BizTalk Server 2009 announcement

by | Sep 25, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I’m a bit late because of my extended bout of 100% travel, much of it disconnected, but I thought I’d do a post about this anyhow because it is a very significant piece of news.

Microsoft has announced that what was previously being called BizTalk Server 2006R3 has been renamed to BizTalk Server 2009.

Why is this announcement important? Because, if you’ve been following my blog and others, you know that Oslo and a wave of other technologies is heading towards us, and that there will be a first-release of some of this at the PDC in October. Many people are probably wondering: what does this mean to existing BizTalk customers? Are their investments protected? Is there a migration path? Is migration something that needs to be done? The BizTalk Server 2009 announcement should go a long way to reassuring people that their investments are protected, and that there is a BizTalk future in Oslo-land.

In the announcement, Microsoft also reaffirmed their commitment to continuing to release new versions of BizTalk Server at 2 year intervals.

Key highlights of what will be in BizTalk Server 2009 are:

  • Support for Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio .NET 2008 and SQL Server 2008
  • Support for Hyper-V virtualization
  • A new version of Microsoft’s ESB Guidance (more on this later, it’s an impressive release)
  • UDDI 3.0
  • Team Foundation Services integration (MSBuild)
  • EDI Enhancements
  • RFID support for LLRP protocol, TDT standard, and Mobility stack
  • New SQL and Oracle Apps adapters
  • Upgrades for .NET 3.5 compatibility
  • SWIFT enhancements

For more info:

  • You can read more about this at the press pass interview with Connected Systems GM Oliver Sharp
  • You can read more about BizTalk Server 2009, and beyond, at the BizTalk Roadmap page
Technorati Tags: BizTalk,ESB,BizTalk Server

Sprint Zero

by | Sep 25, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Some teams use a Sprint 0 to prepare their product backlog, the infrastructure (development environment, CI server), … .Is this part of Scrum? Is it useful? http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/09/sprint_zero Subscribe in a reader Join my blog network on Read More……(read more)

Differences in BizTalk Subscription Handling for SOAP and WCF Adapter Messages

by | Sep 25, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I recently encountered a bit of a “gotcha” when looking at how BizTalk receives WCF messages through its adapters.  I expected my orchestration subscription for messages arriving from either the SOAP adapter or WCF adapter to behave similarly, but alas, they do not.
Let’s say I have two schemas.  I’m building an RPC-style service that takes […]

BizTalk 2006 R2 Pre-requisites CAB Files

by | Sep 25, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

With many thanks to Sanket for posting this information originally, I wanted to post these links here so that the next time I can save my self the Google search and just hit this post.  These links are for the EN language, but there’s a link at the bottom to the full list for all languages.

Windows 2003 Server 32 bit

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=81468

Windows 2003 Server 64 bit

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=81459

Vista 64 bit

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=81423

Vista 32 bit

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=81432

Windows XP 32 bit

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=81450

Windows XP 64 bit

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=81441

For a complete list of all the downloads in all the languages, you can use this link –

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa578652.aspx

Security Measures in relation to PHI with BTAHL7

by | Sep 25, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Microsoft has put a lot of effort into making your environment secure, however, that still does not absolve you of some things that you still have to configure.

Here is an example (using the examples in the SDK) of showing PHI:

Notice that you can essentially see EVERYTHING in that message, including that ever-so-important PHI.

There are a few things that you can to to remove/restrict access to that PHI.

Because there is the ability to see PHI in non secure places, Microsoft has a couple of places that you use to secure that data, based on your security policy. In some instances, the security stops at the firewall, if an intruder gets past the firewall, they have the keys to the kingdom. This security policy is fine for most instances, (thank goodness)! In my case, the last thing I want to do is have to peel off the layers of security to simply figure out that an element is missing from the HL7 message. At 2:00 am I simply want to log in and find out what is going on, what the error is, and fix it.

However, there are some out there that either do not trust their network admins, want to make troubleshooting harder, don’t trust their co workers, or were forced to implement additional security around PHI. For those, here are a few things that are available to increase security around PHI>

The first would be to turn off Event Logging and possibly choose SQL where more restrictions can be managed.

(Remember to restart the Audit and Logging Service)

Another would be to simply restrict who can have access to the event log in the first place, this can be done by changing the following key in the registry (did you see my disclaimer on the right side of this blog?)

Hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Key: SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\EventLog\Application
Name: RestrictGuestAccess
Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 1 Restrict access to Application log

But if you really want to get fancy, you can simply add the following entry into the BizTalk Server Operators group in Active Directory and restrict everyone else: (click to enlarge)

Support for SAP Queries in the SAP ADO.NET Provider

by | Sep 25, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

In the BizTalk Adapter Pack V2, we are adding support for execution of SAP Queries.

A brief one liner on SAP Queries – you can use the SAP GUI designer to create something similar to a “SQL Query” (similar to how you would do it in Microsoft Access) by graphically selecting the tables you’re interested in, the columns, the input parameters, the sort order of the result set, etc.

You can execute the query from the SAP ADO Provider, using syntax like:

EXECQUERY QueryName @P1=Parameter1Value, @P2=Parameter2Value, @USERGROUP=UserGroup [, @WORKSPACE=’X’]

@Pn refers to the nth selection field specified during the creation of the Query.

@USERGROUP (mandatory) refers to the User Group associated with the Query. If the Query was defined in the global workspace, you would additionally specify @WORKSPACE=’X’ in the command.

You can refer to the documentation on additional information on the syntax.

Having the ADO Provider support SAP Queries means that you can also execute them from SSIS Tasks, as well as create SSRS Reports based on them.

In order to use SAP Queries, you’ll have to obtain the next CTP of the BAP 2.0 (scheduled end of October 2008). Note that this CTP is only available to TAP customers.

PipelineTesting Acknowledgements

PipelineTesting Acknowledgements

by | Sep 24, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

This morning I announced the release of PipelineTesting v1.2.0.0.

Now I need to mention that for this release, I need to give a huge %u00a1Thank You! to
the people who contributed to it by reporting bugs and potential problems, providing
some great feature suggestions and even some code!

These are:

  1. Bram Veldhoen
  2. Fr%u00e9d%u00e9ric Hautecoeur
  3. Mark Coleman
  4. GokulRaja Dhamodaran
  5. Gregory Van de Wiele, as always :-)

Bram has also been working on some really cool stuff to integrate PipelineTesting
features with BizUnit!

A huge thanks to each and everyone of you. And please keep the suggestions and bug
reports coming :-)