As most BizTalk developers/architects you have probably been in a situation were documentation of your integration solution has been discussed. And you probably also been just as happy as me when you first found BizTalk Documenter. BizTalk Documenter is a great tool for extracting all that configuration data that is so vital to BizTalk and […]
Blog Post by: Richard
2012-09-30: I’ve renamed the whole project and moved it to GitHub. Hope to see you there!
As most BizTalk developers/architects you have probably been in a situation were documentation of your integration solution has been discussed. And you probably also been just as happy as me when you first found BizTalk Documenter. BizTalk Documenter is a great tool for extracting all that configuration data that is so vital to BizTalk and create a nice technical documentation of it.
There are of course several levels to documentation in BizTalk Server based solution were the technical information is at the lowest level. Above that you would then have you integration process descriptions and then possible another level above that where you fit the integration processes into bigger business processes, and so on – but let’s stick to the technical documentation for now.
BizTalk Documenter does a nice job of automating the creation of technical documentation, instead of basically having to all that configuration job a second time when documenting. Doing technical documentation by hand usually also breaks down after a while as solution setup and configuration changes a lot and the work is really time consuming. And as documentation that isn’t up to date frankly is completely worthless people soon looses interest in both reading and maintaining the technical documentation.
Using BizTalk Documenter however has a few problems …
The tool generates either a CHM file or a word file with documentation. As more and more organizations however move their documentation online new output formats are needed.
The latest 3.4 versions of the tools throws OutOfMemory Exceptions on bigger solutions.
As we started trying to find ways to solve the issues above we had a few ideas we wanted the new solution to handle better.
Web based documentation
A web based documentation is both much easier to distribute and more accessible to read – sending a link and reading a web page rather then sending around a CHM file.
Easy way of see changes in versions
Sometimes one wants to see how things have changed and how things used to be configured. The tools should support “jumping back in time” and see previous versions.
Check out an an example of a Config Explorer yourself.
Config Explorer is a open source tool published on CodePlex GitHub – a good place to start to understanding the workflow of creating documentation and to download the tool itself.
This release is a 1.0 release and there will are many features we haven’t had time for, but a few of them we’ve planned for future releases. Unfortunately there will however also be bugs and obvious things we’ve missed. Please use the CodePlex GutHub Issue Tracker to let us know what you like us to add and what possible issues you’ve found.
I’ll of course also check for any comments here! Winking smile
Microsoft just releases two cumulative update packages for BizTalk 2010! Cumulative update package 2 for BizTalk Server 2010 This cumulative update package for Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 contains hotfixes for the BizTalk Server 2010 issues that were resolved after the release of BizTalk Server 2010%uff0e Important notes about the cumulative update package This cumulative hotfix […]
Blog Post by: Sandro Pereira
A few days ago, Amazon AWS announced the general availability of ElastiCache , a new distributed, in-memory caching service which complements the storage services included in the AWS platform. ElastiCache enables traditional caching capabilities to applications…(read more)
Blog Post by: gsusx
The summer is nearly over, but the “Four Questions” machine continues forward. In this 34th interview with a “connected technologies” thought leader, we’re talking with Ryan CrawCour who is a solutions architect, virtual technology specialist for Microsoft in the Windows Azure space, popular speaker and user group organizer. Q: We’ve seen the recent (CTP) release […]
Blog Post by: Richard Seroter
I’ve been waiting for this for a while… contains all hotfixes released since CU1
was released…
Get it here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2573000
Blog Post by: Daniel Probert
When trying to configure BAM features in BizTalk Server 2010 (64 bit) with a remote SQL Server 2008 R2 (64 bit) I was getting these two errors: When trying to configure “BAM Archive Database” Microsoft SQL Server Data Transformation Services (DTS) 2008 with SP1 or higher for BAM Archiving is not installed on the local […]
Blog Post by: Sandro Pereira
I got the error of death…. I mean we were this close to formatting the machine.
Event Type: Error
Event Source: BizTalk Server 2009
Event Category: BizTalk Server 2009
Event ID: 5719
User: N/A
Description:
There was a failure executing the receive pipeline: “Microsoft.BizTalk.DefaultPipelines.XMLReceive, Microsoft.BizTalk.DefaultPipelines, Version=3.0.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35” Source: “XML disassembler” Receive Port: “GetReferenceDelta” URI: “mssql://zz11aazz//My?” Reason: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.
I thought that the xmlpipeline was broken, so I tried the passthrough…
There was a failure executing the receive pipeline: “Microsoft.BizTalk.DefaultPipelines.PassThruReceive, Microsoft.BizTalk.DefaultPipelines, Version=3.0.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35” Source: “Unknown ”
Receive Port: “GetMyDelta” URI: “mssql://server/uri” Reason: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.
I can no longer receive ANY messages into BizTalk from SQL…
I tried the file receive, I tried xml and pass-through pipelines, nothing works, and it all fails….
I can no longer receive ANYTHING at ALL into BizTalk…. Error of death…
I looked, I tried updates to the Adapter packs… nothing worked….
I was about to trash my environment and format and start again….
THEN!!! I thought, let me remove all updates I had done to BizTalk, I removed one, and tested, removed one and tested.
Finally finding that….. The offending update was cumulative update 1:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2429050
I removed it, and my BizTalk came back to life….. PHEW!
I recently had to document a map quickly and decided to try the BizTalk Map Documenter v2.1. The first error I got was “Extension function parameters or return values which have CLR type ’ConcatString’ are not supported.”. Looking at the comments on the download site I discovered that you have to modify the parseLinkPath() and […]
Blog Post by: mbrimble