients worldwide increase sales, build customer value, cut fraud losses, manage credit risk, reduce operational costs, meet changing compliance demands and enter new markets more profitably. Founded in 1956, Fair Isaac powers hundreds of billions of decisions a year in financial services, insurance, telecommunications, retail, consumer branded goods, healthcare and the public sector.
Global 360, Inc.
Global 360 is a global leader in providing Business Process Management (BPM) and Optimization solutions for automating, measuring and improving resource-intensive business processes. G360 Enterprise, a leading BPM solution based on Microsoft’s .Net framework, is recognized by analysts as the leading solution supporting optimization, simulation and performance management.
IDS-Scheer
Established in 1984 by Prof. August-Wilhelm Scheer, IDS Scheer is the market leader in BPM software and services for corporations and public organizations worldwide. With its unrivaled ARIS Platform for Process Excellence, the company offers an integrated, comprehensive solution portfolio for the strategy, design, implementation and controlling of business processes. Utilizing the ARIS Value Engineering (AVE) approach, IDS Scheer consultants bridge the gap between corporate strategy, business processes, IT solutions and process controlling. Approximately 2,800 employees, in over 70 countries, serve the company’s 6,000 customers.
InRule Technology
InRule Technology is a leading provider of business rules technology designed and optimized for .NET. More than 60 enterprise, ISV, and ASP clients use InRule%u2122 to automate business logic without placing additional burden on IT. A Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, InRule was established in 2002 and is headquartered in Chicago. InRule%u2122 enables development of applications that are more responsive to market conditions and revenue opportunities. InRule’s Business Language Authoring lets users capture business intent, author and verify complex decision logic, rules and calculations without the overhead of custom programming. The results: agile processes and reduced time-to-market.
Metastorm, Inc.
With a focus on improving processes for greater innovation, agility, and governance, Metastorm leads the market in business process management (BPM) software and best practice methodologies for human and system-based processes. Going beyond the basics of modeling and automation, the Metastorm BPM%u00ae Suite supports the complete process lifecycle and is designed specifically to address complex processes that are unique to organizations. Metastorm’s 1300+ global client base in manufacturing, retail, financial services, business services, healthcare and government are achieving rapid ROI and Enterprise Process Advantage%u00ae in customer service, supply chain operations, risk management, and internal operations.
PNMSoft
PNMsoft, a global ISV and a Microsoft gold partner, develops and markets innovative BPM & Workflow software platforms and solutions. As a global company with hundreds of customers worldwide, PNMsoft operates its own offices and a network of partners in North America and EMEA. The company’s product, SEQUENCE, is used to build, run, and manage Workflows and BPM applications in a web environment and is sold through channel partners to midsize and enterprise customers. PNMsoft offers a flexible business-users oriented platform for ISVs looking to OEM a BPM platform in their product, and software vendors offering vertical market solutions.
RuleBurst
RuleBurst provides a fully integrated suite that manages all of an organization’s rules, regulations, risks and compliance needs. Customers use RuleBurst to automate decisions and prevent, detect, and cure breaches of policy. This is particularly important when organizations are struggling to mitigate risk, prove compliance, or make timely, accurate decisions in accordance with policy or legislation. RuleBurst models business content using plain English business language, using Microsoft Office Word, Excel and Visio. RuleBurst can analyze, test and visualize this content, and deploy executable rules to Microsoft’s BPM platform.
SourceCode Technology Holdings, Inc.
SourceCode Technology Holdings, Inc. develops the award-winning K2.net 2003 enterprise workflow solution. K2.net 2003 is the leader in business process management for .NET through its enablement of rapid solution assembly to optimize interactions between people, systems, and process. Customers derive significant value from their Microsoft investments by leveraging K2.net 2003 and its powerful, proven, and seamless integration across a range of Microsoft products.
Conditions:
1. Above orchestration is constructed with just default settings.
2. Logical port Port_2 is configured to use a Send Port with FILE adapter pointing to an unknown URI (purposely, to generate error) and RetryCount = 0
3. Logical port Port_5 is configured to use a Send Port with FILE adapter (normal valid setting).
Will the control flow get into exception handler?
In the above scenario the orchestration will complete successfully without throwing any exception even though the message is not transmitted successfully to the target recipient. The main reason for that is because the orchestration engine successfully persisted the message and state into the MessageBox database. So, from Orchestration perspective the transaction was successful. But, when the send port picked up the message, it couldn’t transmit the message successfully due to the KNOWN URI configured in the FILE adapter, so it raised an exception and suspends the referenced message with Suspended (resumable) status. Later an adminstrator can correct the configuration in the send port with correct URI and resume the message from admin console, which then will transmit successfully.
The end result is the control flow didn’t get into the exception block, even though logically there is an exception in the transmission.
So, how can I make the control flow to get into my exception block:
I made few changes to the Orchestration:
1. I set the “Delivery Transmitted” property to “Transmitted” for Port_2
2. Changed the exception handlers, “Exception Object Type” to “Microsoft.XLANGs.BaseTypes.DeliveryFailureException”
3. Created a new message using Orchestration View called EXC_MESSAGE (just System.String type), and modified the exception handler block as shown in the following figure, added a construct shape with follwing statements inside MessageAssignment
soapExc = (System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException)delFailException.InnerException;
EXC_MESSAGE = soapExc.Detail.InnerXml;
where, delFailedException is the name of the catch exception block, soapExc is a local variable of type SoapException.
Now, the message flow will get into the exception handler block and following ERROR message will be transmitted via the Send shape (eventually to the configured physical send port) configured in the exception handler.
<?xml version=”1.0″ ?><string><ns0:NACK Type=”NACK” xmlns:ns0=”http://schema.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/NACKMessage.xsd”><NAckID>{8F3626A6-E110-49AF-802A-8E85BD5016C6}</NAckID><ErrorCode>0xc0c01c10</ErrorCode><ErrorCategory>0</ErrorCategory><ErrorDescription>The FILE send adapter cannot open file C:\BTSSamples\Listen Timeout Exception\File Drop3\02. OUT RES\{66A1BABF-5509-42CE-82F8-0E100852C526}.xml for writing. Details: The system cannot find the path specified. </ErrorDescription></ns0:NACK></string>
You can do lot of things with this error message now, like for example: you can email it to the adminstrator.
Summary:
So, there is nothing new here “Delivery Notificaition” and “NACK” messages are been there for a very long time. The reason for this post is a result of 2 questions raised in the newsgroup
1. My Control flow is not passing to the exception handler, and
2. How to handle Suspended (resumable) exceptions within orchestration.
Nandri!
Saravana
I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be presenting two sessions at TechEd which is being held at Orlando between Monday 4th June and Friday 8th June! The first is a breakout session which covers BAM and demonstrates some real-world examples of how we’ve put BAM to great use and how it has a place in almost every BizTalk solution, the second is a chalk-talk covering BizTalk performance testing.
Ewan Fairweather (author of the Administration chapter in my book) will also be presenting a breakout session titled “SOA310 – Best Practices and Customer Evidence on Enterprise Ready BizTalk Implementations”
The session abstracts are shown below for reference, and it looks like a book signing will be organised during the week for those of you attending that want to get a signed copy! See you there!
SOA306 – Building an Enterprise-Wide Instrumentation Solution Using the Microsoft BizTalk BAM Infrastructure
Track(s): SOA and Web Services
Level: 300
Speaker(s): Darren Jefford
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is a powerful feature of BizTalk Server and is often marketed as allowing “the business” to understand what is happening within your BizTalk solution. BAM does this really well, but it can in fact be used in a variety of other ways which can deliver huge value to customers and address a number of issues they have with BizTalk based solutions and non-BizTalk based solutions.
In this session, we cover some of the fundamentals of BAM and detail how you can utilize BAM to collect a variety of information and produce a “tracking portal” which you can use to support your application, perform manual repair of messages, and generally observe your solution.
We also show how BAM is not just for BizTalk solutions and how it can be used to produce an enterprise-wide instrumentation solution that is highly scalable and flexible; we touch on the new Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) BAM Interceptor technology that enables data to be collected from Workflows and WCF services enabling a true end-to-end instrumentation solution.
SOA13-TLC – Microsoft BizTalk Performance Testing
Track(s): SOA and Web Services
Level: 400
Speaker(s): Darren Jefford
Testing is a critical area for any solution and BizTalk is no exception. In this session, we start by covering the foundations that you need to put into place before beginning any performance testing, covering the most common environment problems that cause problems during testing and highlighting a number of tools to make testing easier including BizUnit and LoadGen.
Then, we cover how you should monitor your solution during testing; highlighting the key performance counters that should be monitored and explaining how throttling works. We finish by covering a number of common symptoms that you’re likely to experience during testing; we explain why these occur, how to spot them, and more importantly how to resolve them.
Today I’m releasing a message archive receive pipeline component (BTS06 only) – I’ve been meaning to release the code for this component for some time, but never got around to it.
The component is designed to be used in the decode stage of a receive pipeline to archive a message before any BizTalk processing (with the […]
If you receive the following error when you try to deploy BAM activities using bm.exe tool
ERROR: The BAM deployment failed.
A connection cannot be made. Ensure that the server is running.
No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it
The error information doesn’t reflect on the actual cause. Make sure, “SQL Server Analysis Services” is started.
Nandri!
Saravana
Hi All,
After a long time, i attended a MS event yesterday named MSDN RoadShow 2007, where the speakers Daniel Moth, Mike Taulty explained the use and advantages of LINQ. I found these sessions not only very interesting but quiet informative.
Also, there was a session on ASP.Net 2.0 AJAX and MS Expression Blend by Mike and […]
Thanks to one of my colleagues in QLD, Geoff, for this heads up. Essentially a positive write up in eWeek regarding our, BizTalk Services launch.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2121703,00.asp?kc=EWPRDEMNL042507EOAD
As I sit here at the airport waiting to borad my flight to Vegas I was thinking how you can prepare yourselves for the Microsoft MIX conference next week.
1. Watch the Webcasts from the 2007 Expression Launch in the US (new).
2. Check out Tims post introducing Expression Media Encoder.
3. Take a look at http://www.silverlight.net
4. Take a look at http://www.livestation.com
5. Take a look at BizTalk Services
6. Late this week http://visitmix.com will be transformed into a live portal for you to “virtually” attend the Mix event.
Enjoy!
Tags: MIX07
This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights.