Installing Windows 8 using USB

by community-syndication | Oct 21, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

When you buy a netbook it’s most likely there won’t be DVD drive. So it’s getting more important to have the ability to install a OS from a USB device. In the past it’s was a real pain to get the USB drive bootable, you need to fiddle around with Diskpart utility and follow the […]

The post Installing Windows 8 using USB appeared first on BizTalk360 Blog.

Blog Post by: Saravana Kumar

BizTalk 2010 R2 CTP: Azure Service Bus Integration-Part 5 Sending messages to Service Bus Queues using Sessions

by community-syndication | Oct 20, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

What are Service Bus Sessions?

Service Bus Sessions are actually a rather broad subject as there are a few different scenarios in which they can be used.  At its simplest description I consider Service Bus Sessions to be a way to relate messages together.  More specifically here are a few ways in which they can be used:

• To address the Maximum message size constraint.  Service Bus Queues can support messages that have a size of 256 KB or smaller.  Using Sessions allow us to break a larger message down into smaller messages and then send them over the wire.  A consumer, or receiver, can then receive all of these message “chunks” and aggregate them together.
• To support receiving a related set of messages in First In First Out (FIFO) fashion
• Allows for affinity between a consumer and a Service Bus Queue in competing consumer scenarios.  Imagine having 3 consuming clients all trying to receive messages from the same Service Bus Queue.  Under normal circumstances you cannot be assured that one receiver will receive all messages within a message set.  One can expect the messages to be distributed amongst the clients as each consumer “competes” for the right to process a particular message.  In this scenario, once a receiver has started to process a message within a session, that consumer will process all messages within that session barring some sort of application crash.
• In some scenarios, using a Service Bus Session allows for routing of messages.  Within a receiver, you can specify an explicit Session that you are interested in.  So in some ways a Session can be used almost like a filter.  I am not suggesting that this approach be used instead of Service Bus Topics/Subscriptions, but there may be a specific business requirement to do this.

Why are Service Bus Sessions important in BizTalk processing?

BizTalk deals with a variety of different messaging scenarios in many different industry verticals.  Supporting Service Bus Sessions is just another tool in the the BizTalk toolbox for supporting new requirements.  A scenario that I came up with is dispatching messages.  For instance if we wanted to load up a field worker with all of his orders, wouldn’t it be nice to have all of his orders sent to him as a batch?  As opposed to him receiving some of his orders only to receive more orders later on.  For instance he may have driven by one of his customers already because the messages that he receive were out of order and other field workers were also receiving their orders which delayed him in receiving all of his.

Putting it together – Modifying Service Bus Queue

A pre-requisite for this type of messaging scenario to work is configuring our Service Bus Queue to support Sessions.  This can be enabled in a couple different ways:

• When creating a queue from within the Azure Portal, we can check the Enable sessions checkbox.

• When using the QueueDescription class we can set the RequiresSession property to true.

NamespaceManager namespaceClient = new NamespaceManager(serviceUri, credentials);

if (!namespaceClient.QueueExists(Sender.QueueName))
        {

            QueueDescription queueDescription = new QueueDescription(Sender.QueueName)
            {
                RequiresSession = true
            };
            namespaceClient.CreateQueue(queueDescription);
          
        }

BizTalk Configuration

In order to keep the solution very simple, we will create:

• Two Receive Ports
• A Receive Location for each Receive Port.  The purpose of these Receive Locations is to simply inject messages into BizTalk so that we can set the SessionID property on the Send Ports.
• 2 Send Ports
• One for Mike
• One for Joe
• Each Send Port will have a filter for the corresponding Receive Port.  Within each Send Port we will configure a SessionID .

The other Send Port will use the same URI, however it will have a different SessionID value which will be Joe.

Service Bus Queue Client

The code below will make a connection to our session-ful Service Bus Queue and retrieve all messages that have a SessionId of Mike.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using Microsoft.ServiceBus;
using Microsoft.ServiceBus.Messaging;
using System.Runtime.Serialization;
using BrokeredMessageToBizTalk;

namespace RetrieveServiceBusSession
{
    class Receiver
    {

        const string QueueName = “<your_sessionful_queue>”;
        static string ServiceNamespace = “<your_namespace>”;
        static string IssuerName = “<your_issuerName>”;
        static string IssuerKey = “<your_IssuerKey>”;
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            TokenProvider credentials = TokenProvider.CreateSharedSecretTokenProvider(Receiver.IssuerName, Receiver.IssuerKey);
            Uri serviceUri = ServiceBusEnvironment.CreateServiceUri(“sb”, Receiver.ServiceNamespace, string.Empty);

            MessagingFactory factory = null;

            factory = MessagingFactory.Create(serviceUri, credentials);

            QueueClient sessionQueueClient = factory.CreateQueueClient(Receiver.QueueName);

            //Create sessionQueueClient and subscribe to SessionIDs that have a value of “Mike”
            MessageSession sessionReceiver = sessionQueueClient.AcceptMessageSession(“Mike”, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(60));
            BrokeredMessage receivedMessage;

                while ((receivedMessage = sessionReceiver.Receive(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(60))) != null)
                {
                    var data = receivedMessage.GetBody<PowerOut>(new DataContractSerializer(typeof(PowerOut)));
                    Console.WriteLine(String.Format(“Customer Name: {0}”, data.CustomerName));
                    Console.WriteLine(“SessionID: {0}”, receivedMessage.SessionId);
                    //remove message from Topic
                    receivedMessage.Complete();
                }
          
            Console.WriteLine(“All received on this session…press enter to exit”);
            Console.Read();
        }
    }
}

The code itself is very similar to that of some of my previous blog posts on ServiceBus integration.  The main difference is instantiating a MessionSession object.

MessageSession sessionReceiver = sessionQueueClient.AcceptMessageSession(“Mike”, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(60));

Within this line of we are indicating that we want to receive messages that belong to the Mike Session.  We can also provide a TimeSpan as an argument to specify the duration in which we want to receive from this Session.  Setting this value is more useful when we are looking for any available Session as it allows all messages within a Session to be processed before moving onto the next Session.

Testing

I have two sets of messages here.  Two of the messages will be routed through the Joe Send Port and subsequently the SessionID for these two messages will be set to Joe. The other two messages will be routed through the Mike Send Port and subsequently will have its SessionID property set to  Mike.

As mentioned previously, both Send Ports are configured to send to the same Service Bus Queue.  When we do run our client application, the expectation is that messages belonging to the Mike Session will be retrieved.  The Joe Messages will remain in the Queue until another receiver pulls them down or the the Time To Live (TTL) threshold has been exceeded.

When we start our Consumer application we do discover that the “Mike” messages are processed.

So what happened to the other messages?

The “Joe” messages are still in our Queue.  If we navigate to our Windows Azure Portal, we will discover that our Queue Length is set to 2.

So how do we get these messages out?

We have a couple options, we can create another MessageSession instance and retrieve all Messages belonging to the Mike Session or we can not specify a Session and our client will look for the next available Session which in this case will be the Mike Session.

Let’s go with the second option and retrieve the next available session.  In order to do so we need to change the following line of code from

  MessageSession sessionReceiver = sessionQueueClient.AcceptMessageSession(“Mike”, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(60));

to

  MessageSession sessionReceiver = sessionQueueClient.AcceptMessageSession(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(60));

We essentially are no longer specifying a specific Session that we are interested in and are now interested in any Session.

I will now process another 4 files; 2 will belong to the Joe Session and 2 will belong to the Mike Session.  What we expect to happen is that all 4 Joe messages will be processed since it is the next available Session.

So this proves that we have In Order Delivery occurring at the Session level.  Initially our Mike Session was processed which left our Joe messages outstanding.  We then loaded 4 more messages to the Queue and since the Joe messages were first in, they were processed first.  Our remaining 2 messages that now belong to Mike can be retrieved by starting up our Client Application once again.

Note:

Within my BizTalk Send Ports I statically configured my SessionID.  This isn’t very practical in the “Real World” but it was easy to demonstrate for the purpose of this blog post.  Much like other BizTalk context properties the SessionID property is available and can be set dynamically within an Orchestration Message Assignment shape or a Pipeline Component.

Conclusion

Overall I found this functionality pretty neat. I do think that it is another capability that we can leverage to support more granular control over message processing.  I do like the opportunity to group messages together and treat them as a batch.  This also works when dealing with message size limitations as we can stich a bunch of smaller messages together that collective make up a large message.

Hadoop + SSIS, SSIS + Windows Azure Blob Storage

by community-syndication | Oct 18, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Leveraging a Hadoop cluster from SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)

SSIS Packages Sample for Hadoop and Windows Azure

HadoopOnAzure REST API Wrapper Sample

Azure Blob Storage Components for SSIS Sample

Benjamin

Blog Post by: Benjamin GUINEBERTIERE

Microsoft Integration MVP

by community-syndication | Oct 18, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

DocumentSpecName usage in the pipeline configuration

by community-syndication | Oct 18, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

A schema can be defined in the ‘DocumentSpecName’-attribute of the pipeline configuration properties (in the dissamble stage). When no schema is defined and there are multiple schema’s with the same combination for ‘Target Namespace’ (optional) and ‘Root Name’, you ‘ll get following error in the receive pipeline: There was a failure executing the receive pipeline: […]
Blog Post by: Cnext

Want to try BizTalk 2010 R2

by community-syndication | Oct 18, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

For sure, I’m litlle bit late to talk about that, but you can test BizTalk 2010R2 ctp since start of september; Pre-requisite : you need to have a Windows azure account (if not you can create one for free during 90 days). First log on https://manage.windowsazure.com Go to Virtual Machine tab Clic on Create new […]
Blog Post by: Jeremy Ronk

Swedish BizTalk User Group October 18th

by community-syndication | Oct 17, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

If you happen to live in Stockholm and work with BizTalk you should hurry up and get one of the last spots at the next Swedish BizTalk User Group meeting, me and Steef-JanWiggers are on stage talking about “BizTalk ServerAdministration Aspects”. As I’m writing this there is only 9 spots left! This is the first
Blog Post by: Tord Glad Nordahl

Score a Microsoft Surface from QuickLearn!

by community-syndication | Oct 17, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Have you heard that the Microsoft Surface is now available for pre-order?

Be one of the first to score the hottest Windows tablet! Register for any 5-day class before November 1st and when you attend you will receive a free Microsoft Surface from QuickLearn.

Visit QuickLearn’s Course Calendar and select your next course!

Take advantage of this offer while registering by using the promotion code: SURFACE.

This offer is only valid for 5-day courses from Kirkland, WA with a retail value of $2,995 or higher booked between October 17th and November 1st, 2012. Not valid when combined with any other offer or discount. Offer is for 32 GB Surface with Windows RT ($499 value). Does not include cover or accessories.

See the ads

Error on attaching DB

by community-syndication | Oct 17, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

When trying to reattach a database I kept getting following error:

In the SQL log I could find below error. The same error was given when trying to attach the DB with a T-SQL statement.

Msg 5120, Level 16, State 101, Line 3 Unable to open the physical file “E:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10_50.BTSISDEV1\MSSQL\DATA\BizTalkMsgBoxDb.mdf”. Operating system error 5: “5(failed to retrieve text for this error. Reason: 15105)”.

After several attempts on how to solve this I finally found the solution.
Turned out, all I needed to do was run the SQL Server Management Studio as an Administrator.
How can it be that simple, yet has me looking for a solution for over an hour :).

BizTalk WCF Service titbits – Organizing your BizTalk WCF Services in your Visual Studio Solution / Regenerating WCF Services / Adding WCF Services as a resource in your BizTalk Application

by community-syndication | Oct 17, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I’ve been asked quite often of late what the best way to keep track of BizTalk WCF Services is, and I have found myself changing my mind quite a few times on this one (theprevious incumbent involved creating WCF Service projects in my BizTalk solutions but I’ve since gone sour on this idea)before I settled […]
Blog Post by: Johann