Simpler, Smoother, Smarter

by community-syndication | Oct 15, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

We (Enfo) had an internal image contest on the above theme. Unfortunately the images that you could enter was supposed to be of yourself at arms length showing your face. Since I couldn’t quite imagine how I could make myself express those three things by simple face expression I took another picture. And since it wont make the image contest I am instead posting it here.

I am no graphical designer, though at times I could fool a few, but hail Powerpoint as far as my image processing skills go 😉

Blog Post by: Johan Hedberg

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

by community-syndication | Oct 14, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I have 3 e-copies of the new BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration to be raffled away, courtesy of Packet Publishing. To be fair and impartial to all my readers, since they are spread all over the world with different time zones, I decided to make a pre-announcement of the contest so everyone has […]
Blog Post by: Sandro Pereira

End-to-end WCF code coverage with PowerShell

by community-syndication | Oct 14, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I’m a big fan of automated testing which actually proves something. Unit tests may prove all the components in a solution work independently, but that doesn’t mean you have a working solution. Integration tests give you confidence in the whole solution, but the cost of having a test suite with a lot of external dependencies is the risk of false build failures and long-running test suites.

To get something in between, we have acceptance tests written in SpecFlow which run tests at the highest layer – targeting WCFservices which are the external entry point to our solution. Michael Stephenson has blogged and given sessions on the power of BDDfor unifying a project team’s understanding of a feature, and being able to get code coverage based on features proves the solution works as expected through all scenarios. Acceptance tests use stubs for any external dependencies, so they run quickly and allow us to confidently assert that our solution works, provided the dependencies work as expected.

Getting coverage for a whole stack of .NET code running beneath the WCFlayer is trickier than you might expect. There’s no VS or MSBuild functionality for it, and you need todig down tovsinstr and vspercmd.I’ve made it all as simple as possible with a generic PowerShell script you can call locally during development, and which runs as part of the MSBuild scripts on the server.

The script is on poshcode here: PowerShell script for running WCF code coverage against IIS.

Technically the script can be used to get coverage on any process which is hosted in IIS. The bulk of the work is done in functions in the script, the main block requires you to specify values for your own solution:

#————–

# Script begins

#————–

#instrument assemblies:

# – instrument assembly so ALL namespaces are included in coverage

instrument

“x.y.z.Services.dll”


# – instrument assembly so anything from the Ignore1 and Ignore2 namespaces are excluded from coverage

instrument

“x.y.z.Core.dll”

‘x.y.z.Core.Ignore1.*’
,
‘x.y.z.Core.Ignore2.*’




#instrument W3WP, run tests & export results:

start-instrumentation

&

‘C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\msbuild.exe’

Build.proj

/t:$msBuildTarget

/p:ConfigurationName=$configurationName

stop-instrumentation

export-coverage

#————

# Script ends

#————

The sections highlighted in blue above need to be replaced with your own values:

• 
  
  
  solutionFriendlyName – just a friendly name which is used in logging output
  
  
• 
  
  
  wakeUpServiceUrl – any URL which is part of your solution. The script hits the URLto start an app pool which is can instrument for code coverage. Can be anything which fires up the worker process – .svc, .aspx etc.;
  
  
• 
  
  
  appPoolName – the name of the app pool your solution runs under. Ideally have a dedicated app pool as the covergae run stops and starts it, so if it’s dedicated to the solution you won’t impact anything else;
  
  
• 
  
  
  appPoolIdentity – the service account the app pool runs under. Used in setting up instrumentation;
  
  
• 
  
  
  websiteBinDirectory – path to the binaries you want to be instrumented, where the IIS site is running;
  
  
• 
  
  
  coverageOutputPath – specify what the coverage file will be called. Should have the .coverage extension;
  
  
• 
  
  instrument – add a line for every assembly you want to instrument. If the assembly contains just your code, you only need to name the assembly. If it contains generated code you don’t want included (e.g. service reference or EF model code), specify each namespace to exclude after the assembly name. Syntax is important here – each namespace should be fully-specified up to the wildcard, quoted in single quotes, and multiple namespaces are comma-separated.
  
  

The script has some expectations which mean hardcoded values in the functions, so if your environment is different you’ll need to look at those:

• running on Windows Server (expects to instrument W3WP.exe)
• VS2010 installed at default path
• .NET4 installed

In our build scripts, we have one target to run the tests, and another to run the tests with coverage. The PowerShell script calls back into the original MSBuild script to run the unit tests, so to incorporate the script into your build you need a target like this:

– passing the script the name of the MSBuild target to run to execute the tests.

The output from the script is a .coverage file which you can load into VS(note that if you rebuild after running coverage, the assemblies will not be instrumented and the coverage won’t load correctly), and an XML export of the coverage (which you can roll up in your build scripts, or load into VS).

Leonard Lobel Awarded Microsoft MVP for SQL Server!

by community-syndication | Oct 13, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

This month, Microsoft awarded 143 exceptional technical community leaders with the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) title and re-awarded 764 MVPs worldwide. Tallan is thrilled to announce that Lenni Lobel has been recognized as an MVP in SQL Server!
According to the Microsoft MVP Award Program Blog, there are more than 100 million social and technical community […]
Blog Post by: milyevsky

BizTalk User Group Sweden : My debut as International Speaker

by community-syndication | Oct 13, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Next week a new BizTalk User Group Meeting in Sweden is scheduled with two sessions:

• A Lap Around BizTalk Adapter Pack
• A Lap Around BizTalk360

The first session will be done by me and it will be first time I will do a session in English in another country. The other session is done by Saravana on BizTalk360. It will be second time both me and Saravana will share the same stage. Last time was June this year for the Dutch BizTalk User Group.

There are still seats left for this event, so if you want you can attend; it is in Stockholm and I expect many if it not all from Sweden. My session will be talk about BizTalk Adapter Pack, its evolution how it became the pack that is shipped along with BizTalk 2010, its origin, alignment with Microsoft Platform, Cloud and an integration scenario with Oracle. Saravana will take you through his BizTalk360 product showing a lot of its capabilities and how you can leverage them in a BizTalk production environment.

For those who will attend I am looking forward to meet you and present my story on the BizTalk Adapter Pack. Thanks Johan, Mikael and Microsoft Sweden for inviting me and hosting the event.

Cheers!

BizTalk360 – Knowledge base repository

by community-syndication | Oct 13, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

One of the major enhancements we introduced in BizTalk360 2.5 release is Knowledge base repository capabilities. The basic idea behind this is, you keep accumulating KB articles as and when you fix issues in the environment. Over a period you should have wealth of information readily available within the tool (BizTalk360) you are using to support the environment. This will greatly reduce the time it will take to fix the repeating problems. Some of the repeating problems in the environment are inevitable, examples include:

• Environment configuration,
• Data issue (junk characters, encoding issues etc)

BizTalk360 KB repository makes it seamless. It comes with following features

• Attach KB article to suspended instances error codes
• Attach KB article to eventId
• Centrally manage all the KB articles
• Assign permission, who can edit the article

You can read the complete document here Understand Knowledge Base Repository. We also produced couple of videos to show you how the whole thing works.

Knowledgebase Repository – Introduction ( 3 minutes)

Knowledgebase – Central management and user permission (2 minutes)

Nandri!

Saravana Kumar

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

WCF BAM interceptor and no data

by community-syndication | Oct 12, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Official release of “The Developer’s Guide to AppFabric"

by community-syndication | Oct 12, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

BizTalk Administration Console with custom SQL Server Port

by community-syndication | Oct 11, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

It’s one of the common best practices in big enterprises and banks to install SQL server on a custom port rather than the default port 1433 for security reasons.

But when you try to connect the BizTalk administration console via the MMC (especially from a remote machine), you?ll be greeted with some unpleasant message as shown below.

The general principle for connecting to a SQL server instance running on a custom port is by specifying the port number after the instance name separated by a comma. The principle is same in any client application like SQL Management Studio, or even the connection string settings in .NET.

Once you specify the port number after the SQL Server name, you can see the list of databases on the drop down menu, BizTalkmgmtDb will automatically be picked up and you can click "OK" to connect.

The home screen (BizTalk Group Overview) page will display without any issues, but as soon as you try to expand the "Applications" node, you?ll be greeted with the following error message. We experienced the same thing with BizTalk360, when we try to iterate through the applications using the ExplorerOM api. The main reason for this is the value of SQL server instances are stored in few tables (adm_otherdatabases, adm_group etc) in the BizTalkMgmtDb without any knowledge about the port numbers.

The solution to this issue is by simply creating an Alias for SQL server with custom port number. Open SQL Server Configuration manager and under "SQL Native Client Configuration (32bit)", right click "Aliases" and click "New Alias". Then enter the details as shown below (make sure there are no spaces at the end) with your custom port information.

It’s important to create the Alias under 32 bit nodes, since the ExplorerOM is only 32 bit. Once the above alias is create, simply close and open the BizTalk administration console and you’ll be able to iterate through the applications as shown below.

We haven’t tested the run-time capabilities with custom SQL port, but I believe the behaviour must be same.

Nandri!

Saravana

Managing your IT Systems from your SmartPhone or Tablet: Moesion Webinar Tomorrow

by community-syndication | Oct 11, 2011 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

This Wednesday we will hosting the first public webinar about Moesion ( http://www.moesion.com ). In this webinar, we will be highlighting how you can manage your IT systems, whether on-premise on or the cloud, from your smartphone or tablet. Specifically…(read more)
Blog Post by: gsusx