In a meeting a few weeks ago the question of how to support the MOS protocol with BizTalk came up. The MOS protocol, used in the media industry, has two flavours – Versions 3.x are implemented as ’proper’ web services Versions 2.x are implemented as ’xml over TCP’ As the former is a no-brainer for BizTalk, I wanted to look at what it would take to support the later- The protocol (as
I own a Windows Phone 7, and one of the problems I’ve had since day one is the inability to sync my local Outlook with the phone. My initial approach was to add the phone’s live account to Outlook, and then do copy&paste of contacts and appointments to this account. No need to say this is extremely inefficient…
My friend Tiago Pascoal found the solution for me: a miracle little $20 tool called gSyncit. This tool sits on your tray icon and syncs from your Outlook into your gmail account. You can then setup the Google account on your phone, and voila! The tool sync contacts, appointments, tasks and notes.
I’ve been using it with Outlook 2010 x64 and my feedback is very positive, I highly recommend it.
It’s just a pitty that I ended up having to buy an app to do something Zune Software should handle for me out-of-the-box, and on top of this using gmail as a bridge.
Note: I have no affiliation whatsoever with Fieldston Software.
Blog Post by: Jo%u00e3o Pedro Martins
I’m very happy to announce that Saravana Kumar has accepted my invitation to speak at the upcoming BizTalk User Group (BTUG) meeting in Almere on June, 29th. Saravana will talk about and demo BizTalk 360. Saravana has been working with BizTalk Server since the first product release early in 2001, and has many years experience […]
Blog Post by: Randal van Splunteren
Everybody with some experience with BizTalk Server knows that sometimes the ODX files get garbled and have to be fixed manually. I’ve had situations where the compilation of an orchestration works fine, but when viewing the orchestration in the visual studio designer, there are shapes with the red icon of error in it. When things like this happen, or you get those strange “Errors exist for one or more children”, what you can do is have BizTalk re-generate the code part of the ODX.
To do this, edit the ODX file in notepad, and look for the string:
#endif // __DESIGNER_DATA
Then, carefully remove all the text after this line and until the end of the file. Save the file and re-open it in the Visual Studio Designer, and make some change to is (such as adding a newline in an Expression Shape). This will cause the full re-generation of the code part of the ODX that follows the string above, and it will probably fix your strange problems.
An old hint, but a useful one!
Blog Post by: Jo%u00e3o Pedro Martins
I recently ran into a real conundrum at the end of a deployment when we discovered that we would be sending messages to a one way (i.e. fire-and-forget) web service using the inbuilt WCF adapters. Easy! Just use a one-way Send port with the WCF-BasicHttp binding! Everything builds and deploys just fine, however, at run […]
Blog Post by: Brett
Dan Rosanova shares tips for using FOR XML queries.
This blog post is about fragment caching in EPiServer CMS. We take a look at how to use user control output caching together with the DataFactoryCache class in EPiServer. Fragment caching
Fragment…
Daniel Berg’s blog about ASP.NET, EPiServer, SharePoint, BizTalk
Another month and another time for our Tellago Technology Updates webinar !! Next Tuesday, my friend and Tellago’s mobility practice lead Chris Love will be speaking about IOs and Android development from a .NET developer perspective. The session will…(read more)
Blog Post by: gsusx
Introduction
In part 1 we setup the scene by creating a simple Silverlight/WCF application. In that application the Silverlight application is initialized, it made a call to the underlying WCF service operation "GetWelcomeText" and displayed the text on the UI. We used the basicHttpBinding to establish communication between the SL client and WCF service. In this part, we are going to make some modifications to the configuration files, IIS/Windows Server AppFabric settings and make the application work across boundaries between two different geographical locations using Azure AppFabric Service Bus. The high level picture is going to look like
Source: http://blogs.digitaldeposit.net/saravana
Prerequisite:
One of the challenges of Silverlight and Azure AppFabric service bus integration is configuring access to the clientaccesspolicy.xml file. I’ve explained in detail, how you can resolve it in this blog post. It’s mandatory to complete the procedure explained in that post, before you proceed further.
It’s also mandatory to have IIS/Windows Server AppFabric to complete this walkthrough. Please download and install it from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=15848
Create Service Endpoint Behaviour
Expand "Advanced" and "Endpoint Behavior" from the navigation tree and click on the link "New Endpoint Behavior Configuration" as shown below
Click the "Add" button, which will bring "Adding Behavior element extensions" screen as shown below. From the list select "transportClientEndpointBehavior" and click "Add".
Change the name to "slsb_ServiceEndpointBehavior". The final screen should look as shown below
Double click on transportClientEndpointBehavior from the list and make sure CredentialType is SharedSecret.
Create a basicHttpRelayBinding
Navigate to "Bindings" and select "New Binding Configuration.." as shown below
On the "Create a New Binding" window select "basicHttpRelayBinding" and click OK as shown below.
Change the name to slsb_basicHttpRelayBinding, the final configuration should look as shown below.
Create a new Endpoint
Now we are going to create a new WCF end point using the endpointBehavior and basicHttpRelayBinding we created in previous steps.
Navigate to Services\Endpoints, right-click and select "New Service Endpoint" as shown below.
Once the properties window is displayed, provide the configurations as shown below.
The modified web.config file is going to look as shown below
We are going to make few changes here, which we couldn’t do on the SvcConfigEditor.exe tool. The modified web.config file is going to look as shown below
The objective for this demo is establishing communication between Silverlight application and remote WCF service via Azure AppFabric service bus. So, we are going to ignore all the security settings for now, which I’ll cover in future articles. Things to note
Security is set to "None"
Endpoint address is using "http" (not "https")
Also, I commented out previous local endpoint configurations and things that are not really relevant for this demo to keep it simple.
Configure Virtual Directory in IIS/Windows Server AppFabric
You’ll need Windows Server AppFabric for this demo to work, which you can download from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=15848
We are going to host our WCF service on IIS/Windows Server AppFabric. The main reason for that is, we need to take advantage of the "Auto Start" functionality of IIS/ Windows Server AppFabric to start our WCF service automatically when IIS starts and register its namespace in the Azure AppFabric Service bus. Previously this was one of the challenges, since the WCF services hosted just on IIS (without AppFabric) won’t get started until the first request hit the service. In this section we will see the configuration required on IIS/Windows Server AppFabric for our WCF service.
Start Internet Service Manager, and click on our virtual directory AppFabricSBandSLIntegration.Web.
On the Actions column, under "Manage WCF and WF Services", click on "Configure" as shown below
Select "Auto-Start" and choose the option "Enabled" as shown below.
After closing the window, you can Start the application, as shown in the below figure.
Reset IIS by opening a command prompt as administrator and typing iisreset. Navigate to our WCF service as shown below and make sure there are no errors and it displays the page as shown below
One of the common errors I’ve seen, especially while working on corporate networks where a proxy server is used is
Unable to reach watchdog.servicebus.windows.net via TCP (9351, 9352) or HTTP (80, 443)
The solution for the problem is simple, on the web.config file just configure the proxy details as shown below.
<system.net>
<defaultProxy useDefaultCredentials="true">
<proxy proxyaddress="http://<your proxy>:<your port>"/>
</defaultProxy>
</system.net>
You also need to make sure the virtual directory is configured to run under an IIS application pool, with the identity that access to proxy server.
Update the Silverlight application to point to Azure AppFabric service bus URL
The final change we need to make is to update the Silverlight application configuration file ServiceReference.Clientconfig.config file with url pointing to the Azure AppFabric service bus url as shown below
Press F5 to run the application, and now you should see the application working as before but this time via the Azure AppFabric service bus.
One of the key things to note here is, on the Silverlight client side, I only modified the address in the endpoint element. That’s because basicHttpBinding is compatible with basicHttpRelayBinding.
The other important thing is, we relaxed the security completely and concentrated only on connectivity for this demo. So, don’t use this configuration in production.
Nandri!
Saravana