Integrate or Schedule MBV reports

by community-syndication | Oct 19, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Hello BizTalk users !

long time I did not write a post on my MBV blog ! 😉

Indeed, as mentioned in my previous blog I moved one year ago to SharePoint development business assisting my customers in their development around SharePoint, and also debugging and interacting with our SharePoint Product group to push for some hotfixes when needed, and I was very busy with that new job . Another wide product so for me to learn but the same type of challenges than for BizTalk ! 😉

Coming back to MBV blog and this post, I thought it was needed to update more frequently my blog and talk for example today about the way to automate or schedule MBV reports, and also discuss about its possible integration with other products.

Schedule MBV reports

Maybe you don’t know but MBV is provided in two modes : a GUI mode and a console one.

The filename for the GUI application is MsgBoxViewer.exe, just like the name of my tool, and the filename for the Console application is MBVConsole.exe and, as the name implies, represents the console version of MBV tool.

Knowing that the console version starts immediatelty by executing its queries and rules (without so pressing any button or validation process), you can realize that it is easy to spawn or trigger MBV from another tool, or even to schedule MBV to start it periodically using for example the Windows Scheduler or any other scheduler tool.

MBVConsole.exed provides some optional parameters to specify for example the output directory, or if you want also generate .XML file,etc…
Just type “MBVConsole /?” to display the list of possible options.

Let me clarify now the way MBV manages its settings :

MBV is keeping all its settings (global options) and also the list of selected queries and rules in a file named MBVSettings.xml.
Both Console and GUI applications will generate this file on their exit but only the GUI MBV application allows in its UI interface to modify MBV options (listed in the tab “global properties”) and allows to choose the query and rules to execute.
Open that file to give you an idea of the type of properties MBV is keeping there.

Because both the Console version and the GUI one load the same settings file when found in the MBV folder, you can use so GUI application to configure the options and select the queries you want and updating the MBVSettings.xl file, and then MBVConsole can reuse it to run only the queries you selected 😉 just be sure howeever that the MBVSettings.xml file is present in the same folder than MBVConsole.exe so it can find and load it.

As I said above, you can so now start MBV from a parent tool or include MBV execution in some batch file, or even schedule it.

Read for example the interesting blog of Richard Hallgren http://www.richardhallgren.com/receiving-scheduled-msgboxviewer-reports-via-e-mail/ to receive scheduled MBV reports via e-mail. 
At the time Richard wrote his post, MBV console filename was btsdbcollect.exe so you will have to replace it with its new name MBVConsole.exe

Integrate MBV reports

I notice that there is some more and more demand to integrate MBV output (the Warning sections of its html report for example) in other tools.

– If you don’t use already that option, I would like to let you know that MBV offers you the posibility to generate all its warnings in the Application Event log of the server executing MBV, just read one of my previous posts detailing that option :

HOW TO use MBV as a periodic Monitoring tool alerting user of warnings
http://blogs.technet.com/b/jpierauc/archive/2009/03/23/mbv-how-to-use-mbv-as-a-periodic-monitoring-tool-alerting-user-of-warnings.aspx
 

– Using the “Generate XML” global option of MBV, you can ask MBV (in both the GUI and Console Applications) to generate also its reports in .XML format using a specific schema, and you can then develop any parsing tools you want to parse the .XML and produce the output you want in your own tool.
If you want to see now a great example of a such nice integration of MBV reports in another tool, I would personnally recommend to have a look on BizTalk360 product :  http://www.biztalk360.com  and read specially this article from Saravana :

Message Box Viewer – BizTalk360 Integration
htttp://blogs.digitaldeposit.net/saravana/post/2011/10/11/Message-Box-Viewer-BizTalk360-Integration.aspx

Well, I finished that post and I hope that it can help you or give you some idea in some possible MBV integration or MBV automation.

I admit that I did not touch my blog for a while but keep an eye on it as I will inform you there of an upcoming next build of MBV with some additional rules

Thanks !

JP 

Blog Post by: JPAuc

Contest Winners: BizTalk 2010 Line of Business Systems Integration

by community-syndication | Oct 18, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Thanks to all participants and congratulations to: Christophe Brando from France Keng-Chin Lin from Australia Sukesh Shetty from India for winning the BizTalk 2010 Line of Business Systems Integration books from Packet Publishing. Tags: BizTalk | Contest
Blog Post by: Sandro Pereira

BizTalk360 – Trial License

by community-syndication | Oct 18, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

We released BizTalk360 v2.5 about 10 days ago. One thing you may/may not have noticed, we didn’t release the free developer version on the download page. The main reason for that is developer edition requires bit more testing and we couldn’t complete it on time (We are working on it and soon it will be up on the site.).  So, we just released the fully functional enterprise edition, people can download and try.

But we made a mistake, we didn’t give the trial key for users to test, so our support email was bombarded with either request for trial key or people re-registering themselves to get a new key.

Here is the solution

1. If you have downloaded BizTalk360 recently and you still got time left in your license, you can continue to use the same license.

2. If you don’t have a valid license, please use this one which will expiry in 30 days.

tgCAALxmtDtHjcwBkOzaleKkzAE/AGNvbXBhbnk6fGRvbWFpbjp8c3FsSW5zdGFuY2U6fGVkaXRpb246VHJpYWx8bWF4QXBwbGljYXRpb25zOjEwMAH/OEXZI5/9EDtFUbI6f38Wf7f5OCLBEKbON7kUzktUQVSx101ZrAJJ4Fy7AiPNiOsQ

It’s running wide on the screen, but just do a triple click on the text to get the key selected and make sure you copied the full text.

Here is the instruction to update the license

http://support.biztalk360.com/customer/portal/articles/148004-how-to-update-license-key-

Nandri!

Saravana Kumar

http://www.biztalk360.com | http://support.biztalk360.com
@biztalk360 | http://facebook.com/biztalk360  | http://getsatisfaction.com/biztalk360

Azure: How the “Cloud" can help you integrate-we’re doing another session-come along.

by community-syndication | Oct 17, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Blog Post by: Mick Badran

SharePoint 2007 SP2-Turns AUSSIE!!!!

by community-syndication | Oct 17, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

While wrestling with SharePoint 2007 SP2 today, I got a great error message.

“SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wiza” – Wizzzzzaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!
(this sits nicely with Shazza, Mappa, Timmy, Kimmy, and on it goes”)

Now to sort the problem out

Blog Post by: Mick Badran

BtsWcfServicePublishing and support for .net Framework 4

by community-syndication | Oct 17, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I guess you, like me, use the BtsWcfServicePublishing.exe to automate the deployment process for your wcf-hosting needs in BizTalk. If you don’t I think you should, as it saves you a lot of time. For one you don’t have to regenerate your endpoint information using the BtsWcfServicePublishingWizard (note: not the same program as the BtsWcfServicePublishing) and all it’s tedious steps every single time you update a service.

The thing is that when you use the BtsWcfServicePublishing.exe on a BizTalk-assembly built using BizTalk 2010 you get an error like this:

Error publishing WCF service.
Could not load file or assembly 'file:///C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\assembly\GAC_MSIL\' or one of its dependencies. This assembly is built by a runtime newer than the currently loaded runtime and cannot be loaded.

This is due to the fact that the BtsWcfServicePublishing tries to use version 2.0 of the .net framework. To make it work on BizTalk 2010 assemblies add the following info in the configuration file (just under the configuration-tag.

<startup>
   <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" />
</startup>

Just run it again and you’ll be happy as Larry.

Blog Post by: Mikael Sand

BizTalk360 – Next stop Stockholm, Sweden 19th October 2011

by community-syndication | Oct 17, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

We are continuing our world tour following our recent visit to Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark and back to Sweden again.

The details and registration can be found here http://swebug20111019.eventbrite.com/

The agenda for the event is

18:00 A Lap Around BizTalk Adapter Pack, Steef-Jan Wiggers
19:00 Mat, dryck, mingel (I’m guessing it’s break )
19:30 A Lap Around BizTalk 360, Saravana Kumar

Swedish BizTalk user group is one of the successfully operated BizTalk user group in the world.  In the past they have had some of the great speaker and well known figures in the BizTalk community like Richard Seroter, Kent Weare, Charles Young, Darren Jefford, Jon Flanders, Brian Loesgen, Paolo Salvatori, Michael Stephenson and of course the people behind the scene Johan Hedberg and Mikael H?kansson

I’m extremely delighted to have this opportunity to present BizTalk360 in-front of the Swedish audience.

Last but not the least, my close friend Steef-Jan Wiggers, will be presenting a topic on BizTalk Adapter pack. He hinted on his email, he got some really cool scenarios to show the audience.  He is a well known figure in the community for his incredible effort on the BizTalk forums, I believe he is holding his record first position for nearly 2 years now recently crossing 20k forum credits.

See you all in Stockholm. Still there are some tickets left (7 when I last checked), so hurry before it’s gone.

Nandri

Saravana Kumar

Contest: Win a e-copy of the book BizTalk 2010 Line of Business Systems Integration

by community-syndication | Oct 17, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

As I mentioned earlier, I have 3 e-copies of the new BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration to give away, courtesy of Packet Publishing. This book was written by Kent Weare, Carl Darski, Thiago Almeida, Sergei Moukhnitski and Richard Seroter published by Packet Publishing. You can read more about this book here on Packt’s […]
Blog Post by: Sandro Pereira

Sweden Windows Azure Group (SWAG) meeting on Thursday 27th October in Stockholm, "Extending to the Cloud",

by community-syndication | Oct 17, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

5 hours one-to-one chat with Charles Young

by community-syndication | Oct 17, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I’m not going to bore you readers with who Charles Young is, if you are following my blog and you are into BizTalk you’ll know who Charles Young is

From BizTalk360 perspective I wanted to give away few copies of "Microsoft BizTalk Server Unleashed" book to people in the community. To make it special I wanted the book to be signed by some of the authors. Unfortunately except Charles everyone else lives outside UK. If I had the idea before I could have got it signed by Jan Eliasen few weeks ago, when I was in Denmark.

Anyway, this is how it all started, we exchanged few emails, and decided on the date when we are going to meet up. Charles was kind enough to come to our place, I picked him up from the station at 11:30am this morning and went to a coffee shop near by. I was expecting may be an hour or bit more, but when we finished our conversation I looked at the watch it was 16:15.

These things don’t happen often, you sit down with someone like Charles who is really excited and enthusiastic about technology and have a one-to-one chat for nearly 5 hours. I have spoken to him in the past in MVP summits, but nothing to this extend. We had great conversation around so many things, BizTalk, Windows Azure, Amazon, Google, a new term Cloud Service Vendor (CSV), what he thinks is missing on the Azure for CSV’s. Interesting chat about iCloud and the whole rumours around their use of both Windows azure (here and here ) and Amazon S3 for the service.

Quite a bit of talk was around BizTalk and the future directions, problems we face on the enterprise space, and how BizTalk penetrated into that space as a matured product. We discussed a bit about the book and how he structured his chapters in the book.

He thinks the subscription engine we got in BizTalk is just a flavour of rules engine. If you think about it, it’s very true, all it does is evaluates certain rules and matches the subscribers. He also got this great vision of building solutions based on policy driven layered approach. Ex: Subscriptions are bottom layer, static ports are layer above it, dynamic ports are one layer above static ports where you need to provide additional information like address.

Conversation went deep into RulesFest and how people are using rules to solve real world problems that requires artificial intelligence and rule matching like soil analysis for farming.

We also discussed quite a bit about J#, and how death of J# closed the doors for .NET community to have access to the wide matured open source projects like Drools

The interesting part of the conversation was how a failed POC project around 2005, made him interested in the RETE algorithm and rules engine. Only after the POC he realized he was trying to build a forward chaining inference engine with BizTalk orchestrations. If he had known enough about rules engine that time he could have build a much sleeker solution to the problem.

Of course we did have a chat about BizTalk360 and one thing I understood was not everybody got a clear idea of real benefit of BizTalk360 and what problems it’s trying to solve. He was honest to admit, it didn’t strike him first time until a co-worker pointed out the real use case for BizTalk360.  I need to do some work to improve here.

We will soon announce how we are going to give all the signed copies of the book "Microsoft BizTalk Server Unleashed 2010", keep tuned. Follow us on twitter (http://twitter.com/biztalk360) or on facebook (http://facebook.com/biztalk360) to get the latest updates.

Nandri!

Saravana