A couple months ago I wrote a post on how to host WCF services in IIS that expose themselves as endpoints on the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus. The principal challenge in this scenario is that IIS/WAS relies on message-based activation and will only launch the host after the first request comes in. However, until […]
A couple months ago I wrote a post abouta dirty way of aborting a Commerce Server catalog import which involved stopping SQL Server and various other invasive procedures. Tonight I found out there is at least one but maybe twoways ofdoing this, one supported and other basically a hack. First for the supported […]
Here’s an interesting one: I was installing the ESB Toolkit 2.0 on a Win 7 x86 machine the other day, and during install got an error from Visual Studio saying “The operation could not be completed.”:
If you choose OK, the ESB Installer finishes with a success message, but then the Itinerary Designer doesn’t work in Visual Studio (you get an error about a missing assembly when you try and add a new itinerary to a project).
There was nothing…
There are times when a workflow can’t be persisted safely using a SqlWorkflowInstanceStore. The reason isn’t so much saving the state of a workflow to disk, that could be done at any time, but the result when a workflow would be reloaded from disk in that state.
An easy example is a workflow handling a WCF request with a Receive and SendReply activity pair. Suppose you would save the workflow state after the message had been received but before the response had been send. No problem there. Now suppose the workflow is aborted just after the response is send and later the saved state is reloaded. The first action of the reloaded workflow would be to send the response again. But where? The connection is long gone and the client has seen the original response and is happy. Clearly this would fault the workflow again and for that reason the workflow is in a no persist zone starting at the Receive and ending at the SendReply activity.
But wait. The SendReply activity has a property named PersistBeforeSend, surely that means it will be persisted before the reply is send? Actually it doesn’t and it persists after the response has been send. So the property name is wrong? Not quite, although I believe it is poorly named, as the Persist activity is actually scheduled just before the response is send. But due to the asynchronous nature of workflow execution it doesn’t execute until after the response has actually been send and we are at a point where it would be save to reload the workflow.
So what happens of you try to persist a workflow in a no persist zone? You will get an exception with the following message:
Persist activities cannot be contained within no persistence blocks.
In this case all I did was drop a Persist activity between a Receive and SendReply activity pair, I didn’t even add or configure the SqlWorkflowInstanceStore itself.
Checking for a no persist zone
So how can we check if we are currently in a no persist zone? It turns out the NativeActivityContext has a property called IsInNoPersistScope that will tell us that, unfortunately the property is internal so we can’t use it [:(].
Turns out that duplicating this behavior is quite easy though. Whenever a no persist zone is started a NoPersistProperty is created and stored in the NativeActivityContext Properties collection. The NoPersistProperty is also internal but that is no problem as all we need to do if check if there is a object stored under the name "System.Activities.NoPersistProperty", something we can do with the following activity:
public class CheckForNoPersistZone : NativeActivity
{
public OutArgument<bool> IsInNoPersistScope { get; set; }
protected override void Execute(NativeActivityContext context)
{
var prop = context.Properties.Find("System.Activities.NoPersistProperty");
IsInNoPersistScope.Set(context, prop != null);
}
}
Creating our own no persist zones
Sometimes it might be required to stop a workflow from persisting and we can do so by creating our own no persist zone. There is no standard activity to do so but creating a pair of activities to do so isn’t hard. The basic building blocks are a NoPersistHandle and calling Enter() and Exit() on it to start and end the no persist zone. This could easily be done through a composite activity or through two separate activities. In the code below I have chosen for the approach with a single composite activities.
public class NoPersistZone : NativeActivity
{
private Variable<NoPersistHandle> NoPersistHandle { get; set; }
[RequiredArgument]
public Activity Body { get; set; }
protected override void CacheMetadata(NativeActivityMetadata metadata)
{
NoPersistHandle = new Variable<NoPersistHandle>();
metadata.AddImplementationVariable(NoPersistHandle);
base.CacheMetadata(metadata);
}
protected override void Execute(NativeActivityContext context)
{
var noPersistHandle = NoPersistHandle.Get(context);
noPersistHandle.Enter(context);
context.ScheduleActivity(Body, OnCompleted);
}
private void OnCompleted(NativeActivityContext context, ActivityInstance completedInstance)
{
var noPersistHandle = NoPersistHandle.Get(context);
noPersistHandle.Exit(context);
}
}
Another nice activity to have for a generic toolbox.
Enjoy!
www.TheProblemSolver.nl
Wiki.WindowsWorkflowFoundation.eu
I have been reading through BizTalk 2010 Technical Review and noticed that a few things have been changed in BizTalk 2010 compared to current 2009 version. SQL Adapter has been removed and one should now turn to WCF-SQL Adapter that is a part of BizTalk Adapter Pack 2.0. Although in my BizTalk Server 2010 Beta environment on VPC, I still see the SQL Adapter.
In forums I notice still a lot of people use the standard out-of-the box SQL Adapter and they will have to make the shift towards WCF-SQL Adapter in future.For anyone who likes wants to learn more, the article on Packt Publishing by Richard Seroter called New SOA Capabilities in BizTalk Server 2009: WCF SQL Server Adapter is a good starting point and as a follow up my previous post WCF-SQL Table Operations discusses how to set it up the adapter and how CRUD operations on tables in SQL Server work.
Another change is that BizTalk Explorer tool in Visual Studio 2010 is not available for BizTalk Server 2010. Any administrative task you as an administrator of developer wants to do with a Graphical UI is BizTalk Server Administration Console. I think a lot of people stop using this feature in 2006 as Administrative Console came available.
In the Administration console you will also find the BizTalk Server Settings Dashboard, and this is a new feature. Performance settings previously managed through the registry and other locations, are now been centralized in this dashboard. To manage settings (i.e. performance) for the group, hosts, and host instances, you can now use this dashboard. These settings control throttling, thresholds and other runtime parameters in a single location and all settings can be exported and imported to move them between environments. Thiago has written an excellent post on this called BizTalk Server 2010 Beta: Settings Dashboard and Latency control per host.
Cheers.
Technorati: biztalk biztalk server 2010
I had an XSLT style sheet that used a C# method to return a multi line string. I wanted it to include the HTML <BR></BR> tag ad specific places within the string but not as literals. After some searching around I found that instead of trying to get the <BR></BR> tag to not be literal, I could simply use the <pre></pre> tag within my HTML and it would force it to recognize the “/r/n” returned from the C# method.
I needed to find the total purchase order amount given the quantity and line item price on an X12 850 using XSLT and .NET to transform XML into HTML.
In my case:
PO102 = Quantity
PO104 = Price
Add the following to the stylesheet declaration:
xmlns:msxsl=”urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt”
for example:
<xsl:stylesheet version=”1.0″ xmlns:xsl=”http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform” xmlns:ns0=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/EDI/X12/2006″ xmlns:msxsl=”urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt” xmlns:var=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/var” exclude-result-prefixes=”msxsl var userCSharp” xmlns:userCSharp=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/userCSharp>”>
In your XSLT use the following code, modifying the referenced node and element within your XML
<xsl:variable name=”tmpTotal”>
<total_amount>
<xsl:for-each select=”ns0:PO1Loop1″>
<item>
<xsl:value-of select=”ns0:PO1/PO102 * ns0:PO1/PO104“/>
</item>
</xsl:for-each>
</total_amount>
</xsl:variable>
<total>
<!–<xsl:variable name=”myTotal” select=”msxsl:node-set($tmpTotal)”/>–>
<xsl:variable name=”myTotal” select=”$tmpTotal”/>
<xsl:value-of select=”sum(msxsl:node-set($myTotal)/total_amount/item)” />
</total>
[Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman]
Web.config transformation is a simple and powerful inclusion in .NET 4.0 for generating configuration files for different environments. It’s a templated match-and replace, and you can put together a homegrown alternative with T4 and some scripting, but the integrated experience is better. It’s limited to web.config in Visual Studio, but with a simple MSBuild target you can leverage it for any config file.
The transform is based on your VS.NET solution configurations, so you can start by replacing the standard “Debug” and “Release” builds with custom configurations to suit your environment. Then run “Add config transformations” by right-clicking the web.config file and VS will generate stub files for each type of build:
The original Web.config file is the source file, and the .DEV, .TEST and .PROD versions are the transform files which contain the overrides needed for each environment. So your Web.config may define a database connection:
Normal
0
false
false
false
EN-US
X-NONE
X-NONE
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin-top:0cm;
mso-para-margin-right:0cm;
mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt;
mso-para-margin-left:0cm;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:”Calibri”,”sans-serif”;
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-bidi-font-family:”Times New Roman”;
mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}
<connectionStrings>
<add name=“db1“
connectionString=” “
providerName=“System.Data.SqlClient“ />
</connectionStrings>
– and in Web.DEV.config you provide the connection string for the development environment and specify a matching pattern. In this case specify to match on the name attribute of the element, and all the other attributes you provide will replace those in the source (there are more complex transformations available):
Normal
0
false
false
false
EN-US
X-NONE
X-NONE
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin-top:0cm;
mso-para-margin-right:0cm;
mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt;
mso-para-margin-left:0cm;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:”Calibri”,”sans-serif”;
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-bidi-font-family:”Times New Roman”;
mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}
<connectionStrings>
<add name=“db1“
connectionString=“Data Source=.\SQLEXPRESS;Initiali Catalog=xyz;Integrated Security=SSPI;“
xdt:Transform=“SetAttributes“ xdt:Locator=“Match(name)“/>
</connectionStrings>
Switch to the DEV build type, right-click the web project and select “Build Deployment Package” to generate a config file for dev which contains the transformed node with the connectionString attribute from the transform file and the providerName attribute from the source file:
Normal
0
false
false
false
EN-US
X-NONE
X-NONE
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin-top:0cm;
mso-para-margin-right:0cm;
mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt;
mso-para-margin-left:0cm;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:”Calibri”,”sans-serif”;
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-bidi-font-family:”Times New Roman”;
mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}
<connectionStrings>
<add name=“db1“
connectionString=“Data Source=.\SQLEXPRESS;Initiali Catalog=xyz;Integrated Security=SSPI;“
providerName=“System.Data.SqlClient“ />
</connectionStrings>
All straightforward, and the deployment package VS builds is used with the WebDeploy tool, and makes it all very simple. The actual config file will be created in obj\<Configuration>\TransformWebConfig\transformed. You can get the same result from MSBuild by building the solution file with the property DeployOnBuild=True.
The actual transform logic is all in the TransformXml MSBuild task from Microsoft.Web.Publishing.Tasks.dll. So you can utilise the same functionality for generating any config file with a simple MSBuild script:
Normal
0
false
false
false
EN-US
X-NONE
X-NONE
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin-top:0cm;
mso-para-margin-right:0cm;
mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt;
mso-para-margin-left:0cm;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:”Calibri”,”sans-serif”;
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-bidi-font-family:”Times New Roman”;
mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}
<UsingTask TaskName=“TransformXml“ AssemblyFile=“bin\Microsoft.Web.Publishing.Tasks.dll“/>
<Target Name=“GenerateConfigs“>
<MakeDir Directories=“$(BuildOutput)“ Condition=“!Exists(‘$(BuildOutput)’)“/>
<TransformXml Source=“BTSNTSvc.exe.config“
Transform=“BTSNTSvc.exe.$(Configuration).config“
Destination=“$(BuildOutput)\BTSNTSvc.exe.config“/>
</Target>
You’ll have to manually create the source and transform files for each environment, but you can maintain the naming convention so the pattern is consistent across your Web projects and other config targets. One thing the transform doesn’t do is render the runtime value of MSBuild properties – so if you want to include the build version number in an attribute of the config file, then you’ll need a custom step before calling TransformXml to parse the property values.
For application config files you can have this step in your build prior to creating MSIs, so that the MSI has the correct config values when deployed. For external configs – if you need to populate say machine.config or BTSNTSvc.exe.config – you can create the configs in the build and have a manual deploy step to overwrite the files, or if you’re brave you could create an MSI which just contains the config files and overwrites the targets on install.
Note that Microsoft.Web.Publishing.Tasks.dll is part of VS 2010 and not part of MSBuild (default install location: C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\Web), so you will need to be licenced to use the assembly on your build server.
This is an excellent way to centralise all your environment variables in source control along with the project code, and removes the risk of manual config updates as part of deployment.
I needed to count all of the rows in an entire database.
I looked around and came up with a pretty easy way to do this.
Create this stored procedure and when you run it, it will display it for you.
create proc AllTableCount AS BEGIN /*Create temp table to populate the row counts for all of the tables*/ CREATE TABLE #TableRowCount( TableName sysname, [RowCount] int) /*Now actually get the counts*/ EXEC sp_MSforeachtable 'INSERT #TableRowCount (TableName,[RowCount]) SELECT ''?'',Count(*) from ?' /*Finally: sum up all of the counts and show it*/ Select SUM([RowCount]) as [Total Number Of Rows From Database] from #TableRowCount END