The Release Candidates (RC) for Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013 are now available for download from the MSDN Library. These new releases bring a suite of new and enhanced capabilities to help your development team succeed. Some of my favorite new features, in no particular order, include; Code Lens (Code indicators right […]
Blog Post by: Anthony Borton (TFS Instructor)
When you’re a hands-on CEO, you want to get involved in every aspect of your company. Now, as UX Design becomes a differentiating factor for product and company visibility, CEOs are paying more attention to design, but some, like Yahoo!’s Marissa Mayer, are ham-handing it.
Blog Post by: Krish Mandal
Hello People! Sharing is knowledge, ey? I’ve been working on a tool for a long time. I still have a bunch of ideas of what to bring into it. Currently I have health checks in it. So, we’re about to spin this to life and I need to share some more around it all, so […]
Blog Post by: Tord Glad Nordahl
If you don’t hear from me for a while you’ll know things have gone horribly wrong
Going in 🙂
Blog Post by: Mick Badran
This post is the sixteenth in a weekly series intended to briefly spotlight those things that you need to know about new features in BizTalk Server 2013. It is also the fourth part of a five-part series on REST support in BizTalk Server 2013. If you haven’t been following the REST series, stop reading right […]
Blog Post by: Nick Hauenstein
This solution describe how dynamically we can change the WCF-HttpHeaders for WCF-WebHTTP adapter. In our project, there is a need to dynamically change the HttpHeaders content-type to “text/html” and “application/gzip”. The response messages are send on the same port, so we need to construct the message with the proper content-type. During investigation of why the […]
Blog Post by: shadabanwer
Personally I like to create all my BizTalk Server installation and configuration process manually at least one time or maybe from time to time, but when we are dealing with several environments and even worse each environment with several BizTalk Servers this can be very annoying and time consuming. In this case automation is the […]
Blog Post by: Sandro Pereira
Print style sheets, should in theory, be simple. You strip out the complicated junk from your page, and format it a little better for a piece of paper. Right? Wrong. Print style sheets are a pain in the butt. They’re hard to debug, finicky depending on the browser, and downright annoying to get perfect.
Blog Post by: Karissa Wingate
A very powerful feature of BizTalk is Message Tracking. You can use the BizTalk Server Administration Console to enable message body and message property tracking. There you can also view the tracked message body and all the promoted properties for the message. There is only one but, Tracking a lot of data can be bad for the performance so Microsoft recommends that you should only enable the minimum tracking required for your application, as this will reduce the amount of data logged and lower the risk of tracking bottlenecks.
The BizTalk Performance Optimization Guide says the following about message body tracking:
Only use message body tracking if necessary. Depending on message throughput and message size, message body tracking can cause significant overhead. While BizTalk activity tracking has obvious benefits for debugging and auditing, it also has considerable performance and scalability implications. Therefore, you should track only data that is strictly necessary for debugging and security reasons, and avoids tracking redundant information.
So, it can be useful in a development- or test environment but you can’t use this feature in a production environment! But also in a Production environment you want to be able to track message bodies.
MongoDB could be a very good alternative to track message bodies because MongoDB is a web scale database, and doesn’t use SQL or JOINs, so it’s high-performance. An other advantage is that it is a document database. You can store the entire BizTalk message as a document in a collection but you can still search on specific items in the document.
MongoDB can be installed on many platforms such as Windows Azure but in this example I’m going to install it on the local machine.
| Installing MongoDB on Windows is very simple. Download the archive, extract it and move the files to “C:\mongodb”. Also create the folder "C:\data\db". That is required to store the data files. Now you’re good to go! |
| You can start MongoDB as a Windows Service but you can also start it from the Command Prompt: “C:\mongodb\bin\mongod.exe” |
In the steps below I’m going to create an Itinerary Messaging Service that you can use inside an ESB to track message bodies. Notice that you can also use the code in a “regular” Orchestration or Pipeline Component!
| In a previous blog post I explained how to create a Custom Itinerary Messaging Service so in this post I’m focusing on the details! 😉 |
| I’m using the officially supported C# Driver for MongoDB to insert a document in MongoDB. The C# Driver consists of two libraries: the BSON Library and the C# Driver. |
| To add the necessary libraries to a Project in Visual Studio you can use NuGet Packages. |
| Search on MongoDB and install the driver. |
| You also need the Json.NET package because you have to serialize the XML to Json. Json.NET is a popular high-performance JSON framework for .NET |
| Use JsonConvert.SerializeXmlNode to serialize a XmlDocument to Json. |
| To insert a document in a collection in MongoDB create an object representing the document and call Insert. |
// This class serves as the root object for working with a MongoDB server. MongoClient client = new MongoClient(connectionString); var server = client.GetServer(); var mongoDbDatabase = server.GetDatabase(database); var mongoDbCollection = mongoDbDatabase.GetCollection(collection); // Parste the json to a BsonDocument (a collection of name/value pairs) BsonDocument document = BsonDocument.Parse(jsonText); // Insert the document in the collection WriteConcernResult insertResult = mongoDbCollection.Insert(document); // Result ok = insertResult.Ok; .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre |
| Add an entry in the itineraryServices section of the Esb.config file from the ESB Toolkit by adding an <itineraryService> element. |
<itineraryService id="1030" name="TrackingService" type="itHero.ESB.Services. .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre |
| Now you can create an Itineray with the custom TrackingService: |
| Before you can use the Itinerary Service in BizTalk you have to register all the assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache. You can use the Deployment Framework for BizTalk but you can also use Gacutil. |
Once the itinerary is deployed to the Itinerary Store database and the Tracking Service is placed in the GAC, the solution is ready to be tested.
Create a Receive Port and a Receive Location with the BizTalk Administration Console and drop a message in it.
I’ve used the Trace class in System.Diagnostics to trace the steps but you can also use another component for it like ETW tracing.
| Run DebugView to watch the trace output. |
| You can use the MongoVUE application for Windows to find the messages that are stored in MongoDB.
Notice that in the Message also the InterchangeID value is available to match the Message Body with an Tracking Event in BizTalk. |
| You can match the Message Body that is stored in MongoDB with a tracked Message in BizTalk. 1. Open the BizTalk Administrator and Search For: Tracked Message Events 2. Click on an Event and use the Message ID to match the Message in the Event to the Message Body in MongoDB. |
The Tracking Service example showed that MongoDB is a really good alternative for tracking message bodies. I’ve always been a big fan of SQL Server so I was a bit skeptical about MongoDB but seeing is believing! It really is much faster than SQL Server and you can still search on individual items in a message.
You can download the sample Messaging Service with the source code here:
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Using-MongoDB-for-Message-a8e4ba4d
I thought it would be worth mentioning an interesting (and in our case, a “lifesaving” ) feature of BizTalk binding files. First of all though, I will briefly explain what a bindings file is and some caveats… A bindings file is an XML file that is generated via the BizTalk administration console, by right clicking […]
Blog Post by: James Corbould