by community-syndication | Feb 15, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
I am working with an integration against a SalesForce solution, where there is a very complex structure in SalesForce, where there are references that will never end in a recursive situation. This gives you an out of memory exception or your Visual Studio crashes.
The solution is to open the BizTalk map with an XML editor and change the (GenerateDefaultFixedNodes=”Yes”) to (GenerateDefaultFixedNodes=”No”) or (GenerateDefaultFixedNodes=”RequiredDefaults”). If you have defaults in your map then you would need to take the last “RequiredDefaults” as you otherwise will miss those in your output.
Remember to test your mappings after you have done this change. See here for more information: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa561485.aspx
by stephen-w-thomas | Feb 15, 2012 | Stephen's BizTalk and Integration Blog
The results are in!
Out of a total of 12 blog post comments, the winner of the Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 Patters Book published by Packet Publishing is Comment #8 – Mitch Vanhelden
As a 2nd place winner, I am also giving away a copy of Pro BAM in BizTalk Server 2009.
The winner of this book is .. Comment #10 – Eric Beyer
If you did not win this time, watch for a new contest in just a few days.
by community-syndication | Feb 14, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
With our 3.2 release we restructured the navigation menu to make it bit more simpler. The LHS shows the old navigation and the RHS showing the new navigation (Data folder).
In the above screens, Chrome and IE are actually accessing the same resource (URL). IE is smart enough to refresh the new Silverlight XAP files and display the new navigation tree, whereas Chrome is still referring to the old xap file.
The solution to this problem is to clear the browser cache, you can follow the below instructions.
Go to Options>Under the Bonnet> Clear Browsing Data, which will bring the following screen
Just select "Empty the cache" option and click "Clear browsing data". After that you open a new instance of Chrome and navigate to BizTalk360 as normal. You can notice it’s displaying the new navigation now.
There are few ways to tackle this problem permanently, we’ll do a small incremental release to address this problem soon.
Regards,
Saravana Kumar
Follow us on twitter @biztalk360, to get this sort of updates quickly
by community-syndication | Feb 13, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
We have done consulting work for various organisation, typically the BizTalk environment topology diagram is drawn in Visio and stored somewhere in document a repository like SharePoint. Depending on the size of the organisation, there will be various environments like SIT, UAT, Staging, Performance, Production, etc and it will be a time consuming task to keep the diagrams up to date. Majority of the time the diagrams will quickly go out of sync when more servers are added/removed to the environment, not representing the real topology.
BizTalk360, solves this problem by intelligently generating the topology diagram on the fly. This solves few issues
- You don’t need to spend time generating topology diagrams in Visio.
- Your diagram is always in Sync with the real environment, since it’s generated based on the current configuration.
- The diagram is readily available on the tool you use to support, so you don’t need to hunt for them in your document repository.
- Diagram got inbuilt zoom-in/zoom-out capability if your environment is complex (ex: 6 BizTalk server , 4 SQL Servers)
Sample Single-Server diagram
Sample Multi-Server diagram
by community-syndication | Feb 13, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
We have more Kinect for you next week. After the great feedback received with our previous webinar and to celebrate the exciting release of Kinect for Windows, Tellago will be hosting our second Kinect Technology Update next Tuesday . We will cover the…(read more)
Blog Post by: gsusx
by community-syndication | Feb 13, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
For the first SWAG meeting of 2012 Ludwig Ahrle and Mikael Eriksson will present two developer focused sessions covering the work they have been doing for Curvande on the Windows Azure platform. This will be a great opportunity to see real-world Azure development hands-on.
The presentations will take place between 18:00 and 20.30, with a 30 minute break for food, there will then be a chance to take a drink, chat and mingle with the presenters and other SWAG members.
Register here.
Sign up to join Sweden Windows Azure Group here.
by community-syndication | Feb 11, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Ive recently really seen some of the benefits in action from the work we have been doing to introduce Behaviour Driven Development techniques into our BizTalk development process.
A couple of months ago one of the members of our team was unavailable and he was the expert with one of the BizTalk Applications we had developed. The team was small and we have a lot of processes and this particular application was quite complex and no one had the level of experience that this team member had with the business process in this particular application. After he was unavailable we got some new requirements for this application and it was a daunting prospect to pick up the reins and try to make these changes without this valuable member of the team around. I know that in an ideal world you would have a number of people with lots of experience on each project but in the real world we had a small team, lots of projects and lots of change so its tough to be in a great position. What we did have was some good documentation and lots of BizUnit tests but it was still a very challenging change.
To try to address this problem one of the first things I did was to allocate some time so that we could refactor all of the BizUnit tests to use the the BDD approaches I have been encouraging and also the “testing whats happening inside of BizTalk” testing approach. The idea here was this small amount of investment would help us to understand the BizTalk application and its implementation of the various processes but also put a tight level of Gherkin style documentation around the BizUnit tests.
After about a week of refactoring this (and it was a challenging week) and implementing some of the new change we needed to deliverI handed over some of the work on the new change to my colleague on our team. I was very impressed at how much simpler the hand over was and how well Francis was able to get his head around how the application worked.
That week of refactoring really moved us from a position where I had been reluctant to touch anything in that particular BizTalk application to a position where I am very comfortable we have a good handle on it now. The BDD initiative we did in 2011 was definately one of the best changes we have made to our development process.
Some links to some of the techniques we have used:
BDD with BizTalk 2010
http://www.cloudcasts.net/ViewWebcast.aspx?webcastid=2520897495056204879
http://www.cloudcasts.net/ViewWebcast.aspx?webcastid=2520897493960073864
BDD with BizTalk 2006
http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2011/11/04/147577.aspx
Testing Whats Happening inside of BizTalk
http://www.cloudcasts.net/ViewWebcast.aspx?webcastid=2521028145037920619
by community-syndication | Feb 11, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Currently there is a lot of activity in BizTalk community. BizTalkadminsblogging has had a flying start with a lot of contributions. Number of BizTalk related articles on the TechNet wiki is growing. Besides the wiki a lot of BizTalk pro’s are active on blogs and forums. So today I like to continue with the fifth story in the BizTalk Community Series that brings active BizTalk community members to the foreground. The story today is on Rajesh Kolla. I had a little chat with Rajesh through email.
Rajesh Kolla, is working with Microsoft technologies (ASP.NET, WCF, SQL Server, MCMS, WinForms and son on) since 2002. He is currently working as Managing Consultant with Sogeti USA based out of Houston, TX, USA.
Rasjesh has been working with BizTalk since 2006. He worked with following versions of BizTalk Server: 2004, 2006, 2006 R2, 2009 and 2010. His day to day job includes architecting integration solutions, development, and deployment of BizTalk applications. His view on the BizTalk Server product I quote:
“I think, BizTalk has been emerged as a powerful integration/middleware product with familiar tooling and extensible components and frameworks. I envision that, it is going to play even more vital role in developing hybrid solutions between on-premise and cloud in future.”
Rajesh likes to watch cricket and Indian movies/TV in his free time (Thanks to his Roku player for providing low-cost alternative to watch regional TV and movies). This might however change after his wife will give birth to his first child in June/July. He likes to play Cricket and Shuttle badminton. His favorite team is Team India (Indian Cricket team).
Rajesh has been sharing tips/gotchas out of his personal experiences with BizTalk and Azure platform through his blog and answering questions on MSDN forums (see his profile).
His final quote:
“I would like to request our readers also to contribute in their own way, as it is going to help and save time of someone somewhere.”
Thanks Rajesh for taking time to have a little chat with me.
by community-syndication | Feb 10, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
SQL Server 2012 comes with a new licensing model. Instead of per processor socket you will pay per core. Licenses are sold in two core packs with a minimum of four core licenses needed per physical processor (even if that processor only has two cores). The price per core is about one quarter (1/4) of the price per processor today. This means that the price for anything but quad core processor architectures will either go up, in the case of hexa core processors, or will give you less value then what you are paying for, in the case of dual core processors.
As far as how you would design your environments to keep the value without increasing the cost that means going with quad core as far as possible instead of for example hexa core. Especially if you are not sure you need that extra bit of processing power.
Although this change is explicitly announced for SQL Server and so far does not extend to BizTalk Server, the way the development of processors is and has been moving over the last couple of years it stands to reason that this may very well be (and by my guess will be) extended to other products in the future. The change is inevitable.
Therefore, today I would opt for quad core processors over hexa core if I use physical servers, in both SQL and BizTalk, to get a smooth transition to new licensing models.
Or at the very least, think twice before you go on old preferences and choose as many cores as possible just to get the most value out of the current licensing model.
Virtualization stays pretty much the same, that is, either pay for the virtual cores or for the physical cores (under the same rules as stated above).
At this point in time this is not new information. For licensing technicians this is a well known fact, but for other technicians or architects, this information might not have surfaced yet.
HTH,
/Johan
Blog Post by: Johan Hedberg
by community-syndication | Feb 10, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
In part 1 I defined what the bitwise operator is and how you can use it in your .net code. Now, let us see how we can use the same functionality in BizTalk to route messages.
How to use the bitwise operator in BizTalk
One of the great things about my job is that I get to move around a lot. Different customers has different uses for BizTalk and this leads to new ways to use it. This scenario is not unique, but was new to me anyway.
BizTalk receives a message and needs to route it to different receivers. The receivers will be assigned using some form of “lookup” based on the message type. Message type A must be sent to system 1, 2 and 4. Message type B must be sent to system 3 and 4, and so on.
As usual, the preferred solution makes no use of an orchestration, should be reconfigured without redeployment and adding a new receiver should be very easy and should only impact the current deployment in a minor way.
This is a good time to use the bitwise operator!
Setup in BizTalk
This is just a simple proof of concept and, as such not complete. Keep that in mind and please provide feedback if anything is missing.
The schema: The bitwise operator will solve the task. To use that, and also avoid using an orchestration, BizTalk has to be able to route messages based on a value in the file. In order to do that, a promoted property is used. In this case a field called “ReceiverField”.
It is important to remember that in this particular case, the promoted property must be an unsignedInt. This makes sense since you cannot use bitwise on a combination of positive and negative numbers. If you use Int, the operator will not show up in the administration console.
Receive port: Now set up the ports. First we need receive to pick up the incoming data. In this a simple file receive location is used, but there is nothing stopping you form using other protocols. The bitwise handling will still work. The important thing to remember is to use the xmlreceive pipeline (as opposed to the passthru).
Sendport for different systems: Now for the magic part. Add a sendport for each of the systems you need to send the information to. Make sure to configure filters to reflect the particular number you have assigned to that system.
In the picture above, the filter is configured to send files received on the previously configured receive port and then the bitwise operator is used to look for the number two in the receiver field in the previously created schema.
Add another port for another system:
The important thing to notice here is that there really is not any major difference. The only important difference is the number for the receiver field, which is not set to a 4.
Start all the ports create a testfile to be dropped in the receive folder. Set the value of the receiver field to “2”. Drop it in the receive folder. The only the send port marked with a “2” will pick it up.
Try again and change the value to “4”, only the second port will pick it up. Lastly set the value to “6”, now both ports will pick it up!
The upsides
The most important gain is of course the routing but there are some other benefits as well. Firstly, you can put different format mapping for different systems in their respective ports. This is also true for pipelines, so if one of the systems is using custom formatting, that is not a problem.
Next, adding another system is simple as all you have to do is add another send port, and configure it to look for the next number (double the last).
The downsides
This logic cannot be used in orchestrations. You cannot use the bitwise operator as a part of an activation filter in the orchestration, sadly.
Another thing that might be a problem is the code, or handling, by which you assign the number in the “RecievierField”. If BizTalk is responsible for assigning this value, you have to make sure that adding another system is just as simple as adding another send port. Maybe you have a database that matches message types and assign the number. BizTalk can then simply use a database functiod in a map to look it up.
Blog Post by: Mikael Sand
