Yesterday was a big day for Tellago Studios . After a few months hands down working, we announced the release of the SO-Aware Test Workbench tool which brings sophisticated performance testing and test visualization capabilities to theWCF world. This…(read more)
BizTalk is a great tool but sometimes the output is a little unreadable because of the number of namespaces in a document. This post is related to a previous post where I had to import a zillion schemas . Once I had those schema's imported I could…(read more)
I recently participated with our MCS Canada team on a large BizTalk 2009 and CRM 4.0 integration project. I gained a ton of experience about CRM integration from that project and I thought I’d speak about it at our semi-annual TechReady internal conference. Not long before TechReady though, we release CRM 2011 and I realized that speaking about BizTalk 2009 and CRM 4.0 was about as relevant as speaking about Windows 98 and Trumpet Winsock implementations (I was reading a Slashdot article this week about the Trumpet Winsock creator so that’s where the reference came from). I hastily decided to refocus the presentation on CRM 2011 and BizTalk 2010. That meant that I had to quickly figure out exactly what the integration story was between these two products. After a bunch of trial and error and some helpful conversations with folks from the CRM 2011 team, I figure out the options. It turns out that you have TWO options for integrating BizTalk 2010 and CRM 2011. Yes indeed, you have two different methods to choose from when integrating these two products! I ended up having a fairly relevant and well received presentation to deliver. From that internal session, I’ve repurposed my content into a publicly ready format and created a shorter walk through video that explains the two options that you have. Instead of trying to write a lengthy blog post about how to do that, I’ve just filmed a walkthrough of the process. (I found that these video walkthroughs were highly successful when I did them for the BizTalk ESB, so I thought I’d do them again here for CRM) Also, I’ve included the source code project that I use in the video so that you can get a jumpstart on your process.
All in all, I found the process to be a very simple one once I figure out a few basic concepts. Hopefully, this blog post will help you figure out those concepts more quickly than I did. Once you’ve got a grip on those, then I believe you’ll find this integration process to be a very easy one. As with most of these blog videos that I do, I created this after midnight when the house was quite so if you find some issues or bloopers, let me know and I’ll correct them.
Below is an overview of the components, tools and services at play in to the process. In the video, I’ll walk you through this diagram in more depth before showing you the actual project I built. In this diagram, you can see that there is data flowing from BizTalk out to the CRM 2011 cloud service as well as data flowing from CRM 2011 Online back through the firewall to BizTalk on-premise. In this first video, I focus on the BizTalk to CRM 2011 Online option. In a day or two, I’ll post a second video that shows the CRM 2011 Online event notification being sent back to an BizTalk on-premise installation. (it’s a cool one)
This is quite a long video (>45 minutes) so I had to split it into a multipart zip file in order to get it to fit into my SkyDrive folder.
You can get:
You’ll need to download both parts of the zip file and then use WinZip to extract them.
Cheers and stay connected people
Peter
One of the major limitations of traditional SOA governance platforms is the lack of integration as part of the development process. Tools like HP-Systinet or SOA Software are designed to operate by models on which the architects dictate the governance…(read more)
Firstly thanks for all that attended my 5pm – ’fireside’ session.
I definitely was a first for me having a session so late in the day. I took my shoes
off, wiggled my toes and got into it up on stage.
The session was pretty light and easy to follow along as to get bogged down into the
deep technicalities of data storage within SharePoint was going to put all to sleep.
During the session I spoke about (& demo-ed) each approach from Site/Web Property
bags, Custom Service Apps, Lists/External Lists Pros and Cons of each – all good.
Here’s my slide deck guys – Enjoy.
SLIDE
DECK – PPTX
Prior to the MVP Summit, Johan Hedberg and Mikael H%u00e5kansson stopped by Calgary and participated in a Mini-BizTalk Technical conference for my company and three other sister companies. In addition to their presentations we had a round table discussion to find out how the other companies are using BizTalk and had two other presentations; one by myself and another by a colleague Luciano Barbieri.
Below you will find links to the various sessions. I wish I would have recorded these sessions as the demos were excellent. Maybe next time.
A natural follow up to my BizTalk 2010: Calling Dynamics CRM 4.0 Web Services post is one that deals with the Exceptions, or Faults, that these Web Services may return. When using the CRM 4.0 Adapter, the adapter would take care of handling SOAP exceptions and bundling them up into a CRM Response message that had a Return Code and Error Nodes. Whether your operation was successful or not, you could always expect the same type of response message from CRM.
<ns0:Response xmlns:ns0="http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/BizTalkAdapter/Response">
<Header>
<ReturnCode>1</ReturnCode>
<ErrorCode />
<ErrorString />
<Retryable />
</Header>
Now that we are not using this adapter anymore we need to be able to catch our own exceptions coming out of CRM. If we don’t perform these actions below(or similar actions) we can expect an error message like the following.
Inner exception: Received unexpected message type ‘http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/#Fault’ does not match expected type ‘http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2007/WebServices#CreateResponse’.
The issue is we have a Solicit Response Send Port in which we are sending a typed Request message into CRM and are expecting a typed Response message in return. When we encounter a SOAP Fault, a typed message is being returned, it just isn’t what we are expecting. In order to avoid these situations, we need to perform the following actions within our BizTalk solution.
Note: these actions are not specific to CRM, but may be used in other Web Service scenarios.
<ns0:CreateResponse xmlns:ns1="http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2007/CoreTypes" xmlns:ns2="http://microsoft.com/wsdl/types/" xmlns:ns3="http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2006/Query" xmlns:ns0="http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2007/WebServices" xmlns:ns4="http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2006/Scheduling" xmlns:ns5="http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2006/WebServices" xmlns:ns6="http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2006/CoreTypes">
<ns0:CreateResult>soap:Server – Server was unable to process request. -</ns0:CreateResult>
</ns0:CreateResponse>
Note: some other blog posts mention using an XPATH statement, within our WCF Send Port, for both types of messages that we are expecting; typed CRM response and SOAP Fault. In my scenario, this step was not required since I am expecting a typed SOAP Fault exception object within my Scope – Exception handler.
Just to let everyone know the BizTalk Light and Easy Webcast Series has been updated with some new BizTalk 2010 videos
http://www.cloudcasts.net/Default.aspx?category=BizTalk+Light+and+Easy
The project that I am on ran into a critical and somewhat embarrassing situation this past week. As we moved from a single node project environment into a multi-node test environment we discovered that the Dynamics 4.0 Adapter cannot be installed on multiple BizTalk Servers in the same group. Yes – you read that correctly. I have never heard of this kind of limitation and struggle with the idea the adapter was actually made available without this feature. You can read more about this limitation in the FAQ section here.
With this in mind, we needed to quickly make a 180 degree turn. I had heard of other people calling the ASMX CRM Web Services from BizTalk via WCF Adapter. The process of consuming these ASMX services is much like consuming any other Web Service. That is until you start your application and get the dreaded 401 Unauthorized error.
System.ServiceModel.Security.MessageSecurityException: The HTTP request is unauthorized with client authentication scheme ‘Negotiate’. The authentication header received from the server was ‘Negotiate,NTLM’. —> System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized
This seems like a pretty common error within the BizTalk and CRM forums. However, I was not able find any resolutions to the issue. It wasn’t until I started stepping through a .NET SDK sample that I realized that I was missing something and that was a required SOAP header. For your convenience I have built an end to end sample that will walk through creating a Lead within a Dynamics 4.0 system. Keep an eye open for the Message Assignment shape where I assign this header.
msgCreateCustomer (WCF.OutboundCustomHeaders) = "<headers><CrmAuthenticationToken xmlns=\"http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2007/WebServices\"><AuthenticationType xmlns=\"http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2007/CoreTypes\">0</AuthenticationType><OrganizationName xmlns=\"YourOrganizationhttp://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2007/CoreTypes\">YourOrganization</OrganizationName><CallerId xmlns=\"http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2007/CoreTypes\">00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000</CallerId></CrmAuthenticationToken></headers>";
Conclusion
If you have high-availability requirements then I highly recommend abandoning the Dynamics CRM 4.0 adapter. Currently, and I am not sure if there are any plans, CRM 2011 does not have an adapter so now is as good as time as any to make the move. You can read more about CRM 2011 integration on Richard Seroter’s blog. Also look for a chapter on CRM 2011 integration in our upcoming book.