Service Virtualization with the Managed Services Engine (MSE)

by community-syndication | Apr 27, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

My latest MSDN Magazine article entitled SOA Simplified: Service Virtualization with the Managed Services Engine hit the Web towards the end of last week. It focuses on simplifying large-scale SOA ecosystems by leveraging the concept of service virtualization as an abstraction for managing services over time.  Microsoft Services provides a technical solution for implementing service virtualization called the Managed Services Engine (MSE).  This article introduces the concepts of service virtualization and shows you how to get started with the MSE today. Hope you enjoy it.

You can download the MSE bits from CodePlex along with some installation guides, documentation, and some helpful screencast videos that illustrate exactly how to get started. Definitely worth checking out.

MBVQueryBuilder – Latest Version

by community-syndication | Apr 27, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Download it : MBVQueryBuilder.zip

Hello, 

This is the First version of MBVQueryBuilder tool, to integrate your custom Queries in MBV tool.


The zip to download contains :

– The tool itself MBVQueryBuilder.EXE

– Runtime DLLs : MBVEngine.DLL and MYHC.DLL

MYHC.DLL is in fact the runtime dll implementing My Health Check Framework and MBVEngine.DLL is the runtime dll using MyHC.DLL but is dedicated to analyze a BizTalk system.

– Versions of MBV Gui and MBV Console using the runtimes DLLs: MBVGUI.EXE and MBVCONSOLE.EXE

As MBVEngine.DLL and MYHC.DLL are both shared by MBVQueryBuilder.EXE and MBV client tools MBVGUI.EXE and MBVCONSOLE.EXE,
MBVEngine.DLL and MYHC.DLL must be so both located in same folder than the tools using them.

You can find here a quick help about this tool at :

http://blogs.technet.com/jpierauc/archive/2009/04/15/mbvquerybuilder-tool.aspx

Let me know please your feedbacks, questions, suggestions, and possible bugs found about this new tool

Thanks !

 JP

MBVQueryBuilder tool : What and Why ?

by community-syndication | Apr 27, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Hello,

As mentioned in a previous post //blogs.technet.com/jpierauc/archive/2009/04/01/comming-soon-tool-to-build-your-own-queries-for-mbv.aspx, I make available publicly now on my blog a tool complementary to MBV which will allow you to create easily and quickly your custom queries for MBV.

What is MBVQueryBuilder ?

This tool allow in fact to create quickly and easily additional queries for MBV tool
This tool can create and update a Query Repository XML file with all queries you will create and allow also to generate the queries you want in an XML MBV Extension file starting with name “MBVEXT”.

Why MBVQueryBuilder  ? 

MBV use a custom Health Check engine I developed (“MyHC” Engine) which is easily extensible in tem of queries and rules.
This extensibility is made possible via any XML file starting with name “MBVEXT” and located in same folder than MBV.

These MBV Extension File contain additional custom queries (with their rules if exist) which will appear in additional Queries tabs in MBV gui interface.

To generate easily and quickly such MBV Extension XML files, it became obvious to create a tool to do it.

Where to download laetst version of this tool ?

Where can I find a quick help on this tool ?

http://blogs.technet.com/jpierauc/archive/2009/04/15/mbvquerybuilder-tool.aspx

Ler me know please your feedbacks, questions, and suggestions about this tool

Tha%u00a8nks!

JP

BizTalk 2009 RTM – go get it!

by community-syndication | Apr 26, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Being an ex BizTalk Technical Specialist, this one is close to my heart 🙂 BTS 2009 RTM’d recently and the General Availability is imminent. Summarised, here are the most important changes (and you can visit the url: http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/roadmap.aspx#WhereWereGoing )

Key Features & Functions in BizTalk Server 2009:

%u00b7 Supports the latest Microsoft platform technologies including SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5.

%u00b7 New Hyper-V Virtualization Support: Takes advantage of the latest virtualization improvements included as part of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, which can lead to reduced costs through lower hardware, energy, and management overhead, plus the creation of a more dynamic IT infrastructure

%u00b7 New Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) support: Provides support for Team Foundation Server (TFS), and allows development teams to be able to leverage the integrated source control, bug tracking, support for team development, Project Server integration and support for automating builds via MSBuild.

%u00b7 New Web Services Registry — Includes a UDDI 3.0 registry which provides support for registry affiliation, extended discovery services, digital certificates and extensibility for a subscription API.

%u00b7 New Mobile RFID Platform and device management – Delivers a new lightweight platform for a variety of mobile devices, which simplifies the development of mobile applications that expose relevant, real-time business information. Also include support for key RFID industry standards (including LLRP, TDT, TDS, WS Discovery and partial EPCIS support).

%u00b7 Delivers other top features requested by our customers, including:

%u00b7 new and enhanced LOB adapters (Oracle EBS, SQL)

%u00b7 enhanced mainframe and AS400 host systems integration (updates to MQ, CICS, IMS, CICS)

%u00b7 enhanced B2B integration capabilities (updates to EDI, AS2, SWIFT)

%u00b7 a new release of ESB Guidance 2.0 patterns and practices.

Gov and Health – SQL 2008 SP1 is here

by community-syndication | Apr 26, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Just in case you have not seen any of the blogs or announcements!

Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2008 is now available for download here and is primarily a roll-up of previous cumulative updates, quick fix engineering updates and minor fixes made in response to requests reported through the SQL Server community. While there are no new features in this service pack, customers running SQL Server 2008 should download and install SP1 to take advantage of the fixes which increase supportability and stability of SQL Server 2008. With this service pack, Microsoft has made investments to ease deployment and make management of service packs more efficient. Key improvements in SP1 include Slipstream, Service Pack Uninstall and Report Builder 2.0 click-once deployment.

You can keep up to date with all SQL related news at the Insiders Blog: http://blogs.technet.com/dataplatforminsider/default.aspx

SQL Server Kilimanjaro and Madison webcast

by community-syndication | Apr 26, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

If you are up for an early morning start, check out the upcoming webcast:

This session will provide you with an sneak preview into the next release of SQL Server  codenamed ’Kilimanjaro’ as well as project ’Madison’ both of which will ship in the first half of CY 2010. This session will introduce at a high level the set of upcoming technologies in the areas of Self Service Business Intelligence, Application & Multi-Server Management and Scale-out Data Warehousing as well as several other key capabilities planned for the next release of SQL Server

http://www2.eventsvc.com/academylive/register/95712536-abbb-4621-a484-33cb28bce69c

Thursday, April 30, 2009 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM (Americas) Pacific Time (US & Canada)

(you can convert the time to work out when its beamed in your city!)

Now also a pipeline component library

by community-syndication | Apr 25, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Hi all

Just as i have started developing a functoid library (found at http://eebiztalkfunctoids.codeplex.com/)
I have also started developing a pipeline component library. Right now it contains
three components:

• DevNull. This pipeline component is quite simple. It will "swallow" everything
  that comes as input. This enables performance testing of stuff without concerns about
  adapter transport time at send port for instance.
• SearchAndReplace. This component will perform a search and replace on the incoming
  stream, replacing some string with some other string. Optionally, you can decide to
  let the input string be a regular expression and replace based on that instead of
  normal string search and replace.
• Promote. This component has three parameters, the name of a property, the namespace
  of the property and an XPath expression. The component will read in the value that
  corresponds to the XPath expression at runtime and promote it to the property given
  by the name and name space. This enables you to promote reoccurring elements.

You can find it at http://eebiztalkpipelinecom.codeplex.com/ –
the url is weird, I know. But there is a limit to the length of the urls at codeplex,
unfortunately.

—

eliasen

Promoting reoccurring elements – Part III

by community-syndication | Apr 25, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Hi all

So, first I had a post about
promoting reoccurring elements where I discussed 4 options for promoting an element
that can occur multiple times in the input. Then I had a post about
how you can pseudo do it in BizTalk 2000/2002.

This post is about two things:

1. Another way of doing it that doesn’t work
2. Writing the custom pipeline component that was my second suggestion in my first
   post.

First issue

As discussed in my first
post, if you change the XPath of the promoted property in the schema (either by
clicking the ellipsis as I wrote about or manually editing the XSD) to add the “[1]”,
you get this compilation error:

Node "ElementWhereNumber1IsPromoted" – The promoted property field or one
of its parents has Max Occurs greater than 1. Only nodes that are guaranteed to be
unique can be promoted as property fields.

But, since I couldn’t get the “[1]” to work in BizTalk 2000/2002 when editing my second
post I used the position function instead. So i started wondering if that might
work in BizTalk 2006 R2. It doesn’t, though. It compiles just fine, and I really had
my hopes up, but at runtime you get this error:

There was a failure executing the receive pipeline: "Microsoft.BizTalk.DefaultPipelines.XMLReceive,
Microsoft.BizTalk.DefaultPipelines, Version=3.0.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"
Source: "XML disassembler" Receive Port: "ReceivePort3" URI: "C:\Projects\Blog
Entries\PrommotingReoccurringElementsEditXSD\Instances\In\*.xml" Reason: Unexpected
XPath format:

So i had to drop that idea again.

Second issue

I decided to write the custom pipeline component that I discussed in my first
post.

The main code is easy – just three properties:

1. Name of the property
2. Namespace of the property
3. XPath

You can download it at http://eebiztalkpipelinecom.codeplex.com/ where
I have just made my initial release.

—

eliasen

Interview with Brian Loesged

by community-syndication | Apr 25, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Speaking at Northwest Arkansas Code Camp 2009, and you can join remotely

by community-syndication | Apr 25, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

At 3:30 today I’ll be speaking at the Northwest Arkansas Code Camp 2009 about Concurrency in .NET 4.0.  Not in NWA?  No worries.  These guys have all the rooms setup with LiveMeeting, and are going to be making the content available during the day. If you’d like to join, just enter the LiveMeeting associated with each room at the Code Camp, you can find the links to them here.

Come, join in the fun, ask questions, and learn something today!