Sliverlight 2 Beta 2 out this week

by | Jun 4, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

At TechEd
2008 in Orlando, an announcement Silverlight
2 Beta 2 will be publicly available later this week. 

Improvement areas are:

  • UI Framework, including improvements in:

    • animation support

    • error handling and reporting

    • accessibility support

    • keyboard input

    • performance

    • more compatibility between Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation
  • Rich Controls, including:

    • Visual State Manager, permitting the creation of controls as templates

    • text wrapping

    • scrollbars for text boxes
  • Networking Support, including:

    • improved cross domain support

    • security enhancements

    • upload support for web client

    • duplex communications (a server “push” model from server to a Silverlight client)
  • Rich Base Class Library, including:

    • improved threading

    • LINQ-to-JSON

    • ADO.NET Data Services support

    • improved support for Simple Object Access Protocol (SOA)
  • Deep Zoom Support, including:

    • a new XML-based file format for Deep Zoom image tiles

    • a new MultiScaleTileSource that enables existing tile databases to utilize Deep Zoom

    • event-driven notification for zoom/pan state

Thanks Scotty for
the reference to this.

Cheers,

 

Mick.

Oslo news from TechEd

by | Jun 4, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

During the Bill Gates keynote here at TechEd, and during Oliver Sharp’s presentation on Microsoft’s vision and strategy for Connected Systems, it was announced that there will be a public community technology preview (CTP) of *some* of the Oslo stack at PDC this fall. This is the first public announcement of any kind of release dates.

Before you get too excited, remember that Oslo is a very ambitious and far-reaching project. What will be released in the fall will likely only be step down that path, an early look at a few parts that will become part of a much bigger picture.

However, all journeys begin with a single step 🙂

Technorati Tags: BizTalk,Oslo,ESB

Read this before using bts_CleanupMsgBox stored procedure.

by | Jun 4, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Subject: Losing subscriptions after running the sproc, resulting in complete redeploy of BizTalk application(s).

bts_CleanupMsgBox is not something new and it’s been there from BizTalk 2004 SP1. Basically this script is used to clear the MessageBox database (intended only for development and especially useful while during performance testing). This script is not installed by default, the stored procedure will be empty and does nothing. That’s how it should be on a production box, so no one accidentally runs it. You can install the stored procedure (please don’t do it on production server) by running the SQL script presented inside installation folder “C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\Schema\msgbox_cleanup_logic.sql”

Read this great post from Lee, explaining how to use it properly.

Recently, I been using the script very frequently on our performance environment after each test run to bring the environment to a clean state. Couple of days back when I ran the script, I lost all the subscriptions. We had around 13 BizTalk applications in our environment. Executing a query from Admin Console for subscription only showed subscriptions for Caching Service. Stopping and Starting the BizTalk Applications (Enlisting all Send Ports/Orchestrations) only brought back Send Port Subscriptions and Orchestrations subscriptions were not created whatsoever. The only way I managed to bring it back is by stopping/deleting existing BizTalk applications and re-importing them back in one server, then I had to apply the correct binding file and set all the modified parameters before continuing the test. We lost few hours of our valuable performance slot.

Reason:

The reason is so simple, only thing I did wrong this time was generated “EXECUTE” script from SQL Management console, which generated the script as shown below

the parameter @fLeaveActSubs is by default set to “1” in the stored procedure, so if you run it normally using the command “exec bts_CleanupMsgBox”, everything is well and good, it will leave the subscriptions.

But by generating the “EXECUTE” script and running it, this value is set to “0” (default), which in turn results in clearing the subscriptions.

Million Dollar Question!!

Why do we have this option in the first place in this stored procedure? Do we really need to clear the  subscriptions at any stage of testing. I can understand clearing all instance subscriptions, but why do we need to clear the activations subscriptions, and resulting in a environment where we couldn’t bring it back, unless we do a redeploy.

Probably I could have tried running the piece of SQL inside the ELSE part of the IF condition @fLeaveActSubs <> 0, but I didn’t want to leave the environment in a completely unstable state. So redeployed all of our applications (time consuming but safe bet).

If someone can explain the reason behind it, I’ll happily update this post.

Thanks Gunjan Jain (Microsoft, India) for pointing this out.

Nandri,

Saravana

Got Some Spare Time? Read Some SharePoint Blogs!

by | Jun 4, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Weblogs are a great way to keep up with the latest SharePoint Buzz and I get quite a lot of questions from people who are just dipping their toes in the SharePoint pool for some good reading material. Well if you don’t want to go after every interesting SharePoint blog individually or if you want to add blogs to your list that you didn’t know yet, check out following links:

  • On the SharePoint Community Portal you can find the OPML of SharePoint PG, MVPs, Insiders, and Rangers. You can import this OPML in your favorite RSS reader, et voila you are subscribed to a bunch of very interesting blogs.
  • Also on the SharePoint Community Portal you can find a link to some aggregated feeds, for example the feed of all MVP blogs.
  • Joel Oleson has compiled a list of the Top 100 SharePoint Blogs. <ShamelessPlug>I’m number seven in the list!</ShamelessPlug>
  • Probably due to lots of feedback related to his Top 100 list, Joel also created a list of more than 300 SharePoint related blogs, sorted alphabetically.

If you really want to read every bit related to SharePoint, you can use following sites (quality of the content is not guaranteed!):

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,wss,moss,blog,blogs
Updated PS & BizTalk Posts

Updated PS & BizTalk Posts

by | Jun 3, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I just took a few moments to update some of my old posts on administering BizTalk
Server using PowerShell:

Here are some of the changes:

  • Reformatted code samples so that they were nicely readable using the current blog
    theme
  • Fixed some code that still used InvokeMethod() on WMI objects. This was the big change,
    since the old code was written with one of the PowerShell betas and didn’t work anymore
    on RTM.

If anyone notices any other problems with the samples, let me know!

technorati BizTalk
Server, PowerShell

New BizTalk Training Offering: BizTalk Expert Series

by | Jun 3, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication


QuickLearn has just announced a new training series they are offering:
BizTalk Expert Series are focused BizTalk classes that drill-down into a specific topic. In response to customer requests, QuickLearn has created these classes that are at least two days long, covering topics like BAM, RFID, EDI, BRE, Testing and ESB. These classes are packed with labs and are designed for students who have already attended a BizTalk class or who have been using BizTalk for at least six months or so.  
QuickLearn are currently offering customers who have attended their previous trainings, a 25% discount for the first public delivery of classes in the BizTalk Expert Series.
 For more details go to the QuickLearn site:


http://www.quicklearn.com/class_BizTalk_Expert_Series.aspx


Enjoy,


Ofer

Replace any Character or String BizTalk Pipeline Component

by | Jun 3, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I’ve created a decode BizTalk Pipeline Component that can replace any character or any string in an inbound file.

Here are some uses for it:

Replace a Trading Partner ID before BizTalk receives the file in the Message Box.

Replace HEX Characters in a flat file.

Insert carriage returns in an EDI file as the Segment Terminator.

In Pipeline Properties choose the characters you’d like to replace in the form of <character to replace>,<replacement character>. You can replace as many character pairs as you’d like.

In this example I’m replacing %u00bb with N and a with w.

Here’s a sample input file:

Here’s the output:

Email me if you would like a copy.