BizTalk Setup: System.EnterpriseServices.TransactionProxyException

by | Jul 21, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

This is now the second time that it has happened, and I didn’t write about it before.

I am setting BizTalk up in a multi server environment where the SQL Server exists on a different machine.

I got the following error after applying the configuration: System.EnterpriseServices.TransactionProxyException

After a couple of hours of going thru database permissions, checking MSTDC settings in component services. I found that on the SQL Server MS DTC was not installed (Add/Remove windows components -> Application Server)

Changes to the WCF LOB Adapter SDK in SP2

by | Jul 21, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

If you’re developing your own adapters against the WCF LOB Adapter SDK, then it might be worth your while to try out the June CTP of the SP2 of the WCF LOB ASDK. There are a few minor changes, but we might make more based on your feedback.

I’m mentioning the changes from SP1 to the June CTP of SP2 in brief. For more details, you should refer to the documentation.

  • Pre SP2, the ASDK allowed all input channel shapes – IInputChannel, IInputSessionChannel, IReplyChannel, and IReplySessionChannel. In SP2, there is a setting exposed to the adapter, which allows the adapter to control which of the above four shapes should be allowed. This is important when the adapter is used with BizTalk, and you want to integrate the LOB transaction (assuming it understands System.Transaction) with the BizTalk MessageBox transaction – in such a situation, you only want to allow one-way channels to be used. In other cases (SAP for example), where a reply always needs to be sent back to the LOB, you might want to only allow two-way channels.
  • Pre SP2, the WSDL generated (based on the operations selected in the Metadata Search Browse UI) was always compiled before being returned to the caller (or being converted to a WCF proxy). In some situations (e.g., where the adapter is overriding the XSD generation to return metadata for – let’s say a System.Data.DataSet) – the XSD/WSDL might not compile (even though svcutil.exe can successfully convert it to a WCF proxy). In order to allow this, a setting is exposed to the adapter which determines whether the WSDL should be compiled or not, before being converted to a WCF proxy. The advantage of compilation is that it can catch “real” errors in the wsdl.
  • There are two new QualifiedTypes added for System.Data.DataSet. (For “why two” and “why not just one”, refer to the documentation).
  • Pre SP2, the MSB UI tool by default always showed all authentication options – “Username”, “Windows” and “Certificate”. The adapter can now indicate which ones are supported (and correspondingly, only those appear in the UI).
  • Pre SP2, when using the “Consume Adapter Service” tool in a BizTalk project, the XSD files generated had names like “MyBinding1.xsd”, “MyBinding2.xsd”, etc. Even though a “filename prefix” textbox was present, it had a couple of drawbacks – (a) the user had to provide the prefix, which might not clearly indicate what the XSDs contained, and (b) the same prefix applied to all XSDs generated during the metadata resolution of all operations selected in the UI. In SP2, it is now possible for the adapter to specify a “filename hint” for each XSD generated.

A Great BizTalk Scenario – Two Way Port being Serviced by two one way backend ports

by | Jul 21, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

This one came from Paolo Salvatori (a senior PM within the MS Connected Systems Division
Team… I know a bit of a mouthful) whom has gotten in touch with his creative side
and drawn a picture for all us common folk 🙂 – well done Paolo.

The scenario is – a Request/Response Port is published at the ‘front
end’, goes through BizTalk and the work is done by a backend system that operates
via a One-Way Send and BTS gets the response via another
One-Way Receive.

The thing I like about Paolo’s piece of work is that he shows all the Message Context
Properties required to be set by BizTalk for message correlation.
Which makes this a Messaging Only Solution and NO Orchestrations required!!!! (how
cool)

 

 

Click on the image to enlarge……one day I’ll get Silverlight Zoom Composer control
running for these…. 🙂

Configuring Dynamics 2009 AIF for BizTalk 2006

by | Jul 21, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

There has been little documentation, if any, either on MSDN or CustomerSource regarding the implementation of AIF Services with the BizTalk Adapter.

I have been working with this for Dynamics 2009, which is even worse, as all of the documentation is for dynamics 4. I managed to figure out, with the help of some others how to configure dynamics to enable BizTalk to at least send a document to it. It’s all about end points, and services. See below for the step by step.

Nice Summer Days

by | Jul 19, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Before I get to a .NET-related post, I thought I would make a visit to the confessional. No fear – we’re not voting anyone off the island…but I do have a confession to make (but it’s something that you probably already know) — this blog has been quiet over the past couple weeks. I have a couple blog posts in the pipeline, but I thought I would drop some context around the pause.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Seattle area, western Washington in the summer is just pure magic. I know that it may be hard to believe – given the reputation Seattle has – but between the months of June and September, the skies clear and the mountains come out to play. When one isn’t cranking out code during these glorious months, it’s a time for biking, hiking, and enjoying the outdoors.

For our part, my wife and I struck out to British Columbia to see Whistler and Blackcomb – we enjoyed the mountain off-season and did some bear-watching. It was nice being able to walk about and do some mountain biking at the lower parts of the mountains, and have the option of doing some snowboarding on the still-snowy top of Blackcomb. The picture attached to this post was of the river that flows through the village at the bottom of the mountains – a river I was told the river was being fed by melting snow.

"Great story and an excellent photo of water," you say; "but what does this all have to do with WF/WCF?", you ask.  Well, the weather and the July 4th holiday weekend means that folks on various teams have been taking a couple days off here and there to enjoy the summer sunshine – which means that publication processes that usually move within a 2 day period have had a lot of delay steps placed in the middle of them. 🙂

That being said, there’s some good things afoot for the coming months:

  • We have some good technical content that’s going to be going live this week on the MSDN site.
  • There’s also some library clean-up being done with the posts that have been languishing in the Windows Vista branch of the library (much of it was posted there when this was all still WinFX).
  • I’ve been beta testing some new publication tools for the MSDN web site, which should make creating new pages much simpler. We’re going to try and get a couple new pages posted under the WF Dev Center and WCF Dev Center. Our current thoughts are to start tying to collect the video screencasts/how-to’s and the code samples together, to help with find-ability.
  • I’m trying to convince some of the folks that have signed up to blog to at least pop on and do an introduction, to at least get past their first posts.

I look forward to sharing more details on information as the stuff moves up from staging to production this week; and I hope everyone is having a good summer (for whom this is summer – for those who it is winter, I hope you’re enjoying the slopes!) and enjoying yourself.

Your buddy in .NET-Connectedness,
Cliff Simpkins

Creating a PIDX Partner Interface Process (PIP) in BTARN 3.5

by | Jul 18, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

The next step in developing your PIDX / RNIF solution using the BizTalk Accelerator for RosettaNet (BTARN 3.5) is to create a new Process Configuration from your PIDX PIP. I’m going to use the PIDX “Invoice” and “Invoice Response” PIPs (P21 & P22) in this example since they are generally the most important in the Energy, Oil & Gas industry right now.

1. You begin by opening the BTARN Management Console and right-clicking on the Process Configuration Settings node in the left-hand pane and selecting New > Process Configuration.

2. For PIDX configurations I recommend using a Display Code that includes the standard, the PIP and the version like “PIDX_P21_1.0”. This will make things a lot easier if you need to support multiple versions in the future. The Process Code corresponds to the PIP number which is “P21” in our case. The Version is “1.0” and the Process Name is “Invoice”. The Message Standard is “PIDX”, the Standard Version is “1.0” and the Payload Binding ID is also “PIDX. Once you are done, your General tab should look like this.

3. The parameters you set on the Activity tab are very important and the required values can be found in the PIDX Implementation Guide. To meet the PIDX requirements, the Non-Repudiation Required, Is Authorization Required and Non-Repudiation of Origin and Content parameters must all be set to “True” and the Type parameter must be set to “Request/Response”. The settings for all other parameters on the Activity tab must be agreed upon by both parties involved in the transaction. Once you are done, the Activity tab should look like this.

4. The parameters you set on the Initiator tab are also very important and these are all specified by the PIDX P21 Invoice PIP documentation. It’s very important that you communicate these settings to your trading partner as well since they must be the same on both messaging systems. Once you are complete the Initiator tab should look exactly like this.

 

5. The same goes for the Responder tab as shown here.

There are a lot of parameters to set when creating a new Process Configuration in the BizTalk Accelerator for RosettaNet. Almost all of these are used by the Initiator Private Process and Initiator Public Process to create the outbound RNIF headers and message so it’s vital that you and your trading partner agree on all these before you begin testing.

It’s pretty sad how complicated this is compared to an alternative such as AS2. As I’ve said before using RosettaNet is like “swatting a fly with an atom bomb”.

Currently listening to Eric Marienthal’s Just Around the Corner.

BizTalk Services “R12” Release – Workflow

by | Jul 18, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Drum roll please.for those of you are as interested in the advent of cloud services, this is big. Today, we released BizTalk Services “R12” Community Technology Preview (CTP).  Just as a refresher: “BizTalk Services” is the code-name for an incubation for our SOA platform-in-the-cloud offering from Microsoft.  BizTalk Services provides Messaging, Identity and Workflow (our latest addition) enabling developers to extend existing premises applications and build new composite applications.  See my previous post for additional information.


 


While the BizTalk Services “R12” CTP includes a variety of updates, the piece that stand out is the release of the anticipated Workflow capabilities. The new cloud-based Workflow capabilities enable ’service orchestration’ from the cloud.  This functionality is based on the Windows Workflow Foundation (.NET Framework component) and can orchestrate services that connect to systems in your enterprise, or to systems running anywhere on the Internet via Web services messages. Using this service, you can define the interaction of any web-addressable services.  



In addition to the Workflow functionality, the BizTalk Services Identity Service has been expanded and enhanced to enable more flexibility for scenarios demanded by our customers.  R12 introduces a new approach for creating, viewing, and managing access control rules.   


 


The new BizTalk Services “R12” CTP is online and available now for your use and the SDK is available at http://labs.biztalk.net. Whether or not you currently have an account, now’s the time to try it!

Validating Schemas During Runtime

by | Jul 18, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I recently came across an interesting scenario.  In my application, we are transforming multiple incoming messages to a a canonical format.  We then take the output and place it in the MessageBox for some other downstream subscriber to process. 


The Mapper did the transformation and created the output, however, based on the processing that we were doing during the mapping we found that some of the output messages we created did not always get created so that they would pass validation against the canonical schema.  Since we were doing our processing without the use of an Orchestration we did not have the ability to call a pipeline component to do the validation.   In addition, since the canonical message was used as input to the next set of processes we couldn’t use a pipeline on the send side either.


What we needed was the ability to validate against the output schema without requiring an Orchestration.


By adding the following items to the BizTalk config file on all of our servers we were able to achieve this behavior.


 <configSections>
    <section
        name=”xlangs”
        type=”Microsoft.XLANGs.BizTalk.CrossProcess.XmlSerializationConfigurationSectionHandler, Microsoft.XLANGs.BizTalk.CrossProcess” />
</configSections>

<xlangs>
    <Configuration>
        <Debugging
            ValidateSchemas=”true”
            ExtendedLogging=”false”
        />
    </Configuration>
</xlangs>


Once you make this change make sure that you test all of the messages that you are processing in your environment.  There is a good chance that you could end up generating suspended messages for interchanges that were just working.


An prime example is if you are using SQL UpdateGrams as outlined in this previous post.


In my next post I will talk about how to get around this issue and another very curious and frustrating UpdateGram behavior.

Our first UK SOA/BPM User Group Meeting

by | Jul 18, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Last night we had our first UK SOA/BPM user group meeting held at Microsoft office in London Victoria. Thanks goes to Jonathan Woodward, Michael Stephenson , Andy James for organising this. It was a good turn around for the first meeting, around 30 people. It’s good to get in touch with some of the folks you have only known in the online world.  I think its very healthy knowledgeable crowd, with fellow MVP’s (Yossi Dahan, Santosh Benjamin, Robert Hogg), few people from Connect Systems Advisory board, Microsoft and  Microsoft/Business Process Alliance.  I didn’t get the chance to speak to every single person, we only had 3 hours to network with each other, hopefully after few meetings we’ll get to know who’s who better.

Nandri!

Saravana