Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 has been released

by | Sep 24, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Yesterday, another milestone has been reached in the rich history of BizTalk Server.  The latest version, BizTalk Server 2010, RTM’ed.  The version will be available for purchasing as from October 1.

Today it is already possible to start developing on the 2010 release, because the developer edition is now free and available for download here.

CODit congratulates the product team with this release that looks very stable and has some interesting new features.  We participated successfully in the BizTalk Server 2010 TAP program, where we used the BizTalk Server 2010 beta version to work out a full TFS-integrated project lifecycle, including build-automation, automated testing, scrum-methodology 

A full article on all new features can be found on the BizTalk Server Team Blog.

A very interesting feature that we blogged about was the integration between AppFabric and BizTalk Server with the Mapper and the LOB Activities.  These blog posts can be found here:

  • Using the LOB activity in AppFabric workflows
  • Using the BizTalk mapper activity in AppFabric workflows.

Sam Vanhoutte, CODit

BizTalk Server 2010 Released to Manufacturing!

by | Sep 23, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

The BizTalk team announced today that the latest version of BizTalk Server, BizTalk Server 2010, has been released to manufacturing. It will be available for purchase starting October 1 2010.

The Developer and Evaluation Editions are available effective today at the links below.

For those of you that were working with the public beta, your results may vary, but I was able to do an in-place upgrade from the BETA to the RTM with no issues at all, all BizTalk applications/settings/artifacts/BAM/etc were maintained. Nice!

 

The Developer Edition (which is now FREE) download is available here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=938102b8-a677-4c20-906d-f6ae472b3a6a&displaylang=en

 

The Evaluation Edition download is available here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=8b1069cf-202b-462b-8d10-bec65d315c65

 

I won’t re-hash what the team said, you can read *all* about the new release at the official BizTalk team blog post here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/biztalk_server_team_blog/archive/2010/09/22/biztalk-server-2010-released-for-manufacturing.aspx

 

Summary by Charles Young, one of my co-authors on BizTalk Server 2010 Unleashed, is here.

http://geekswithblogs.net/cyoung/archive/2010/09/23/biztalk-server-2010-rtm.aspx

BizTalk Server 2010 RTM

by | Sep 23, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

The BizTalk Server team announced today that BizTalk Server 2010 has RTMd.That’s a relief, as my reputation was on the line regarding RTM before the end of the month. Just this Tuesday I confidently told a prospective customer to expect an imminent announcement.
I’ve been playing with BTS 2010 for a little while now.It has been my constant companion while writing several chapters for the forthcoming BizTalk Server 2010 Unleashed.It looks great.As well as bringing BTS up to date with Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2, it introduces some welcome improvements.First and foremost, for developers, is a re-worked mapper.A decade ago, the mapper was the ‘killer app’ (as Clemens Vasters put it at the time) that sold BTS 2000 licences. A lot has changed since then, but the mapper, although much copied over the years, remains a vital part of BizTalk tooling.The new version is head and shoulders over the previous version and, frankly, over much of the competition as well.In the last few days, I’ve constructed a couple of medium-complexity maps in BTS 2009.I really, really wished I was using BTS 2010.Even though the maps were not by any means the biggest and ugliest I have worked on, things would still have been much easier with the new version.Better still, you can use the new mapper in conjunction with WCF/WF workflow services in .NET 4 (under the beta, you had to have AppFabric installed – I haven’t tested this yet on the RTM version).It’s a great indication of how, as time goes on, BizTalk Server is supporting and extending WCF/WF to an ever-greater degree. There is much more water to flow under this particular bridge.
One more point about the mapper. It seems the hilariously named ‘Suggestive Match’ feature in the beta (wink, wink) has been renamed ‘Predictive Match’. They are a bunch of killjoys over there in Redmond, but I suppose double entrendres have no place in enterprise-level platforms.
The Trading Partner Management features have had a welcome makeover.Some of us older folk remember how BTS began life as the Commerce Interchange Pipeline (CIP) in Microsoft Site Server (ah, what a trip down memory lane!).BizTalk Server was originally conceived principally as a B2B product and has always had some TPM features.Over the years these have languished.BTS has excellent support for EDI standards (EDIFACT, X12 and AS2), but the TPM was relatively poor. That has changed in BTS 2010 with the introduction of a completely reworked model with new support for agreement templating and onboarding as well as new models for centralised management of identities, message types, validation, etc.
There are new features to please the operations guys who have to maintain BTS, including a new improved SCOM management pack, new rapid tuning features and data compression for backups.RFID Server has also been extended with a number of new event handlers and other features.
Looking through the official announcement, I am clearly going to have to revisit some of the adapter content I’ve recently been writing for BizTalk Server 2010 Unleashed. When looking at the beta, I discovered the SSL extensions to the existing FTP adapter, but MS keep on talking about a new FTPS adapter as if it is a separate item. This is currently confusing me.They also talk about new features of the File adapter which I didn’t discover in the beta.The beta documentation clearly stated that the old SQL Server adapter has been removed from the product, but it was still there in the beta.I will be interested to see if it is in the RTM version.If it is, I understand that it will not be supported.The old SOAP adapter, I believe, retains its deprecated status but is still supported.This caused me some pain earlier this year when we discovered that a customer, new to BizTalk Server, needed to integrate with a central system via web services written in an older version of Apache Axis. Axis used to use RPC/Encoded as the default SOAP style, and I had to explain to the customer that, having spent all that money on a bright shiny new integration server, the only way it could support this part of the SOAP specification was through a deprecated adapter.The WCF adapters have no support for RPC.Also, publishing ASMX web services via BizTalk with RPC support is not handled well. You have to make changes to the code generated by the publishing wizard to get everything working as required.<rant>For BizTalk Server to fail to provide good support for a major, if unfashionable, part of the SOAP spec, and to only support RPC via a deprecated adapter verges on the incredible.In the rush to adopt pristine-pure WCF, there is always the fear that Microsoft could lose sight of the whole purpose of BizTalk Server and the value proposition it offers to companies.It is an integration server.It is there to cope with mess and confusion, mediocre and bad practice, delinquent systemsand ancient protocols.Supporting things like RPC is what makes the cost of the license worthwhile.</rant>
I can’t yet comment on the stability of the development tools in BTS 2010. I haven’t experienced any major problems with the BTS 2010 beta, but I’ve yet to do any serious development in the new version. BTS 2009 dev tools were delivered in a poor, sometimes barely usable, state although subsequent hotfixes improved things significantly.The biggest issue in BTS 2009 remains the poor handling of references amongst multiple BizTalk projects.There were other problems as well.On my current project, I’ve been struggling just today with very peculiar and wrong behaviour when deploying a small cluster of BizTalk projects to a single application. I really hope that some headway has been made on these issues in BTS 2010 as they are an open sore in this otherwise excellent, stable and mature product.
So, welcome to BTS 2010, and congratulations to Microsoft on getting this version out of the door in the stated timeframe. Keep up the good work.

Windows Server AppFabric How-To: Adding multiple persistence stores to an AppFabric installation

by | Sep 23, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Yesterday someone contacted me in regards to adding a secondary persistence store to their AppFabric installation – they were trying to configure the environment so that workflow service A persists its instances to Store A, while workflow service B persists to Store B. Simple enough, right? Well, I realized that there was no documentation on how exactly to achieve this configuration. So, here you go

Manual registration of additional persistence stores

  1. The first step of course, is to physically create and initialize a persistence database. Start the Configure AppFabric wizard, and select next to go to the Hosting Services config page. Tick the Set persistence configuration checkbox, select sqlStoreProvider as the Persistence provider, and click the Configure button:

  2. In the Persistence Store Configuration window, tick the Initialize persistence store checkbox, specify the Server and Database names for the new persistence database, and then click OK:

    Note: Do no tick the “Register AppFabric persistence store in root web.config” checkbox – we will add the required entries manually.

  3. Now, if you open your root web.config, towards the end of the file you will find a section that “declares” the instance stores that AppFabric knows about. Here’s an extract with the default config from my machine:

  4. To declare a new persistence store, you should create another <add> element under <instanceStores>. Note that you will also need to define a corresponding connection string under the <connectionStrings> element a bit further down in the file. Your modified web.config file should look similar to:

  5. Save the file. You now have a second persistence store that you can use for your workflow services.

Scripted Version

To perform the above tasks you can also use the AppFabric PowerShell cmdlets as follows:

  1. Start a PowerShell cmd window with elevated privileges and import the AppFabric management module:

    import-module ApplicationServer

  2. Create and initialize a new persistence database using the Initialize-ASPersistenceSqlDatabase cmdlet:

    Initialize-ASPersistenceSqlDatabase -Database “NewDB” -Server “NewDBServer\SQLEXPRESS” -Admins “Domain\AppServerAdmins” -Readers “DOMAIN\AppServerReaders” -Users “DOMAIN\AppServerUsers”

    Note: The user groups you specify for the -Admins, -Readers, and -Users parameters will be specific to your environment

  3. Use the Add-ASAppSqlInstanceStore cmdlet to register the persistence store in the root web.config file:

    Add-ASAppSqlInstanceStore -Name secondarySqlPersistenceStore -ConnectionString “Data Source=sqlServerName2\SQLEXPRESS;Initial Catalog=NewDB;Integrated Security=True” -root

Here is the copy/paste-ready script:

import-module ApplicationServer
Initialize-ASPersistenceSqlDatabase -Database “NewDB” -Server “NewDBServer\SQLEXPRESS” -Admins “Domain\AppServerAdmins” -Readers “DOMAIN\AppServerReaders” -Users “DOMAIN\AppServerUsers”
add-ASAppSqlInstanceStore -Name secondarySqlPersistenceStore -ConnectionString “Data Source=sqlServerName2\SQLEXPRESS;Initial Catalog=NewDB;Integrated Security=True” -root

Final notes

The above steps register the new persistence store at the root level (through the root web.config file). This means that the new store will be available for use by all AppFabric applications running on machine. You may also choose to add a persistence store at a specific scope in the IIS application hierarchy. For the scripted version, the only difference will be in the parameters passed to the cmdlet in step 3 – the full list of parameters for the cmdlet is available on its documentation page.

BizTalk 2010 Developer is available

BizTalk 2010 Developer is available

by | Sep 23, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

image

During European BizTalk Conference we were told BizTalk 2010 was going to be released before end of September and moment has come. It offers a developer edition, which can be downloaded. BizTalk Server 2010 Developer is a free edition of BizTalk Server that enables developers to build and test applications that run on BizTalk Server on both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms.  BizTalk Server 2010 Developer includes all of the functionality of Enterprise Edition, but is licensed only for development, test, and demo use.  Solutions from BizTalk Server 2010 Developer Edition can easily be packaged and deployed to a production environment that is configured with any other edition of BizTalk Server 2010.

Besides that BizTalk Server 2010 introduces a new feature “AppFabric Connect”, which combines rich proven features of BizTalk Server and the flexible development experience of .NET to allow users to easily develop simple integration applications (See Installing the BizTalk Server 2010 AppFabric Connect feature). AppFabric Connect uses Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) activities to programmatically access BizTalk’s LOB connectivity and data transformation capabilities. This enables users to easily create new composite applications using the WF model, which can be deployed, hosted, managed in Windows Server AppFabric.

You as developer can setup an environment using virtualization (VM-ware, VPC, Hyper-V or Virtual Box), Visual Studio 2010, BizTalk Server 2010 Developer, SQL Server 2008 Developer and Windows Server AppFabric. Not just that cause you could add Windows Azure SDK to it and you can start building all kinds of state of the art applications.

Cheers!

Technorati: biztalk server 2010 appfabric

RIP Quadrant. Adios, SSM Repository.

by | Sep 23, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

So it’s official.Kraig Brockschmidt has blogged an update on SQL Server Modelling.As widely rumoured, he has confirmed that Quadrant is dead. The shock is that the model repository has expired as well.
M is still hanging on in there, but we don’t know anything more about what the future holds. For some time, the official word has been that it would arrive in conjunction with a future SQL Server release.I detect a possible change here, in that Kraig simply says ‘We are continuing our investment in this technology and will share our plans for productization once they are concrete’. For my part, I maintain that tying ‘M’ to the SQL Server licence would be a really bad move.I know that every time Doug Purdy (who has recently left Microsoft to join Facebook) was challenged on this, he kept saying…no, SQL Server is a platform, not a product…watch this space. However, in the next breath it certainly sounded as if ‘M’ was in danger of being subsumed under a product license.No, no, no.Set it free to be used across Microsoft’s platform. That platform is not SQL Server. It remains Windows, and for developers, it is Windows (on-premises and cloud) mediated through .NET.

MsgBoxViewer 11 – Compatible for BizTalk 2010

MsgBoxViewer 11 – Compatible for BizTalk 2010

by | Sep 23, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Hello

A long time I did not update my blog to announce a new version of my tool !  🙂

One of the reason is that I just changed of business to become an Escalation Engineer in SharePoint Developement Support; a lot of work and topics to learn in perspective so but I wanted to enlarge my skills set.
I change of business but I still continue to have an eye on BizTalk of course 🙂

I also spent some time these past months with my former BizTalk colleagues to try to identify  a process and people responsible for futur MBV updates, and help for quick and easy next updates of MBV.
I had so to change the MBV architecture and redesign completly my tool MBVQueryBuilder to make the query or rules update a task much more easy.
Next MBV updates might be done so mainly by the Biztalk Support team with my contribution.

Finaly I spent time to  update MBV to make it compatible for BizTalk 2010 (the Class Settings query reported indeed wrong changes for example) and this is this new version that I put here

This version  brings also two major changes :

 
1) MBV is compiled now to target .NET 2

You can ask yourself why MV was targeting until now only .NET 1.x ?? it is for the simple reason that MBV remained always compatible for BizTalk 2004 and that it should be able to run on BizTalk Server 2004 Servers where only .NET 1.x could be installed

This change means so that it can not run anymore on a BT 2004 box with ONLY .NET 1.X installed, but honestly do we meet frequently such configs now  ? 🙂  and anyway you know that you can run MBV on any type of Servers and not only BT ones
 
 
2) MBV is not anymore a single .EXE but it is composed now of the following files:

o   MYHC.DLL : Implement my custom Health Check engine

o   MYHCQUERIES_MBVQUERIES.DLL : Contains the entire MBV repository and custom Query functions to analyze a BizTalk Group      

o   MSGBOXVIEWER.EXE : GUI MBV Client tool

o   MBVCONSOLE.EXE : Console MBV Client tool

 
Reasons for this split are mainly the following ones:

o   Query repository grow too quickly, need so to separate it from the clients .exe
o   Health Check engine should be updated w/o the client tools using it
o   Need to update easily MBV Repository w/o recompiling the client tools
o   As MBV is just a client tool of my generic health Check engine, it can load any type of Query repository (DLL or XML) and not only the BizTalk one
 
You have the right to prefer the single binary version so in this case I can only suggest you to keep using  the old build 🙂 but you will not benefit of additional rules and queries

you can find this new version  here :

http://blogs.technet.com/b/jpierauc/archive/2007/12/18/msgboxviewer.aspx

 

As usual, feel free to report in this blog your feedbacks on the tool, your suggestions for new features or improvements, and any kind of problems you could meet using MBV

and many thanks to all of you who already sent me good feedbacks  ! 😉

 

JP

 

New Features :


–          Compatible for incoming BizTalk 2010
–          Add additional query to get retrieve part of Biztalk 2010 Dashboard Settings
–          Detect if CU3 is installed on each BT Server
–          Get Perfmon counters for ALL BT Servers (and not only the local server)
–          Get Perfmon counters for MsgBox Db SQL Servers (SQL General statisitcs, SQL locks, SQL Databases)
–          Add order delivery and other port settings in the “Send ports” query
–          Add query to get custom settings of each Send Port: Not checked by default
–          Add query to get custom settings of each Receive Location: Not checked by default
–          Check for small or default value in WCF ReceiveTimeout  binding property
–          Check for MQS port configured w/o Tx
–          Check for WMI prop “ClearAfter” too large value : Error CLSID_PropertBag
–          Format better BAM config info report output
–          Added Latest new MSDTC /COM+ packages version info
–          Get Last X rows from Spool and Instances  tables : rows number is configurable as a query property
–          Raise a warning in MBV if the CustomSD key is found under HKLM\System\Current Control Set\Services\Eventlog\Application
–          Rule to check for KB  980560
–          Rule to  check for KB  979709
–          Rule to check for KB  979095
–          Add more info in the “BizTalk Group” category of the SUMMARY REPORT section
–          Improved query to get sucessfully all GAC assemblies
–          Updated  Latest BT Mgmt Pack version check
–          Get Pipeline ID in Pipeline Query Report
–          Get the Transport Type used in “WCF Custom” port
–          Redesigned the DialogBox UI to add custom Rules and be able to raise different type of actions
–          Redesigned the main dialogbox of MsgBoxViewer.exe (gui version)

BizTalk Server 2010 Documentation – Beta and Posters

by | Sep 23, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

BizTalk Server 2010 Documentation – Beta is available through Microsoft Download Center. Here you will find documents like:

  • BizTalkServer2010.exe
  • BizTalkServer2010HXS.exe
  • Installing BizTalk Server 2010 and BAM in a Multi-Computer Environment.docx
  • Installing BizTalk Server 2010 on Windows 7 and Windows Vista.docx
  • Installing BizTalk Server 2010 on Windows Server 2008 R2 and 2008.docx
  • KWUserGuide.exe
  • PartyMigrationTool.exe
  • Troubleshooting BizTalk Server 2010 Setup.docx
  • Upgrading to BizTalk Server 2010 from BizTalk Server 2009 or 2006 R2.docx

Besides the documentation a new set of posters is available:

  • BizTalk Server 2010 BAM Poster
    This poster describes BizTalk Server 2010 BAM concepts, processes, and management for both new and experienced users.
  • BizTalk Server 2010 Runtime Architecture Poster
    The poster depicts message flow, data flow, and references that occur at runtime in BizTalk Server 2010.
  • BizTalk Server 2010 Capabilities Poster
    The poster provides a high-level and detailed view of BizTalk Server 2010 features and capabilities.
  • BizTalk Server 2010 Scale-out Configurations Poster
    This poster describes typical scale-out configurations and options for BizTalk Server 2010.
  • BizTalk Server 2010 ESB Toolkit Architecture Poster
    This interactive poster, created in Silverlight, depicts the architecture of the BizTalk Server 2010 ESB Toolkit. It shows the toolkit’s core components, and how these integrate with BizTalk Server.
  • BizTalk Server 2010 Database Infrastructure Poster
    This poster describes BizTalk Server 2010 databases and associated components, jobs, services, UI, and events.

Cheers.

Technorati: biztalk biztalk server 2010