I couldn’t resist commenting on this issue. I was just doing some final prep for my VBUG talk tomorrow and came across Richard Hallgren’s oddly titled post – Does BizTalk have man-boobs?. Richard writes about a QCon webcast of a session done by Martin Fowler and Jim Webber and writes
“Their main point is that we […]
I’m thrilled to announce that Dallas TechFest 2009 is a go, for Friday April 17th, 2009. As such we are on the hunt for speakers willing to come out and share their knowledge. If you’re interested in speaking at Dallas TechFest, then here is what we would like:
Then for each session you’d like to present please send:
Once you’ve collected all that information, please send it away to [email protected] and we’ll review the submissions and let you know. We would like your submissions by March 6th, 2009 so we can finalize the schedule for events. We know this is short notice for speakers, and truly appreciate the great presenters in our region rising to the challenge.
Please remember we welcome all technologies at Dallas TechFest and expect to have tracks on Java, Ruby, PHP, Cold Fusion, Adobe Flex, as well as Microsoft technologies.
[Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman]
We had an issue with one of our BizTalk estates with incoming messages being suspended if they were bigger than the large message threshold:
A response message sent to adapter “WCF-BasicHttp” on Receive Location: “x” with URI:”y” is suspended. Error details: There was a failure executing the response(receive) pipeline: “z” Source: “Unknown ” Send Port: “x” URI: “y” Reason: 0x8004d027
The error message wasn’t particularly helpful but the reason code 0x8004d027 had a few threads and posts relating to DTC. This made sense as we’re in a distributed environment so DTC will be used to create message fragments under a transaction, if the whole message exceeds the threshold size. Using Web Service Studio I found the expected message size, and setting the large message threshold above that figure fixed the problem so that seemed to confirm it.
We finally tracked the issue down to permissions on the cluster where MSDTC was running. Buried in the Event Log for the BizTalk host suspending the messages was this error:
The application could not connect to MSDTC because of insufficient permissions. Please make sure that the identity under which the application is running has permission to access the cluster. Please refer to MSCS documentation on how to grant permissions. Error Specifics: d:\nt\com\complus\dtc\dtc\msdtcprx\src\dtcinit.cpp:652, Pid: 6772 No Callstack, CmdLine: “C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\BTSNTSvc.exe” -group “BizTalk Group” -name “x” -btsapp “y”
This was logged when the BizTalk service started, which had been the day before we found the suspended messages, so I didn’t see the connection. This post from Ben Cops: http://bencops.blogspot.com/2008/12/error-on-installing-sso-on-clustered.html pointed me in the right direction, and the steps for adding permissions are simple – the only oddity is that you set permissions at the cluster level, not at the resource level:
This and a host restart fixed the issue. Along the way we did notice a couple of other issues in our MSDTC configuration which we tracked down and fixed with DTCPing. Worth noting that in Windows Server 2003 the properties for MSDTC under dcomcnfg may not correctly reflect the registry settings, so while you think DTC security is configured like this:
– it may actually be configured like this:
The DTCPing log will tell you what registry settings are in use, and the BizTalk Best Practices Analyzer will warn you if the DTC security settings are incorrect, so worth double-checking this.
I came across a little nasty, when trying to send email from the smtp adapter. If you look down deep …
Quick note: the slides for the Auckland Connected Systems User Group presentation last week “Introduction to Oslo” with Jeremy Boyd can be downloaded from the meeting page (under attachments):
http://www.acsug.co.nz/Meetings/Olso-modelling-platform-Overview-Jeremy-Boyd.aspx
Also, get the meeting demos from JB’s blog:
http://www.mindscape.co.nz/staff/jeremy/index.php/2009/02/introduction-to-oslo/
This was a great presentation and I can’t thank JB enough for coming up to Auckland to present for […]
Hopefully you’ve been keeping an eye on this in recent times.
This is a Set of Adapters that MS have built on top of the WCF LOB Adapter
SDK (a platform neutral .NET based Adapter framework).
This allows the Adapters to run within the .NET stack almost anywhere – Console apps,
Custom WebServices, BizTalk, SSIS, SharePoint etc.
(Build once – run everywhere 🙂
The public beta is available as a 120-day d/l from MS
Connect.
What to expect with the Adapter Pack
(in addition to a free migration tool to go from the old adapters to the new – e.g.
SQL)
Oracle EBS
%u00b7 64 bit support
%u00b7 Synonyms
%u00b7 Added performance counters
%u00b7 Notification support
OracleDB
%u00b7 64 bit support
%u00b7 Synonyms
%u00b7 UDTs
%u00b7 Notifications
%u00b7 Polling stored procedures
%u00b7 Performance counters
SQL Adapter
%u00b7 64 bit support and improved SQL
Adapter SDK
%u00b7 Display complex binding properties
%u00b7 Display metadata wsdl in web control
SAP data provider
%u00b7 Support for more operators in Sap Queries
%u00b7 SAP SSRS support in VS2008
Samples
%u00b7 New Samples for SQL and Oracle eBiz Adapters
%u00b7 Repackaged samples for BAP 1.0
I’ve written a few queries to get counts from a BizTalk tracking database – grouped by schema, schema per host, ports, and orchestration event tracking – to help me and the team advise out clients on what tracking should be turned off on their BizTalk environment. They go well together with the report you get […]
I will be presenting an introductory session to Biztalk 2006 R2 (and spending some time on the WCF adapters) at the local chapter of VBUG in Bracknell.Of course, we will also spend a little while discussing the impact of Oslo and Dublin and the factors to keep in mind when choosing your integration technologies.
Despite the […]
When you generate a class out of a schema with an element configured to allow mixed content (child attributes and elements as well as text), you should expect the corresponding generated field type to be a string array;
So – if you have a schema that looks like this
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<xs:schema targetNamespace=”http://tempuri.org/XMLSchema.xsd” elementFormDefault=”qualified” xmlns=”http://tempuri.org/XMLSchema.xsd” xmlns:mstns=”http://tempuri.org/XMLSchema.xsd”
xmlns:xs=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema”>
<xs:element name=”SomeElement”>
<xs:complexType mixed=”true”>
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element name=”Child1″ type=”xs:string”/>
<xs:element name=”Child2″ type=”xs:string”/>
<xs:element name=”Child3″ type=”xs:string”/>
</xs:sequence>
<xs:attribute name=”SomeAttribute” type=”xs:string”/>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
</xs:schema>
(not ’SomeElement’ being a complex type allowing mixed content)
The fields in the generated class would look like
public partial class SomeElement { private string child1Field; private string child2Field; private string child3Field; private string[] textField; private string someAttributeField; . . .
The reason is that an XML corresponding to the schema might look like this –
<SomeElement xmlns="http://tempuri.org/XMLSchema.xsd" SomeAttribute="someAttributeValue"> Some free text <Child1>Child1 text</Child1> Some more free text <Child2>Child2 text</Child2> yet some more free text <Child3>Child3 text</Child3> </SomeElement>
And so by using a string array to hold the text the deserialiser can keep string portion separately.
Initially, I thought, this allows the structure to represent the original xml accurately, but this is not exactly the case – you would still not know for certain where each string portion existed, especially if in the source XML you get a few elements that don’t have text between them, which , I suspect, is why when I serialise the instance back to xml I actually get –
<?xml version="1.0"?> <SomeElement xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" SomeAttribute="someAttributeValue" xmlns="http://tempuri.org/XMLSchema.xsd"> <Child1>Child1 text</Child1> <Child2>Child2 text</Child2> <Child3>Child3 text</Child3> Some free text Some more free text yet some more free text </SomeElement>
Now, I don’t particularly like this sort of xml, and shy away from mixed content; I don’t believe that xml snippets like my samples above are useful, specifically I don’t think that mixing elements and text is particularly nice.
However, consider an element with an attribute and some text – the following is quite reasonable I think, and yet requires mixed content –
<Phone type=”mobile”>some text here</Phone>
I just installed Microsoft Enterprise Service Bus Guidance framework (November 2007 version for BizTalk 2006 R2). Although lengthy installation process is well documented in the accompanying help file I ran into multiple issues and it took a couple of days to sort everything out.I’d like to mention here majorproblems/solutions in case somebody decides to go through the same.First, if you install on other than default location (C:/%PROGRAM_FILES% and C:/Projects)make sureto update all scripts and command files as well as bindings.Second, I had issue withUDDI service configuration. It wouldn’t install until I enabled NTLM authentication for IIS.It is done by executing IIS utility scriptper this MS article. But thiscommand workedonly when I dropped quotes around Negotiate,NTLM contrary to MS KB article. Also,make sure the default web site ID is “1”. Some of my computers had it set to different numbers so I had to change command line appropriately. In the end command that worked looks like this:
cscript adsutil.vbs get w3svc/<Default Web Site ID>/root/NTAuthenticationProviders Negotiate,NTLM
Anotherproblem is that assemblies in MSI packagesare signed with different key comparing to source projects. So even if you install all ESB componentsfrom source you will run into this issue because some of the projects reference assemblies from packaged installation. Solution is to go through all project references, remove them and add new to ones generated from source code. The same applies to sample applications. Don’t install them from MSI if you chose source code based ESB installation. Open project, update references, rebuild and deploy.