ESB Toolkit 2.0 Portal 401 Exception

by community-syndication | Feb 25, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I had this exceptionin the Application Event Log after trying to bring up the portal in IE (after a newly installed and configured BizTalk & ESB platform):

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Exception information:
Exception type: WebException
Exception message: The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized.

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I was working in atwo (application) server BizTalk environment but Ionly had this exception on one server. The portal came up fine on the other server.

I looked at IIS log files and found a 401 for /ESB.Exceptions.Service/ExceptionService.svc/GetUserSettings

I browsed to the /ESB.Exceptions.Service/ExceptionService.svc in IE and saw this in the Application Event Log:

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Uhh… I did have that configured:Windows Integrated was turned on and Anonymous was turned off.

The issue was that I did not run the set command for NTAuthenticationProviders (specified in this KB: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/215383)on that server. I had previously ran the set command on the other server in my environment before running the Microsoft.Practices.ESB.UDDIPublisher.exe

Host Integration Server generates a lot of warning in the eventlog

by community-syndication | Feb 25, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

The following warning is often seen on servers running Microsoft Host Integration Server:

Log Name:      Application
Source:        SNA Base Service
Date:          date
Event ID:      561
Task Category: None
Level:         Warning
Keywords:      Classic
User:          user
Computer:      computer
Description:
Write to mailslot or socket failed, rc = 64

 EXPLANATION

 A Win32 WriteFile() or winsock sendto() call failed. The return code is shown.

 ACTION

 Provide network support personnel with the event log file(s) related to SNA, and the return code included in this message. For information about SNA log files, see the “Microsoft Host Integration Server Online Books.

 The warning is caused because Host Integration Server tries to communicate with all the servers in a subdomain (and the clients) via broadcasts messages. Host Integration Server does this over all protocols that are selected in the SNA Manager. Not all of these protocols are enabled on your network, if one of them is not enabled this warning will pop up.

To fix this warning unselect the protocol that causes the warning as shown in this screenshot.

Typically you enable TCP/IP and you disable Named Pipes. After adapting the configuration the warning disappears.

Peter Borremans

WSDL import problem in BizTalk project

by community-syndication | Feb 25, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

When adding a Web reference to a BizTalk project, the following message appears:

There is a problem with the WSDL but you don’t get any extra information.

The cause was this part in the WSDL:

    <port binding=”tns:TestServicePortBinding” name=”TestServicePort”>

            <soap:address location=”REPLACE_WITH_ACTUAL_URL“/>

    </port>

Apparently a BizTalk project can’t handle an invalid location (a Console project doesn’t have any problem with this!).

The problem was solved by putting the filepath of the WSDL in the location attribute.

To find this problem i removed part after part of the WSDL untill the import went fine. It’s a good practice to identify different kinds of WSDL problems.

BizTalk vNext features or WF/WCF vnext features?

by community-syndication | Feb 25, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Look at the next version of BizTalk 2009 R2, coming soon, and then think what else would I like to …

WSCF.blue 1.0.7 supports VS10 RC

by community-syndication | Feb 24, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

WSCF.blue v1.0.7 now supports VS10 RC in addition to VS2008. There are no new features as such although v1.0.6 which we released a short while ago fixes a number of important bugs in data contract generation. Alex , our code-master extraordinaire, blogged about the 1.0.6 release here.
The generated code has not changed (from previous versions) […]

Application Platform Event – Netherlands

by community-syndication | Feb 24, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Haven’t blog for awhile since I am preparing for a session I giving on Monitoring Business Integration Suite (branded for SQL Server, BizTalk Server and MOSS in an integration context). This session will be given during the Dutch Application Platform Event. Will be my second talk I ever done for general public so one way I am quite excited (only time preparing a lot of stuff (demo’s) is hard task to do). Now I am enjoying my holiday currently in Chester (UK) and still cannot stay away from my laptop in the evenings 🙂

Update: Unfortunelty due to family matters and highly visible project within a customer I am working for I was unable to do the presentation. I regret it, but some things had higher priority.

Desktop Virtualization Hour – Coming March 18th

by community-syndication | Feb 23, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

While browsing Microsoft’s Virtualization site, I stumbled across an upcoming event:

Looking at Desktop Virtualization including VDI? Thinking about Windows 7 migration; wants savings, but wondering about ROI?

Join Microsoft, industry experts and IT leaders: Desktop Virtualization Hour, March 18th, 9am PST.

This is all the information they’re sharing with the public at the moment, which normally might indicate a lack of planned content… but considering the fact that they purchased a domain just for this event, http://www.desktopvirtualizationhour.com/, Microsoft is being suspiciously vague about their plans.

I managed to find a ZDNet whitepaper posting from January that has some extra lines of description:

Have more questions than answers on the topic?
…
Watch and interact live with Microsoft, industry experts and IT leaders for a moderated televised discussion. Submit your questions in the hour or in advance.

Does the fact that these lines don’t appear on the event-specific domain mean something? Perhaps they’ve already chosen the questions they’re going to answer, or perhaps the list of experts grew too large to allow viewer participation? We’ll have to wait and see what transpires.

In the mean time, you can study up on VDI in preparation of this event:

• Microsoft’s Virtualized Desktop Products and Technology – Homepage for Microsoft’s VDI solutions
• TechNet video series on VDI deployment (Part 2, Part 3) – Matt McSpirit walks through setting up VDI

BizTalk Server: Handling decimal types with the xpath() Function

by community-syndication | Feb 23, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Last week, I spent some time looking at a problem with a customer’s orchestration. In one place, the developer had made use of the infamous BizTalk xpath() function to assign a value in one messageto a decimal field in another message. He got an error stating that the application is “Unable to cast object of type ‘System.Double’ to type ‘System.Xml.XmlNodeList'”. This is due to a logical error in BizTalk’s code. Read more at http://geekswithblogs.net/cyoung/archive/2010/02/23/biztalk-server-handling-decimal-types-with-the-xpath-function.aspx.

Survey of the .NET Blogosphere

by community-syndication | Feb 23, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Last week I undertook a completely unscientific study of the .NET Blogosphere (as much as I loathe that term), to determine which namespaces and classes people are most excited about, confused by, or frustrated with – at least to the point that they would dedicate the time to write in their blog about them. My methods for undertaking this study were rather simplistic. I wrote a quick and dirty console application to reflect through the .NET Framework namespaces and classes, and search the internet for mentions of them alongside the terms .NET and blog. For classes whose namespaces contained no periods, the full name of the class was used as the search term. For those classes whose namespaces did contain periods, the namespace and name of the class were used as separate search terms. For example, the class System.IO.File would result in a search for “System.IO File .NET blog”, whereas the class System.String would result in a search for “System.String .NET blog”.

More than to just do a popularity contest of the different classes, I wanted to try to determine the best sources of information for each component of the framework. I wanted to see which sites seemed to consistently beat out others as authoritative sources with complete coverage of a given area. In preparation for the transition to .NET 4, I also was interested to see if the features new to .NET 3, and .NET 3.5 received similar coverage to those classes/namespaces that are used in nearly every project created. This final concern will require further testing and analysis before any conclusions can be reached.

What I did find, however, was that (perhaps unsurprisingly considering the methods) those classes/namespaces which one might use more often round out the top 10 result getters:

I was surprised at how strong of a showing the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace had among all other contenders. Another interesting study would be to look into those sites that are represented in the result count and find the ratio of C# to VB code contained within.

When looking only at classes, we find the following in the top 10:

From here it looks like features from .NET 2.0 (List<T>) and .NET 3.0 (System.Windows.Window) have gotten enough traction to make a big splash. Generics have had quite a long time to catch on so that’s not surprising. Features from WPF making the top 10 already is surprising (considering how much longer classes have had to be written about), and in this case may simply come as a result of the search term that the application used, which would split off Window from System.Windows.Window as its own term alongside the rest.

The top 10 sources for information about .NET would appear to be the following:

The number next to the name of the site indicates how many classes/namespaces for which the site is the top result. Further investigation shows that this might be inaccurate since dotnet247 seems to just index the entire framework and aggregate information from other sites in an automated fashion. Sounds like a great way to make some money from ads, but it might not be the best information source (though is still fairly genius). MSDN blogs definitely provide some serious coverage of the .NET Framework, and likely have excellent information about those classes/namespaces for which they were the top results.

Another interesting statistic that came out of this entirely informal study is that 29% of the .NET Framework (3.5) has less than 5 articles of coverage on the internet. In fact there are 389 classes or namespaces that would appear to have nothing written about them at all (according to the semi-flawed methodology described above).

You can use the download link below to download the complete results that contain all of the raw data that was analyzed, as well a pivot table, and some charts that can be used to explore it to some extent. What interesting information can you find? Has anyone else done a more formal survey of the same?

Fast way to count rows in a table

by community-syndication | Feb 22, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I have had to look this query up a few times, so I thought I would write about it here:

USE [DBInstanceName]
GO
SELECT  st.row_count as [Row Count]
FROM sys.dm_db_partition_stats st
WHERE index_id < 2
and OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID)='TableName'