The public beta 2 of BizTalk Server 2006 R2 has been released.

by | Apr 3, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication


It’s been long time since I posted the last one. I was pretty busy in working on the WCF adapter documentation for R2.  In addition to the WCF adapters, R2 also has EDI, RFID, and WCF/WinWF interceptors. I think this release has a very high quality.  The WCF adapter has been improved a lot since Beta 1 from the TAP customer feedbacks, and it also has several walkthroughs and samples. You can download this release from here. If you have any questions about the WCF adapters in R2, please let me know.


— Young

Watch out: DebugView (OutputDebugString) & Performance

by | Apr 3, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

For developer level tracing the tracing classes held within the System.Diagnostics namespace are often used along with the Windows Sysinternals DebugView tool.  In default configuration all trace will be output using the Win32 OutputDebugString function which DebugView can monitor.


 


This approach works extremely well, but you should be aware of the associated performance overhead. DebugView effectively acts as a debugger and hooks the OUTPUT_DEBUG_STRING_EVENT event, as a result your application (a BizTalk process perhaps) will experience a performance impact as the application threads will be suspended whilst the debug information is output, effectively serializing your application.  Therefore if you have many Orchestrations in-flight (or multiple threads if your not using BizTalk) they will all be side-affected if DebugView is started and performance will therefore be affected.  It’s worth noting that if the DebugView tool is not started (and therefore there are no subscribers to the information) the performance impact is negligible and shouldn’t in my experience be something to worry about, therefore do not be afraid to output information that you feel will be useful.


 


Either way you should ensure that your tracing code is implemented such that it can be disabled to reduce the performance overhead, typically you will need the ability to enable it at run-time. When carrying out performance testing you will most likely want to disable tracing, although gaining an understanding of the overhead is also valuable.


 


In my view the performance hit associated with software tracing is outweighed by the ability to diagnose run-time issues in a non-intrusive manner.  Most Microsoft products, including BizTalk Server, rely heavily on software tracing which the product group leverage to diagnose customer issues off-line.  Just be aware that running DebugView during performance testing or on a live server is very likely to significantly impact performance!  I’m not saying not to use it, Please Do!  It makes everyone’s life easier but just be aware of the performance impact when your running those tests and in live.


 


Roll on the mighty ETW TraceListener planned for Visual Studio “Orcas”, kernel model ultra-fast tracing from managed code!  ETW has been available for a while but has been pretty hard to leverage from managed code.  It’s worth nothing that BizTalk itself uses ETW heavily to provide extremely rich internal “developer level” tracing which we can use to diagnose problems at customer sites.


 


Thanks to Jon Fancey for highlighting this during the review stage of the book, he experienced a solution being seriously impacted when DebugView was left running on a live server..

BAM: PivotTables not working on the BAM Portal

by | Apr 3, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I’ve used the same base VPC for my various BizTalk Server 2006 images over the last few years, this has worked fine apart from a few annoying bugs that of course plagued every single instance of a VPC using it, of course I never really spent the time to iron them out so suffer from them every now and again 🙁


All are most certainly down to me not having exactly the right bits installed or not having the configuration quite right.  One annoying problem was the Pivot Table view on the BAM Portal refusing to work by coming up with the following unhelpful error:



“The query could not be processed: Cannot connect to the server ‘DARRENJBTS06’. The server is either not started or too busy.”


Over the years I’ve tried just about everything to fix it: Configuration, Security, Service Packs,etc. but have never managed to solve it until now – after some digging internally it seems that my base VPC was missing Version 9.0 of the Analysis Services OLE DB Provider, installing this resolved the issue straight away, the update is listed on this page along with some other updates.


Hope it helps!

The public beta 2 of BizTalk Server 2006 R2 has been released.

by | Apr 3, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication


It’s been long time since I posted the last one. I was pretty busy in working on the WCF adapter documentation for R2.  In addition to the WCF adapters, R2 also has EDI, RFID, and WCF/WinWF interceptors. I think this release has a very high quality.  The WCF adapter has been improved a lot since Beta 1 from the TAP customer feedbacks, and it also has several walkthroughs and samples. You can download this release from here. If you have any questions about the WCF adapters in R2, please let me know.


— Young

Interesting BizTalk Error – When’s a receive location not a receive location?

Interesting BizTalk Error – When’s a receive location not a receive location?

by | Apr 3, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Today in class (in the beautiful city of Perth 🙂 I was busily going through a class
demo in BTS06 R2(Feb CTP) and I created a Project having:

  1. BizTalk project
  2. Test App
  3. BizTalk Wizard Published WCF Service hosted in IIS.

I then needed to give this out to the 12 students in class, so I (some something quick):

  • zipped up the project + Test App
  • exported the Bindings info (via a MSI)
  • Seeing I had made a few changes in IIS to the virtual directory/web app created I
    decided to use IIS Mgr, select the Virtual Directory, then under ‘Tasks….’ select
    ‘Export to Config file xml’ option

    This essentially saves the metadata (that’s normally placed in the IIS metabase) into
    the file – I envisaged the students would be able to ‘Import XML IIS Config file’
    and be done with it……….

    nice thoughts……

After all was said and done, the error we got was something like “Receive
location /SERVICES/WCFSERVICE/page.svc” could not be found.

All was inplace and worked on my machine…..we did discover what the problem was
and moral to this story…..

“/SERVICES/WCFSERVICE/page.svc” is treated differently to

“/Services/wcfService/page.svc”    (this was the actual BTS receive
location path settings for the ‘basicHttpBinding’.

Solution:

– either change the BTS receive location to capitals….or….recreate the Virtual
directory under IIS…..or……modify the virtual directory config.xml file.

Now we know……fingerscrossed

WCF Performance Comparisons

by | Apr 3, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

One of the most common questions I get while teaching WCF is “how does WCF stack-up against the existing distributed technology stacks (ASMX, WSE, COM+, .NET Remoting) in terms of performance and throughput?” This whitepaper, written by Saurabh Gupta, offers some answers. [Via Paul Andrew]
I love the comparison between message-based security and the mixed mode where you secure the transport and use message credentials for authorization. According to this study, mixed offers 2.5x more throughput than message security (using WCF for both), and about 10x more than using WSE 2.0. I think mixed mode will end up becoming the sweet spot for many scenarios.