My thoughts about RETRO: A RESTful Transactions Model

by community-syndication | Jul 16, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Transactions has typically been one of the aspects that the WS-* followers continuously point out as one of the weaknesses of the REST model. Even though we all agree that atomic transactions in distributed systems are JUST A BAD IDEA and everybody that…(read more)

BizUnit 3.1

by community-syndication | Jul 16, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

BizUnit 3.1 is now released. (Actually its been out for over a week). There are a few bug fixes in this release and most notable is the addition of the following steps that Bram Veldhoen contributed.

BizTalkSteps/ExecuteMapStep
BizTalkSteps/ExecuteReceivePipelineStep
BizTalkSteps/ExecuteSendPipelineStep

The Pipeline steps use Tomas Restrepo’s Pipeline Testing Library.
I had originally planned on incorporating Bram’s steps into Extensions as I […]

EDI/AS2 in BizTalk 2009 : How to get the BatchId for a specific BatchName

by community-syndication | Jul 16, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

One of the new features in BizTalk 2009 EDI is the possibility to create multiple batch configurations for each party.
Each batch will have a specific name and specific batchID and can be managed individually.

For a specific batch name you can get the corresponding batch ID. For example you may need this for an external trigger message for that batch.

If you want to do that programmatically, you may expect you can just call Partner.GetBatchIdForBatchName method by passing the batch name.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.biztalk.edi.partneragreementmanager.partner.getbatchidforbatchname.aspx

But looking at the signature of that method, it is probably not what you want. Instead of expecting just a string for the batch name, this method wants two int, the partyID and the messageType. But if you just want to pass in the batch name, you do not get very far with that method.

To get the batch ID for a batch name, we have a stored procedure you can call from code: edi_GetBatchIdForBatchName .
Calling 
  exec edi_GetBatchIdForBatchName ‘MyBatch’
will return the ID of the batch name MyBatch.

Note: both calling GetBatchIdForBatchName and edi_GetBatchIdForBatchName directly is not supported.

Manuel Stern

Google Maps ASP.NET control and the KML framework

by community-syndication | Jul 16, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Why?

This post is going to be about how to create a Google Map control that renders a map and subscribes to the KML feed.
My last post about the KML wrapper framework was about how to actually…

Daniel Berg’s blog about ASP.NET, EPiServer, SharePoint, BizTalk

InitializeSecurityContext() and SEC_E_INSUFFICIENT_MEMORY

by community-syndication | Jul 15, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I’ve been doing some work recently with the Security Support Provider Interface (SSPI) API in Windows; particularly with the Kerberos package. I had used SSPI a lot before (see my WSSPI library for stuff I did with it years ago), but it had been mostly done with NTLM and not much of Kerberos.
Overall, using Kerberos […]

BizTalk 2009 Performance Slides release by Microsoft BizTalk CAT Team

by community-syndication | Jul 15, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Just saw on Ewan Fairweather’s blog that the BizTalk Server Customer Advisory Team have released four presentation slides about BizTalk Server 2009 performance. The presentations will give you a great insight into how the team sets up performance labs for the BizTalk projects they’re involved in, and have many many performance tips, links to online […]

Covast HIPAA accelerator (004010A1) to 5010

by community-syndication | Jul 15, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

By popular demand, there is different versions of the conversion tool available, you can purchase one or all of them, whatever you need.

Here is a screen shot of the context menu after installing all conversion plug-ins.

Looping around elements of a message, follow-up part II

by community-syndication | Jul 15, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Hi all

I did a follow
up to my old
post about how to loop around the elements of a message a couple of days ago.

As you can se from the comments to my followup, Thiago mentions that there isn’t any
performance hit because everything is done inside an atomic scope. Now, Thiago is
naturally correct when he states, that no persistence occurs inside an atomic scope.
But as you can also see from the comments, I wondered about what to do about using
a request-response port – so I just had to test it.

For BizTalk 2009, just as the previous versions, you CAN’T have both the send shape
and corresponding receive shape used for a request-response port in the same atomic
scope. At compile time you will get this error: “an atomic scope may not contain or
call a service or scope that contains both the send and the corresponding receive
of a requestresponse operation on a ‘uses’ port or servicelink”.

This may seem odd at first glance, but it is due to the fact, that in order to make
sure the ACID properties
are respected at runtime the orchestration engine submits messages that are sent out
to the messagebox, but it doesn’t release them for the messagebox to route until the
atomic scope has finished. This way, if an error occurs inside the atomic scope, no
messages have actually been sent, and therefore, BizTalk can guarantee a consistent
state.

So basically, if the message isn’t released until AFTER the atomic scope, then there
is no way you can receive the reply inside the same atomic scope. Makes sense.

SO, if you want to loop around elements in a message by calling a receive pipeline
inside your orchestration, you can’t use request-response ports, as you can with other
patterns. Sorry, but that is the way it is.

Conclusion:

If you want to loop around elements inside an orhestration, use a receive pipeline
if possible since this is done in an atomic scope and therefore no persistence points
occur. If not possible, use the pattern described here.

Thanks, Thiago for pointing out that my post needed some more details

—

eliasen

Schemas not compiled and do not show up anywhere

by community-syndication | Jul 15, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Hi all

Today I faced a very peculiar problem. I was helping a customer split a BizTalk project
into two projects, because some of the schemas that were in the original project needed
to be common for other projects.

So this is what i started out with:

which is: Two schemas and a map between them.

And this is what I would like:

So basically, the common schema has been transferred to a common project. Now, naturally,
I need to reference the CommonProject from the OriginalProject and then reload the
schema in my map to make it work. But this is where the weird part starts. After compiling
the NewCommonProject and adding the reference, this is what showed up in the schema
browser when I wanted to reload the schema in the map:

Basically, my new project didn’t have any schemas inside it. After much troubleshooting,
thinking that the issue was something with the newly compiled dll didn’t get copied
to the bin folder of the OriginalProject and trying lots of stuff with that, I finally
figured it out.

I just happened to notice that the file size of the NewCommonProject.dll was only
5kb which seemed to small. So I browsed the dll in the object browser and it was totally
empty. Weird. Then I went and looked at the properties of the schema, and didn’t see
anything unusual. So I added a new schema to the project just to see what would happen
with that. This new schema showed up in the schema browser. Even weirder. But then
I went and looked at the properties of the schemas again and that’s when this new
property suddenly showed up:

I changed the build action on the schemas to be “BtsCompile” and this did the trick.
Now all the schemas showed up in the schema browser.

Now, another strange side to this story is, that by now, the Build Action property
has disappeared again I haven’t quite figured out when it appears and when it does
not.

BUT, if you ever run into issues where your schemas just don’t show up anywhere this
might be your issue.

Hope this helps someone.

—

eliasen

MMC Snap-in for MBV now available !

by community-syndication | Jul 15, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication