Version 5 of pipeline components library

by | Jul 22, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Hi all

I have just released version 5 of my pipeline components library.

It has the following additions:

  • SuspendAfterMap. In BizTalk 2009 (which is the only supported BizTalk version for
    this pipeline component) there has been added support for recoverable interchanges
    for errors occurring during mapping on receive ports after disassembling. This is
    achieved by setting a specific promoted property to “true”. I have created a pipeline
    component that will do this for you.
  • WriteProperties. This pipeline component serves almost NO purpose at all, except I
    used it for debugging to see what properties existed on a message going through BizTalk.
    It will write out all context of a message to the eventlog, one event at a time.

It has the following new features:

  • Promote. The pipeline component used for promoting a value based on an XPath expression
    and thereby enabling you to promote a specific instance of a reoccurring element has
    been enhanced by a “constant”. So instead of having to set the value of some property
    to the result of an XPath expression you can just enter a constant instead. If you
    enter both a constant and an XPath expression the constant wins. This new feature
    is quite handy if you need to set the value of for instance MIME.FileName to a specific
    value or any other property for that matter.

You can find the newest versions at http://eebiztalkpipelinecom.codeplex.com/

—

eliasen

Version 9.1 of functoids library

by | Jul 22, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Hi all

I have just released version 9.1 of my functoid library. Actually, nothing much new
has appeared. I had accidentally left out the functoid I described at http://blog.eliasen.dk/2009/03/08/SolvingTheIfThenElseProblemInAMapPartIII.aspx from
version 9, so now it is reintroduced – and it has also been added to the documentation.

Find the newest version of the functoids library at http://eebiztalkfunctoids.codeplex.com –
thanks.

—

eliasen

ESBT Toolkit How To Video #6: Performance Metrics using Built in BAM

by | Jul 22, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Welcome to #6 in my series of ESB Toolkit How To Videos. If you have not seen the previous videos, I encourage you to do so. The previous ones can be found here


1) Basic Itinerary Routing and UDDI Integration


2) Composite Itinerary and Dynamic Mapping


3) Itinerary Resolution in the Bus


4) Dynamic Itinerary Resolution in the Bus


5) Including Custom Orchestrations in the Itinerary Designer


There is a great (but sadly under appreciated and under discussed) feature in the ESB Toolkit that I want to focus on today. Back at last years SOA conference, I spent some time talking with Dmitri Ossipov (who lead the development of the ESBT) and he showed me some of the new features he was adding into the toolkit. The one that caught my eye immediately was the built in BAM tracking. The ESB Toolkit has the built in ability to automatically log tracking and performance information for your itineraries as they are processed by the ESB components. If you have enabled “Tracking” in your itineraries, then the ESBT automatically logs information to a BAM table in SQL Server every time any of the itineraries services execute. This data includes data about which service executed, which itinerary and version it was part of, what time it executed, what specific instance it was part of as well as the status of the overall itinerary. This data is a gold mine for those of you looking to track the overall performance of your ESB and related services. It can be used to view all kinds of invaluable information about which itineraries are being used, how well they are performing, which ones are too slow, which ones are failing, which individual services are under performing etc.


Now while the ESBT will automatically capture all of this information you, it doesn’t come with any kind of user friendly mechanism for viewing, analyzing or interacting with this data. In this video, I’ll show you how to easily setup a number of BAM Views that will allow you to quickly assess performance stats about your itineraries. I build these views out in Excel and that allows me to use standard pivot tables and charts to view the data and I slice it up. I have also created views that allow me to tracking the performance of specific itineraries across different versions and across time. This is great info to have if you want to understand if recent changes to an itinerary have resulted in better or worse performance than you previously had.


The following image shows one of the views that I setup to show me what the average, worst and best performance times were for my itineraries. This is pretty useful information to have as I can quickly identify performance issues in my itineraries. You can easily see that the “ComposedDemo” takes quite slow when compared to the “DemoService” itinerary. I can even drill down in the specifics of a single itinerary and find out if a specific ESB service is causing the overall poor performance. 



Now, unlike my previous videos, where I just showed you how to build out a specific solution, I’m going to actually provide you with the components I’ve built. I’ve attached the Excel file that contains my BAM Views and you should be able to easily deploy these into your system and access the charts and tables that I show in the video. You will just need to have the ESBT installed as well as the BizTalk BAM components installed and configured.


In order to avoid make an hour long video, I do not go very deep into what BAM is or how you work it. If you are not familiar with BizTalk’s BAM feature, there may be some elements of this video that are not 100% clear. However, if you have a basic understanding of what BAM is, then I hope this video will offer some great value.


The video can be accessed here:


The BAM Excel Project can be accessed here:


Cheers and keep on BizTalking


Peter

Migration Guidance for the WF Developer (Beta 1 – Part 2)

by | Jul 21, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

About six weeks ago, the WF team published up the first four WF3->WF4 migration guidance documents, aimed at helping WF developers prepare and think about the new WF object model runtime.

Today, we published the next three documents in the series to the WF4 Migration Guidance document set. With today’s release, we begin moving from the general guidance and start to present cookbook material, addressing more specific scenarios and presenting code.

  • WF Migration Overview (Already Live)
    Overview of the document collection and an initial starting place for the WF3 developer
  • WF Migration: Best Practices for WF3 Development (Already Live)
    How to design WF3 artifacts so they are more easily migratable to WF4
  • WF Guidance: Rules (Already Live)
    Discussion of how to bring rules-related investments forward into .NET 4
  • WF Guidance: State Machine (Already Live)
    Discussion of WF4 control flow modeling in the absence of a StateMachine activity
  • WF Migration Cookbook: Custom Activities (Now Live!)
    Examples and instructions for redesigning WF3 custom activities on WF4
  • WF Migration Cookbook: Workflows (Now Live!)
    Examples and instructions for redesigning WF3 workflows on WF4
  • WF Migration Cookbook: Workflow Services (Now Live!)
    Examples and instructions for redesigning WF3 workflow services on WF4
  • WF Migration Cookbook: Advanced Custom Activities (Coming Soon)
    Examples and instructions for redesigning advanced WF3 custom activities on WF4

As I mentioned in the last post about the documents, these documents are initial draft releases that the team is releasing to you. For these, they are all written for the object model and features that are part of Beta 1. We will be updating the documents as additional releases of .NET 4 are publicly released, and the documents will address further scenarios with each release.

Also – again – the team will be supporting feedback and requests for the documents and accompanying sample code in the WF 4 forum on MSDN.

Happy reading!
Cliff

Issues with BizTalk 2009 on VS.NET 2008

by | Jul 21, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Hi all

I have been running into too many issues with BizTalk 2009 on VS.NET 2008 lately.
This post is just to mention them and let everyone else know that they are not the
only one – and that they will be reported to MS and hopefully fixed quickly.

Build action of schemas

Some times the “build action” of a schema in your BizTalk project is set
to “None” instead of “BtsCompile”. When this happens, the schema is not compiled into
the assembly and can therefore not be used for pipeline components, maps, orchestration
messages, and so on. It happens if you drag a schema from your explorer into your
project, but it also happens sometimes when you drag a schema between two projects
inside VS.NET.

More build action of schemas

The above error could be more easy to live with, if it weren’t absolutely
impossible to know when the “Build action” property of the schema in visible in VS.NET
– some times the property is visible and you can change the value. Other times it
is not. Quite confusing. I have found that if I add a schema to a project, then the
property is suddenly visible for all schemas in the project. Change the ones that
need changing and delete the schema you added.

Auto save a map before schemas are chosen

When you add a new map then at some point VS.NET auto saves the map, but
if this happens before you have chosen both the source and destination schema you
suddenly get an error, which you really do not expect, because you weren’t doing anything
at the time of the error. This also occurred in previous versions of BizTalk.

Map looses information about schemas

I have seen several times, that even after choosing source- and destination
schema for a map and dragging a couple of links in the map and saving it, then at
compile time, I get an error about the map not having source- and destination schemas.
So I need to choose them again, and redo all the links, because they have magically
disappeared. This happens for maps that uses both schemas from the same project as
schemas from referenced projects.

Output window

The output window seems to not always show all information when compiling/deploying.
Some times the information comes all at the end instead of being written to the output
windows as it happens. Other times, I can rebuild my entire solution and the output
windows will only show me the one warning that occurred during compilation.

Dragging elements in Schema Editor

Dragging elements inside the schema editor has had me baffled since BizTalk
2002. Some times, I need more than 20 tries to get an element to be dragged – and
sometimes it just works. Annoying? Indeed it is!

Copy local fails

If I have a project (P2) that references another project (P1), then after
I have added an item to P1 and recompiled it, everything seems OK. BUT, if I then
deploy from within V.NET, things start to go wrong. From then on, it seems that the
“Copy local” property of the project reference is ignored. Whenever I recompile P2,
I do NOT get the P1.dll copied to the local folder of P2. This causes all sorts of
stuff as also explained here by Ryan: http://dotnet.org.za/ryancrawcour/archive/2009/07/17/biztalk-2009-amp-visual-studio-2008-annoyance-2.aspx

Setting properties for more than one project at the same time

See here: http://dotnet.org.za/ryancrawcour/archive/2009/07/15/biztalk-2009-feature-missing.aspx for
Ryans thoughts on this.

—

eliasen