The configuration authoring experience remains one of the main challenges of .NET applications. Every time we need to create a new configuration files, we find ourselves going to MSDN or similar websites and trying to figure out the structure of different…(read more)
Blog Post by: gsusx
Visual Studio LightSwitch seems to be a real productivity booster for some applications. See one demo here how even a business user can create the application.
Cheers
Rohit Sharma
Today when we were showing the demo of BizTalk 360 to some potential customers, the question was raised about the various deployment choices for BizTalk 360. This is one of the common questions we have seen recently on our customer engagements. Here are the choices
Scenario 1:
You can install BizTalk 360 in one of the BizTalk Server environments (production, non-production etc) and configure all the environments using the administration module. The user can then access BizTalk 360 via a url (something like http://production/biztalk360) and access all the environments configured. The super user will have the ability to assign various fine grained authorization to the users for various environments using the user management module.
Scenario #2
This is another common scenario, where customers don’t want to install any third party products like BizTalk 360 directly on their production environment. BizTalk 360 supports this scenario by allowing customers to install BizTalk 360 on a standalone server and point to various environments. In this case customers need to install BizTalk administration components (only) in the standalone server.
Nandri!
Saravana Kumar
Social:
Join us on @biztalk360 | http://facebook.com/biztalk360 | http://getsatisfaction.com/biztalk360
We released BizTalk 360 with lot of features targeted toward supporting and monitoring controlled BizTalk environments like production, test etc. After the release, our basic principle in the direction/road map of the product is mainly driven by customer request. That’s the result you are seeing on the latest addition of alert/notification functionality added to V2, fixing of clustered host instance behaviour etc.
One of the latest addition in the same line is the ability to start and stop the whole application. In previous versions of BizTalk 360 (prior to 1.0.206), there was no ability to start and stop entire application, user need to click "Select all checkbox" on each artifacts (receive location, send ports, etc) tab and do a bulk start. One of our potential customer wants to give the tool to some third party support company and they don’t want them messing around with individual artifacts and also they wanted to keep starting and stopping application simple.
To address the customer request, we added Start/Stop functionality at application level. Here are the screen shots
Nandri!
Saravana Kumar
Social:
Join us on @biztalk360 | http://facebook.com/biztalk360 | http://getsatisfaction.com/biztalk360
One useful feature in SQL Server is something called the OVER clause. The OVER clause has been available since SQL Server 2005 and allows you to perform window functions over a set of data. SQL Server provides two types of window functions: aggregate window functions and ranking window functions. I will explain what aggregate […]
Blog Post by: Dylan Barrett
We need to admit this is one of the thing we didn’t pay enough attention in the previous versions of BizTalk 360. Until last week when one of our potential clients raised the issue and told us its a show stopper. We reacted quickly and can confirm from version 1.0.206 and above all the issues related to clustered host instances are fixed.
Background:
In majority of the cases you don’t need to cluster the BizTalk host instances. BizTalk group concept having multiple BizTalk servers and the internal mechanism of circulating the load is sufficient to make the host highly available. All you need to do is, create the host instances in multiple servers. But there are certain adapter which are not capable of running in multiple servers, example FTP, POP3 etc. due to the nature of these adapters. In those case you need to configure the host instances running these adapter using Windows clustering.
The first challenge to fix this issue was to setup the environment, our fail over cluster configuration looks as shown below.
Fix 1: Host Instance will have an icon to represent their clustered status
It’s important to differentiate the normal host instance from the clustered ones. So, we introduce small icons in the grid showing they are clustered host instance.
Fix 2: Dashboards reflect the status correctly
In the previous versions (without proper cluster instance handling) the above screen would have shown RED for host instances, since there is host instance in stopped state (refer to previous image). But now the dashboard will show the correct status GREEN understanding the host instances and their cluster behaviour.
Fix 3: Starting/Stopping clustered host instance
Starting and stopping of clustered host instances behaves differently to normal ones. In a normal situation you should be able to start and stop host instances individually without any dependency. But for a clustered host instance case, there is a patter.
1. You can stop the clustered host instance without any issue
2. Starting a host instance will bring the cluster group online rather than starting the host instance standalone.
3. If you try to start the host instance on a failover server (passive server), the behaviour will be same, it will bring the cluster group online rather than trying to start the wrong host instance.
If you want to start the host instance on a passive server, you need to do it via the "Failover Cluster Manager".
Nandri!
Saravana Kumar
Social:
Join us on @biztalk360 | http://facebook.com/biztalk360 | http://getsatisfaction.com/biztalk360
This post is about how to retrieve the entry point page reference when the page data object is served from a custom page provider. We have a look at Page Providers in EPiServer CMS, the DataFactory…
Daniel Berg’s blog about ASP.NET, EPiServer, SharePoint, BizTalk
Charan: Hey Pal I am getting this weird error not sure what is wrong everything was working fine few hours ago and now I am unable to start the 32-bit BizTalk host instances. I have even repaired the BizTalk installation and still getting the same error.
Rohit: Have you done any recent changes to the machine.
Charan: Yes I have installed one BizTalk application exported from the other machine
This week, Packt Publishing released the book BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I contributed three chapters to this book covering integration with Dynamics CRM 2011, Windows Azure AppFabric and Salesforce.com. The lead author, Kent Weare wrote a blog post announcing the release, and you can also […]
Blog Post by: Richard Seroter
Story: Bob is an IT Professional ( ITPro ) responsible for maintaining dozens of enterprise .NET applications. One day, Bob gets a call informing him that one of the applications he is responsible for have stopped working after some changes in the configuration…(read more)
Blog Post by: gsusx