How everyone should test their BizTalk based solutions: Presentation

by | Nov 1, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I’ve managed to find somewhere to store the presentation deck I delivered yesteday and you can now download it from here.  I’ve also added the slides I had to cut from the presentation to enable it to fit within the SOA & BPM conference breakout length – these cover the throttling semantics at a high level and detail some common symptoms you might see during performance testing and what you should look at to resolve them.


There’s of course more detail in the book!  Enjoy.

WCF Bad Message

by | Nov 1, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

When creating a web service using the WCF-BasicHttp adapter, make sure that you adjust the “Maximum received message size” binding configuration to jive with the size of the message you expect to hit the service. If a request is made to the web service that contains a payload that is larger than this setting, an HTTP 400 (Bad Message) error will be generated. The default maximum size is 64K, which seems a bit small.

Checkmate? MySpace To Join Google OpenSocial

by | Nov 1, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Seems it’s official: MySpace is joining Google OpenSocial . This is a huge boost for OpenSocial API.

I’m looking forward to see all the great 3rd party applications from Facebook also on MySpace. Obviously there is a huge incentive for these application providers to embrace the OpenSocial API: Millions of MySpace users are joining in!

Maybe one day, Google will launch an initiative to support one Rule Markup Language. Being RuleML or anything. As long as there are enough participants, a standard will evolve.
This would open the door to the Web 3.0: putting the semantics on top of hyper text.

How everyone should test their BizTalk based solutions: Presentation

by | Nov 1, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I’ve managed to find somewhere to store the presentation deck I delivered yesteday and you can now download it from here.  I’ve also added the slides I had to cut from the presentation to enable it to fit within the SOA & BPM conference breakout length – these cover the throttling semantics at a high level and detail some common symptoms you might see during performance testing and what you should look at to resolve them.


There’s of course more detail in the book!  Enjoy.

A pattern for Ordered Delivery using orchestrations

by | Nov 1, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Ordered Delivery is a great feature of BizTalk 2006. The problem is however that as soon as one introduce a orchestration in the process it doesn’t work. The Ordered Delivery option on ports in BizTalk 2006 ensures two things today:

  1. Messages are published to the MessageBox in the same order as they were consumed by the Receive Port.
  2. Messages are consumed from the MessageB0ox and published to the end destination by the send port in the same order as they were persisted in the MessageBox.

What’s the problem?

Fine. But if we introduce an orchestration each message being persisted in the the MessageBox will start it’s own orchestration instance. These instances could (and in many cases will) finish in different order than they started. This means that we loose the correct order of the messages one they are persisted back to the MessageBox from the orchestration instance.

The above “limitation” is well known and the solution to this has always been a Sequential Orchestration pattern (also called Singleton Orchestration). Basically this correlates messages from for example a specific Receive Port of a particular Message Type. This ensures that only one instance of the orchestration will be started and we can keep the order of the messages. We’ve experienced a lot of problems using this this kind of solution for Ordered Delivery – all from Zombies to them using huge amounts of memory and so on.

Microsoft’s new solution

Now .gif)it finally looks like this problem is about to be solved! Microsoft released a white paper recently (download it here – found it via Richard Seroter’s blog) to solve these problems in a other way. It basically means that a pipeline will stamp the messages with a sequence number as they enter BizTalk (the messages are then in order as we’re then using Ordered Delivery on the port). Then one can have as many orchestration as one like processing these messages and publish them back to the MessageBox (now possibly out of order but with a sequence number stamped on them). The last business orchestration will set a “destination” property that will route the message to a resequence orchestration. This orchestration resequences the messages and decides by checking the last sequence number it sent out if the current message should be sent out or put back on queue.

Conclusion

My biggest concern in this solution is that is still based on a singleton. We’ve had cases where where the send procedure been extremely slow (for example when we used SOAP and had a slow Web Service in the other end), then the orchestration has built up in memory as it queued messages internally. However it looks like this solution is well thought through with a “flush queue” functionality, stop message, some ideas on how to handle errors (remember that if the singleton fails and you don’t handle this your processes stop) and so on.

Read it and please let me know what you think!

Comphrensive list of WSS/MOSS Resources

by | Oct 31, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

A friend of mine Sezai spent a great deal of time putting together a great list of
WSS/MOSS articles. Thought I’d share them with you – thanks Sezai!!!

SharePoint
Products and Technologies 2007 Customization Policy
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=92311&clcid=0x409

Deploying
and Supporting Enterprise Search with MOSS 2007 at Microsoft – White Paper
http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/5/3/253f0074-5c2c-4b45-a1c6-62c2c288c6eb/deployingandsupportingenterprisesearchtwp.doc

2007
Office System Document: Bringing Web 2.0 to the Enterprise with the 2007 Office System
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8b48bd31-f043-4ab4-96eb-c6e958fe4ec9&DisplayLang=en

Microsoft
SharePoint Products and Technologies Document: Using Blogs and Wikis in Business
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=6224AA0B-2EB5-4780-8161-C8C94D86B9E9&displaylang=en

Microsoft
SharePoint Products and Technologies Document: Microsoft Office Programs and SharePoint
Products and Technologies Integration – Fair, Good, Better, Best
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e0d05a69-f67b-4d37-961e-2db3c4065cb9&DisplayLang=en

2007
Office System Document: Understanding Workflow in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services
and the 2007 Microsoft Office System

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=DBBD82C7-9BDE-4974-8443-67B8F30126A8&displaylang=en

 

Microsoft
SharePoint Products and Technologies Document: Transform Your Business With SharePoint
Products and Technologies

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=CF5BB5E2-909D-4910-A8BB-3F4718BEE8F7&displaylang=en

 

Microsoft
Best Practices Analyzer for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and the 2007 Microsoft
Office System

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=CB944B27-9D6B-4A1F-B3E1-778EFDA07DF8&displaylang=en

 

Information
architecture in Office SharePoint Server (case study for Fabrikam Industries)

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/logredir.aspx?MODE=CT&CTT=ToExternal&target=http%3A%2F%2Fgo.microsoft.com%2Ffwlink%2F%3FLinkId%3D91053&referrer=http%3A%2F%2Ftechnet2.microsoft.com%2FOffice%2Fen-us%2Flibrary%2F902bbfaa-d6cc-4e8b-a1f5-6215168f47681033.mspx&reldir=en-us%2Flibrary

 

Windows
SharePoint Services Document: Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services
3.0 – Under the Hood

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C49A6B00-E0AA-4102-B585-B25CD3CBB383&displaylang=en

 

SharePoint
Server 2007 Document: Role-Based Templates for SharePoint My Sites – Under the Hood

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8248ab85-3ef7-4dd2-a5a6-2615683f6f6d&DisplayLang=en

 

Plan
for building multilingual solutions by using SharePoint Products and Technologies

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=79322

 

Planning
and architecture for Office SharePoint Server 2007, part 1

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=79552&clcid=0x409

 

Planning
and architecture for Office SharePoint Server 2007, part 2

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=85548&clcid=0x409

 

SharePoint
Server 2007 Sample: Creating a Custom User Site Provisioning Solution with Office
SharePoint Server 2007

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=5B6C8FB0-9B67-47DB-8A09-BCA76BC9A5D1&displaylang=en

 

SharePoint
Products and Technologies Templates: Web Part Templates for Visual Studio .NET

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=CAC3E0D2-BEC1-494C-A74E-75936B88E3B5&displaylang=en

 

Best
Practices: Writing SQL Syntax Queries for Relevant Results in Enterprise Search

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb219479.aspx

 

Managing
enterprise metadata with content types

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=101604&clcid=0x409

 

Evaluating
and Customizing Search Relevance in SharePoint Server 2007

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb499682.aspx

 

Chapter
3: Customizing and Extending the Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 Search (Part 1 of
2)

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb608302.aspx

 

Chapter
3: Customizing and Extending the Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 Search (Part 2 of
2)

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb608305.aspx

 

Best
Practices: Common Coding Issues When Using the SharePoint Object Model

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb687949.aspx

 

Upgrading
an MCMS 2002 Application to SharePoint Server 2007 (Part 1 of 2)

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb466172.aspx

 

Upgrading
an MCMS 2002 Application to SharePoint Server 2007 (Part 2 of 2)

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb466171.aspx

 

Development
Tools and Techniques for Working with Code in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Part
1 of 2)

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb530302.aspx

 

Development
Tools and Techniques for Working with Code in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Part
2 of 2)

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb530301.aspx

 

Using
the Business Data Catalog and Smart Tags with the 2007 Microsoft Office System

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb608684.aspx

 

Sample
governance plan

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=92333&clcid=0x409

 

“Creating
Shared Hosting Solutions on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0” whitepaper

http://office.microsoft.com/search/redir.aspx?AssetID=AM102157711033

 

Windows
SharePoint Services 3.0 Document: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Quick Reference
Guide

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=80FD0D64-4BD0-476B-BFD9-39DA34C22EFB&displaylang=en

 

Windows
SharePoint Services 3.0 Sample: Example Master Pages

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=7C05CA44-869A-463B-84D7-57B053711A96&displaylang=en

 

Windows
SharePoint Services 3.0 Document: Tips and Tricks – Using Wikis in Windows SharePoint
Services 3.0

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=BA4B9AFB-C06E-4480-B816-26B7E009E35C&displaylang=en

 

Windows
SharePoint Services 3.0

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=D51730B5-48FC-4CA2-B454-8DC2CAF93951&displaylang=en

 

Windows
SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Template: Application Template Core

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=C1039E13-94DA-4D7D-8CAE-3B96FA5A4045&displaylang=en

 

Windows
SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Templates: All Server Admin Templates

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=AAE4CB5A-91D2-4F1B-9A45-3BB894E218F8&displaylang=en

 

Enterprise
Content Management From Microsoft

http://office.microsoft.com/search/redir.aspx?AssetID=XT102253281033&CTT=5&Origin=HA102063591033 
docx

http://office.microsoft.com/search/redir.aspx?AssetID=XT102063611033&CTT=5&Origin=HA102063591033 
doc

 

Microsoft
Office SharePoint Server 2007 on HP ProLiant Servers – Performance Summary

http://h71019.www7.hp.com/ActiveAnswers/cache/497613-0-0-0-121.html

 

Working
with Large Lists in Office SharePoint Server 2007

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=95450&clcid=0x409

 

SharePoint
Server 2007 SDK: Software Development Kit

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=6D94E307-67D9-41AC-B2D6-0074D6286FA9&displaylang=en

 

White
paper: Using database mirroring with Office SharePoint Server

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=83725&clcid=0x409

 

White
paper: Chaos no more: Steps for building governance into Microsoft Office SharePoint
Server 2007

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=92602&clcid=0x409

 

White
paper: Integrating Office SharePoint Server 2007 and SAP

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=91026

 

White
paper: Configure Office SharePoint Server for SAP iView Web Parts

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=96087&clcid=0x409

 

White
paper: Data protection and recovery for Office SharePoint Server in small to medium
deployments

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=102839&clcid=0x409

 

White
paper: Managing social networking with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=98123&clcid=0x409

 

White
paper: Upgrading Large Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Intranet Portals
to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=91410&clcid=0x409

 

White
paper: SharePoint Products and Technologies governance checklist guide

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=91896&clcid=0x409

 

2007
Microsoft Office System Business Intelligence Integration

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=98657

 

Microsoft
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) Installation/Configuration Guide for SharePoint
Integration Mode

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=98664

 

White
paper: Guide for Office SharePoint Server Management Pack

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=94824&clcid=0x409

 

White
papers: Role-based My Site template setup guides

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/f/?en-us/library/f1ddbcec-af41-4c3e-8c85-f30480329d491033.mspx

 

White
papers: Excel Services step-by-step guides

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/f/?en-us/library/eea3ace8-0863-429a-b1e8-041254ed2fc41033.mspx

 

Sample
project plan: Office SharePoint Server 2007 deployment (Office Project 2007 format)

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=101328&clcid=0x409

Sample
project plan: Office SharePoint Server 2007 deployment (Office Project 2003 format)

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=102043&clcid=0x409

 

Downloadable
book: Web Publishing and Planning Guide with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=92330