I recently received a request for help from a customer about a problem that has started to occur with SQL Server jobs in BizTalk Server. Everything was working fine for the last few months until they begin receiving the following errors while the SQL Jobs was trying to execute:
The job failed. Unable to determine if the owner (domainusername) of job MessageBox_Message_ManageRefCountLog_BizTalkMsgBoxDb has server access (reason: Could not obtain information about Windows NT group/user ‘domainusername’, error code 0x534. [SQLSTATE 42000] (Error 15404)).
Cause
Actually, the reason for this error was quite simple, and it is an error that can happen relatively often if we do not take the necessary steps.
In this case, the user that performed the BizTalk Server installation and configuration was a personal account that was a member of the BizTalk Server Administration group, and by default, he is configured as the owner of that jobs. However, at some point, the employee left or terminated the contract and his account was terminated or disabled and that is the reason for that error started to happen.
Solution
The solution is simple, we need to change the owner. And to do that, we need:
Open the SQL Server Management Studio.
Expand SQL Server Agent, and then Jobs.
Right-click on job name, in this case, MessageBox_Message_ManageRefCountLog_BizTalkMsgBoxDb and select Properties
In the Owner field, select the sa account, or any other account, as the job owner using the ellipsis button
Do that steps for all the BizTalk Server SQL Jobs.
Recently while I was testing an integration solution on a client that uses a WCF-SAP adapter to receive an IDOC from the SAP system I got the following error:
The Messaging Engine failed to add a receive location “IN_IDOC_SAP” with URL “sap://CLIENT=003;LANG=EN;@a/ip-addres/00?ListenerGwHost=ip-address&ListenerGwServ=sapgw00&ListenerProgramId=name” to the adapter “WCF-SAP”. Reason: “Microsoft.ServiceModel.Channels.Common.ConnectionException: The parameter Program Id required for SAP Inbound Handler was not specified.
I knew I had this error in the past. Still, I couldn’t remember the reason immediately – this is one of the main reasons I often blog about the errors I face and solutions I found, my blog serves as my notes, and I’m one of the primary consumers of my blog.
Cause
Of course, and as always, there may be several reasons to face this problem, but in my case, the reason was quite simple.
If you pay attention to the URI on the error message and that highlight below:
BizTalk Server leverages the Enterprise Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities for securely storing critical information such as secure configuration properties (for example, the proxy user ID, and proxy password) for the BizTalk adapters. Therefore, the BizTalk Server requires SSO to work properly.
But it also can keep your own application configuration data in the SSO database, let say the usual configurations that we normally keep in a configuration file (“app.config”)). Unfortunately, there is no command-line tool to allow you to script the deployment SSO Application Configurations or perform CI/CD thru DevOps.
BizTalk Server SSO Application Configuration CLI
BizTalk ServerSSO Application Configuration CLI is a command-line tool that provides the ability to import SSO configuration applications – key-value pairs in the SSO database – that can be deployed to different environments. This way enables you to script these tasks.
This tool is designed to address this gap allowing you to:
You can securely import Application configurations by using this CLI application;
And it mandatory accepts 5 arguments:
Path: full path to the .sso file
Password: password to unencrypted the .sso file
Contact Info: Internal field that is normally in the format of an email that is used internally in SSO tables for Application Configurations
Application User Account: SSO Affiliate Administrators Group or the Group that will access (read) key.values, for example: BizTalk Application Users.
Application Admin Account: SSO Administrator Group – Administrators of the Enterprise Single Sign-On (SSO) service.
Download
THIS TOOL IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND.
You can download BizTalk Server SSO Application Configuration Tool from GitHub here:
This is a so common task on BizTalk Server that I already forgot how many times I did it. Depending on several scenarios, like:
Testing
Certain parts of the application are not yet ready to production
Or even discarded unwanted messages
We want/need to create a send port and subscribe specific messages to be discarded on a folder. Otherwise, they will get stuck on the administration console, and we don’t want that.
After a while, the problem is that the folder will get a considerable amount of messages, and writing a large number of files to disk will get progressively slower as the number of files in the target directory gets large. This is because your computer’s operating system must keep track of all files in a directory. Even bulk deleting all of these files will take a longer time. Moving or deleting files from the target directory on a regular basis will ensure that the performance is not adversely affected.
A large number of small files make more impact than a small number of large files, and most of the time, BizTalk Server consumes/produces small messages. However, at some point, you may completely fill the hard drive, which is more critical.
With this script, you can easily configure the folders and the type of files you want to monitor and delete.
Patrick Wellink, a long-time BizTalk Server consultant from the Netherlands, asked me to broadcast this news. I’m happy to do it because I know that many of you use and like BizTalk Deployment Framework (BTDF) to perform deployment across your environments.
Patrick suppresses a need by developing a Visual Studio 2019 plugin (VSIX) for BizTalk Server 2020. Of course, there was already a new version of The BTDF Framework. But one of the convenient things was the visual studio plugin… that was missing.
Unfortunately, and I understand this feeling entirely because I also have several community projects, we always have to for the owner and developer to upgrade his project, and we usually struggle to find the time. So I take this opportunity to encourage all community members to start contributing to these initiatives as Patrick did. Start performing changes and submit your contributions to the repo. I speak for myself, and from what I know from the community, we accept the changes and are happy that you contribute.
And it wasn’t that difficult, rephrasing Patrick:
With some guidance of this post and some fiddeling I got the VSIX to work for VS2019. After some more fiddeling I got the project wizard to run as well.
I did so with minimal effort.
Where I can download it
You can download the Visual Studio 2019 plugin (VSIX) for BizTalk Server 2020 here:
Surprisingly enough, or not, legacy systems can still be found across many organizations. IBM MQ is a family of message-oriented middleware products that IBM launched in December 1993. It was called MQSeries initially and was renamed WebSphere MQ in 2002 to join the suite of WebSphere products. In April 2014, it was renamed to IBM MQ.
We can mainly see the use and the need for integration with these products in banks systems. BizTalk Server provides two ways to communicate with IBM MQ:
By using the MQSeries built-in adapter that will act as a bridge between Microsoft BizTalk Server and IBM MQSeries servers:
The MQSeries adapter is available with the BizTalk Server installation. It supports transactional and non-transactional messaging by setting the Transaction Supported property in the MQSeries adapter transport properties
The MQSeries adapter uses the MQSAgent2 COM+ application to put/get messages into the IBM WebSphere Queue Manager
The MQSeries adapter requires IBM’s MQSeries Server for Windows to reside on the client system to communicate with an IBM WebSphere Queue Manager running on Windows or non-Windows. MQSeries Server for Windows is not a Microsoft product and must be obtained from your IBM WebSphere MQ program
By using the Host Integration Server (HIS) that provides a WCF Channel for MQ and BizTalk Adapter for MQ Series Client (MQSC) — depending on the version of BizTalk Server you are using that will support a variety of IBM WebSphere versions:
The MQSC adapter is a light-weight component of MQ that does not require the MQSeries Queue Manager run-time code to reside on a client system. The MQSC adapter is available in the BizTalk Adapters for Host Systems installation part of Host Integration Server (HIS). This adapter can connect to an IBM WebSphere Queue Manager on Windows or non-Windows. It also supports transactional and non-transactional messaging
This whitepaper’s goal is not how to install and configure MQSeries, neither compare the advantages or disadvantages of using this adapter compared to MQSC. Instead, this whitepaper’s focus is on improving the performance of the MQSeries adapter to better support low latency scenarios that most of the time are required in financial transactions.
Where I can download it
You can download the whitepaper here:
You can also find, download and enjoy several other free whitepapers of my own here:
Recently I wrote my version of a script that Mike Stephenson initially created: Find Orphaned Azure API Connectors with PowerShell. This PowerShell script will look at all of the API Connections in a specific resource group and then inspect every Logic App in your resource group to check if the API Connections are being used or not. The goal of this script, of course, is to identify orphaned API Connections in a single Resource Group quickly and effectively.
I modify the original script to have a better output or at least a different output that works better for my needs. Automatically add a Deprecated tag on all the API Connectors with the value True or False. And add additional capabilities on the generation of the output report in a CSV format.
The only limitation of this script is that it only checks a specific Resource Group. So, if you have 3 or 4 Resources Groups, you need to configure this script and run it 3 or 4 times.
To streamline this process and not waste so much time, I decided to create a new version of this script. This new script will look at all the API Connections in all resource groups on a single Azure Subscription and then inspect every Logic App in that specific Resource Group (RG) to check if the API Connections of that RG are being used or not.
What’s new on this PowerShell script:
It will check in all Resources Groups available on a single Subscription if API Connections are being used or not.
Subscription Details output is improved and with coloring to better read
List of available API Connectors group by Resource Group output is improved and with coloring to better read
List of Logic Apps and API Connectors association group by Resource Group and Logic App output is improved and with coloring to better read
List of Orphaned API Connectors order by Resource Group output is improved and with coloring to better read
Download
THIS POWERSHELL SCRIPT IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND.
You can download Find Orphaned API Connectors in all Resource Groups from GitHub here:
Last week was Microsoft MVP renewal time – as you’ll probably have seen – and usually, I share this news firsthand, but this year my wife caught me off guard and in a week of hard work and was faster than me!
I’m delighted to share with you that on July 1st, I was renewed as a Microsoft Azure MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) for one more year. This is my 11th straight year on the MVP Program, a fantastic journey that started in 2011, back them as a BizTalk Server MVP. It looks like it was yesterday! And even though it’s already been 11 years, I still feel the same joy, excitement, and privilege of belonging to this group as on the first day!
It is an honor and privilege to be among great minds and community leaders! I want to send a big thanks to Cristina González Herrero, Irene Otero Perez for all the fantastic work managing the program in my region. And to all my fellow MVPs, my beautiful family, my coworkers, and to my team at DevScope, and in special all my blog readers, friends, members of Microsoft Enterprise Integration Community – THANKS! Thanks for your support during these years.
Historically, deploying BizTalk Server solutions across environments is or can be a complicated process depending how complex is your solution. There are many ways to deploy BizTalk artifacts for example:
Importing them as part of an application by using the Deployment Wizard (from an .msi file), importing them using BTSTask.exe – this is the default way to deploy across environments.
You can replace and use allow BTSTask, PowerShell scripts.
Or deploy them from Visual Studio – this is the default way to deploy to your development environment.
During the years, the BizTalk Server Community created an open-source deployment framework called Deployment Framework for BizTalk (BTDF) – https://github.com/BTDF/DeploymentFramework. The Deployment Framework for BizTalk is an easy-to-use toolkit for deploying and configuring your BizTalk solutions. In reality, BTDF is an MSBuild project with custom MSBuild tasks, and it can be customizable according to customer BizTalk project needs, and it is extensible. This framework brings new capabilities and advantages to deploying BizTalk Server solutions, but it also has limitations or disadvantages.
Azure DevOps and Azure Pipelines
Microsoft has introduced automated deployment of BizTalk Applications in BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Packs using Azure DevOps (previously called Visual Studio Team Services – VSTS). In BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 1, automatic deployment and application lifecycle management (ALM) experience was introduced. The automatic deployment process has been improved with the release of BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2. These features were only available on the Enterprise edition of BizTalk Server 2016.
BizTalk Server 2020 brings all these functionalities out-of-the-box across all editions: Enterprise, Standard, Development, or Branch.
To accomplish this, we need basically 3 steps:
BizTalk Server: Add a BizTalk Server Application project in your Visual Studio solution.
We will not address this topic today.
DevOps: Create a build agent.
DevOps: Create a Build and release Azure Pipeline.
Today we will talk about starting to configure your Azure Pipeline to create a BizTalk Server Build Agent.
Create a Personal Access Token
A personal access token (PAT) is created in DevOps. This token is your password and is used by the DevOps build agent to authenticate. The token is only shown when you create it. After that, it isn’t shown anymore. Once you create it, you should save it to another file in a rememberable location.
If you do not have an account, select Create new account, and enter a name. To manage your code, choose your personal preference between Git or Team Foundation Version Control. When finished, your new account is created, you will be able to access Azure DevOps Portal.
Select your DevOps organization and then click the top second right-side corner icon – User settings – and select User settings > Personal access tokens.
The Personal Access Tokens page will be presented a list of all existing personal access tokens.
If you don’t have an existing PAT for your agent, select Add, and on the Create a new personal access token page, enter the following configuration:
On the Name property, enter a name for your PAT, for example, BizTalk Build Agent.
On the Organization property, leave the default organization.
On the Expiration (UTC) property, set an expiration date, for example, 90 days.
In Scopes, select Show all scopes, and then select Agent Pools – Read & manage option and Connected server – Connected server.
Select Create to finish the PAT creation.
Important Note: You need to save the token value. You need it in future steps. If you don’t know the access token value and didn’t take note of it anywhere, it cannot be retrieved. In this case, you need to create a new PAT.
Install the Build Agent
The build agent is installed on the BizTalk development computer. If using deployment groups, the build agent is installed on all the BizTalk servers you want to deploy to. Also, use these same steps to add a build computer, which might be different than the BizTalk development computer.
The following steps show you how to install the build agent on a single computer:
Open your Azure DevOps organization and then select the Organization settings icon and then Agent Pools.
Optional you can choose a Project inside your Organization and then select the Project settings icon and select Agent Pools.
Open Agent pools page, select the Default (Azure Pipelines) agent.
On the Default agent page, select New agent.
On the Get the agent pop-up window, select your SO, and on the Download the agent section, select Download.
It is important for you to save the file to your Downloads folder – on your BizTalk Server Development machine since the scripts will be referencing that folder.
Depending on your SO, this will download a zip file, for example, vsts-agent-win-x64-2.188.3.zip, that you will need to create the agent on the BizTalk Server Development machine.
The first step is to create the agent on your BizTalk Server Development machine. To do that open Windows PowerShell as Administrator and type the following command:
Note: The vsts-agent file version changes. Make sure the zip file name is the correct one.
The second step, as you also see in the picture is to configure the agent. To do that type the following command:
PS C:agent> .config.cmd
Enter the following details:
Server URL: Type https://dev.azure.com/{your-organization}.
Authentication Type: Enter PAT.
Personal access token: Paste your Azure DevOps token.
Agent pool: Click Enter for assuming the default value.
Agent name: Click Enter for assuming the default value.
Replace: Only displays if you have an existing agent.
Work folder: Click Enter for assuming the default value.
Run agent as a service: Enter Y.
User account: This value is up to you, but you may run into a permissions issue. Consider entering your current logged-on account, which is a local admin.
To validate if the agent was properly installed, Open services.msc to see the new service called Azure Pipelines Agent (<organization>.<agent pool>.<server>). The job should be running, otherwise type the following command:
PS C:agent> .run.cmd
Now, if we go back to our DevOps organization > Organization settings > Agent pools > Default (Azure Pipelines) > Agents, you will see your BizTalk Server Development server on the list:
I’m not a Dynamics 265 expert, and Dynamics 365 is not my focus area. Nevertheless, I couldn’t ignore the flood of requests to add the new Dynamics 365 logos, especially the App icons. It took a while, but they are finally here.
What’s new in this version?
These are the list of changes and additions present in this major release:
New shapes: There are new shapes on the following Visio Stencils files (.vssx):
MIS Office, Office 365 and Dynamics 365: add the new Dynamic 265 logo, Dynamics 365 App Icons, and Dynamics 365 Mixed Reality Icons.
MIS Azure Stencils and MIS Azure Additional or Support Stencils: there were a few new icons add to the stencils, most of them related to new preview features and integration services like the new Logic App icon.
SVG files: new SVG files added.
Microsoft Integration, Azure, Power Platform, Office 365 and much more Stencils Pack
Microsoft Integration, Azure, Power Platform, Office 365 and much more Stencils Pack it’s a Visio package that contains fully resizable Visio shapes (symbols/icons) that will help you to visually represent On-premise, Cloud or Hybrid Integration and Enterprise architectures scenarios (BizTalk Server, API Management, Logic Apps, Service Bus, Event Hub…), solutions diagrams and features or systems that use Microsoft Azure and related cloud and on-premises technologies in Visio 2016/2013:
BizTalk Server
Microsoft Azure
Integration
Integration Service Environments (ISE)
Logic Apps and Azure App Service in general (API Apps, Web Apps, and Mobile Apps)
Azure API Management
Messaging: Event Hubs, Event Grid, Service Bus, …
Azure IoT and Docker
AI, Machine Learning, Stream Analytics, Data Factory, Data Pipelines
SQL Server, DocumentDB, CosmosDB, MySQL, …
and so on
Microsoft Power Platform
Microsoft Flow
PowerApps
Power BI
Office365, SharePoint,…
DevOps and PowerShell
Security and Governance
And much more…
… and now non-related Microsoft technologies like:
SAP Stencils
The Microsoft Integration Stencils Pack is composed of 27 files:
Microsoft Integration Stencils
MIS Additional or Support Stencils
MIS AI and Machine Learning Stencils
MIS Apps and Systems Logo Stencils
MIS Azure Additional or Support Stencils
MIS Azure Black and Gray
MIS Azure Old Versions
MIS Azure Stencils
MIS Black and Cyan
MIS Buildings Stencils
MIS Databases and Analytics Stencils
MIS Deprecated Stencils
MIS Developer Stencils
MIS Devices Stencils
MIS Files and Message Types Stencils
MIS Generic Stencils
MIS Infrastructure and Networking Stencils
MIS Integration Fun
MIS Integration Patterns Stencils
MIS IoT Stencils
MIS Office, Office 365 and Dynamics 365
MIS Power BI Stencils
MIS Power Platform Stencils
MIS SAP Stencils
MIS Security and Governance
MIS Servers (Hexagonal) Stencils
MIS Users and Roles Stencils
Organisational Stencils
That you can use and resize without losing quality, in particular, the new shapes.
Download
You can download Microsoft Integration, Azure, BAPI, Office 365 and much more Stencils Pack for Visio from GitHub Here:
