Identifing the BizTalk Host from the Process Name

by community-syndication | Aug 24, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

In a production system, it’s likely that you’ll have multiple hosts (and therefore multiple instances of the btsntsvc.exe process) running on a particular server. If one of the btsntsvc processes is performing particularily badly – e.g. hogging all of your CPU – how do you identify the host?

Fire-up Task Manager and identify the PID of […]

Zorro defends the people of the land against tyrannical governors and other villains

by community-syndication | Aug 23, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

 Here’s a bit of fun out in the world of Enterprise Computing:

Making a long story short, I got parole, community service and some psych treatment due to “diminished capacity.” For community service, I explained that I like to resolve conflicts. The judge said that as long as I take my meds and do community service, I can stay out of jail. Community service was to work to peacefully resolve conflicts.

My parole officer thought I got off easy, and decided to give me the worst conflict he could imagine. My assignment is to resolve conflicts in “enterprise computing.” This includes large and small companies, solution developers, etc.

I cannot even begin to list all of the conflicts: “Why use WS-* versus Web 2.0?” “Is a browser good enough?” “Do I need an ESB?” “On-premise solutions rule and hosted solutions drool.” etc. etc. 

There are a few problems. First, I cannot use a sword. Second, how do I reach these people? There are a lot of them. I tried standing in public places and “preaching.” Apparently, the court thought I had stopped taking my meds. Not good. Finally, someone explained blogs to me.

It is not immediately clear to me that most bloggers are any better than the guy on the subway shouting to someone the rest of us cannot see. I like being out of jail, however, and will give it a try. 

I’m not sure where this is going to lead but I’m subscribing to Zorro’s feed. :^)

Regards,

mike

Debatching Flat Files Into XML (With Header Intact)

by community-syndication | Aug 23, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Today I was approached with the problem of how to take a flat file input, debatch it, add the “header” to each individual record, and return the results as XML messages.

The first part of the equation was to successfully debatch the flat file. So, I took the header and body schemas that the developer […]

WCF behavior vs. pipelines on BizTalk Server R2

by community-syndication | Aug 23, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

BizTalk Server R2 is close to be released and one of the most attractive features for traditional BizTalk developer is the new set of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) adapters. As of today, this set of adapters represents the best way of leveraging…(read more)

The legend of Zorro continues?

by community-syndication | Aug 23, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Possibly the funniest thing I have seen on a blog in a while…

 http://zorroisb.spaces.live.com/

 Let the speculation begin!

 snip:

Hi. This is Zorro, and I joined Microsoft. Why am I blogging? It is a condition of my parole. Obviously, this needs explanation.

I have had a little trouble finding my way since the Spanish colonial control over California ended. I like fighting oppression, but had trouble finding something to sink my sword into. This doesn’t mean there weren’t worthy causes. My problem was that the authorities had developed better firearms. A rapier might work against a musket, but taking on a Glock is bad idea.

Eventually, I went to a Red Sox – Yankees baseball game, and this really interested me. I used to go to ballgames all the time, but things went horribly wrong one day at Yankee Stadium. A few of the Yankee fans were ridiculing some Red Sox fans. This was the 200^th time I had seen this happen. The Sox gave a lot of opportunities for Yankee fans to tease Sox fans.

BizTalk and elementFormDefault

by community-syndication | Aug 23, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Yossi Dahan commented here on
being surprised by the implications of the elementFormDefault option in XSD schemas,
and particularly in relation to BizTalk.

I don’t find the behavior surprising myself anymore, as I already was familiar with
the implications of elementFormDefault. In reality, this is something that I don’t
particularly like about XSD, as I find that leaving it to “unqualified” can
lead, as Yossi found out, to some weird looking schemas (at least for me). Mind you,
regardless of this option, qualified-ness of an element can also be enabled/disabled
for each element individually.

There are, however, 2 things that make this option more obscure than it should be:

1. The default value defined in XSD for elementFormDefault is “unqualified”.
2. When you install BizTalk, now Visual Studio will have 2 different templates for
   XSD schemas. The original one in Visual Studio has elementFormDefault=”qualified”,
   while the one installed by BizTalk doesn’t specify elementFormDefault (thus leaving
   it in the default value of “unqualified”). Which one you get depends on the context
   in which you use the Add New Item menu in VS.

In general, I recommend always watching out for this issue and always explicitly setting
elementFormDefault to the appropriate value. In my mind, that appropriate value should
always be “qualified” for new schemas .

Also, just for the sake of completeness, it is worth saying that, under the XSD specification,
all root elements defined in a schema are always qualified (i.e. should be
associated to the XML targetNamespace of the schema). The elementFormDefault only
controls whether child elements are qualified or unqualified. This is why
the elementFormDefault option doesn’t really “drop namespaces” from the XML document
instances; it merely restricts it to the root elements.

XSD, BIzTalk

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Launch!

by community-syndication | Aug 23, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Worldwide Launch – Your Business, Connected

The launch of BizTalk Server 2006 R2 is just three weeks away and with it comes a new wave of innovation that addresses core challenges found in key industries such as manufacturing and retail. These capabilities include native support for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and AS2 […]

Next UK BizTalk User Group Meeting – 12th September 2007

by community-syndication | Aug 23, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

My colleague Mike Stephenson has just posted details of the next UK BizTalk User Group meeting to be held at the Edenbrook offices in London on the 12th September 2007.
I’ve missed the previous UK meetings so I’m looking forward to meeting the UK community, it’s also great that my employer is hosting the event!

HL7 v.Next

by community-syndication | Aug 23, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

This is what I would like to see in HL7 v.Next. This entry I hopeserves to be launch pad for other entries. I have spent a great deal of time thinking over the following guideline in the HL7 standards, which are not followed in the BTAHL7 accelerator.

Ignore segments, fields, components, subcomponents, and extra repetitions of a field that are present but were not expected.

Let’s take a look at the current situation. You have all of these fields that are defined in the schema as required, and they are at various levels in the schema.

Here there is a obviously wrong implementation of the standard. If I don’t care about this, why is this element required, and why might it have to match a pattern and possibly have an enumeration that it needs to match against?

What I would like to do is four things initially:

1. When I start up a new project where I am going to need to create a new trigger message for a data source, I don’t want to have to hack into the schemas to change the target namespace for the base schemas (datatypes, segments, and tablevalues). Why can’t there be a way from within the schema to define a party that this message is defined to, and it have it derive a new definition off ofthe base schemas for that party?In the BTAHL7 Configuration explorer, it will automatically make the targetnamespace coincide with the party name. Something that looks like this:

   which would automatically change the Target Namespace to this when I choose the Partner URI in the schema

2. I would like to open up the schema and be able to do a ‘Select All’ and then with the CTRL button go and de-select the fields I care about, and with the right click make all of the fields optional and override the data type to ST or TX with no enumeration or patterns.
3. I would like to be able to see the enumeration lists for the base schemas even though I am looking at an inherited schema. When I click on PID 2.5.0 in the ORM^O01 schema, because it has imported that definition, I don’t see the enumeration. I have to go and open up the tablevalues schema and search thru it to change those valuesto have to recompile and redeploy. Why can’t I first see the values and second override theexisting values with values I know are going to come in, sometimes less, sometimes more values.
4. The last thing is that everysegment, sub elementshould have the optional Trailer to consume additional data that might be there:

It should be pretty easy to accomplish, shouldn’t it?

This is just something that I thought of this week while at MS-HUG. I do not doubt that there are many issues with my theory, but those three things would make implementing HL7 with BizTalkSO MUCH easier and bring Microsoft’s HL7 component much closer to the standard.

Send me an email thru my contacts page if you have more ideas.

Launch of BizTalk Server 2006 R2

by community-syndication | Aug 23, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 launch events will be taking place soon in Taiwan, Australia and US.  Below, you’ll find more information about these events. There will also be a launch page and a Virtual Press Room online soon. Some of the great speakers who will be keynoting the launch include Don Ferguson, Kevin Turner and Oliver Sharp.