Adapter Pack Poster from Microsoft

by community-syndication | Jul 24, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Announcing the Biztalk Adapter Pack Poster

Announcing the Biztalk Adapter Pack Poster

by community-syndication | Jul 24, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Creating Linked Server to Informix

by community-syndication | Jul 23, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I was given the task of connecting BizTalk to an Informix database. When the project was first kicked off, the client started exploring their options, one of the companies that they looked at was Attunity.

I told them that the Linked Server option was a much better approach, while offering significant cost savings!

So I started my research on how to get connected, and I came across a few pages of interest:

The first is IBM documentation page about how to set up the actual connection within Enterprise Manager.

When I first started connecting, I was getting this error:

After doing some more research I found additional articles that were of interest:

One that I thought might be a problem was the permissions for the temp folder as documented on KB814398 to deal with Error: 7399. I set the permissions as documented with the same results.

Another IBM’s documentation page about how to set up the linked server and the fact that you need to install the coledbp.sql on the Informix database so that the OLE DB can actually connect.

Here is what I had setup (of course the actual connectivity is different)

I had read an article about mapping between the local instance of SQL Server and the security account on a remote server, but did not try it.

I finally clicked on the security button and filled in the username and password

It worked!

What I don’t quite understand is the relationship between the Provider string and the security context they are the same, but when would they be different?

BizTalk Ranger Blog – Paolo Salvatori

by community-syndication | Jul 23, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

My friend and colleague Paolo Salvatori has just started a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/paolos/ and began with a great post on Synchronous to Asynchronous Flows Without an Orchestration http://blogs.msdn.com/paolos/archive/2008/07/21/msdn-blogs.aspx.  As you’ll see from the post Paolo loves to delve into technical issues and always provides comprehensive report and great source code samples to back up his findings.

I’d definitely recommend adding this blog to your feed/favourites as I can guarantee from Paolo’s previous work that you will see lot’s of interesting content.

BizTalk 2006 R2 Hyper-V Guide

by community-syndication | Jul 23, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I’ve just completed the BizTalk 2006 R2 Hyper-V Guide project working with the BizTalk UE team and Clint Huffman from Premier Field Engineering. The purpose of this guide is to provide you with the information, techniques and best practices necessary to evaluate BizTalk Server performance in a Hyper-V environment.

Overall the results were very positive.  In most scenarios we were able to process about 75% of the load in a virtualized environment compared to an equivalent physical environment. The Hyper-V team have done a great job at improving this when compared to Hyper-V.  Pass-through storage provides fast storage access and they have done a great job at ensuring that CPU and memory overhead of virtualization is kept to a minimum.  You can even install the Hyper-V role on Server Core which minimizes the overhead further.

The guide provides full details of our experiements, results and findings.  I hope that you find this information useful.

The guide is available on MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc768518.aspx) and TechNet (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc768518.aspx )

Launch Mail 

The BizTalk Customer Advisory Team and BizTalk UE team are pleased to announce the first edition of the “Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Hyper-V Guide”.

The Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Hyper-V Guide is the third installment in a series of guides intended to provide easily accessible, hands-on guidance to our customer and partner community. This 145 page guide is available on MSDN, TechNet and as a separate DOCX, PDF or CHM download alongside the already available “Microsoft BizTalk Server Operations Guide”  and “Microsoft BizTalk Server Performance Optimizations Guide”

The guide provides relevant information to IT professionals to enable them to make educated decisions about the advantages and tradeoffs of using Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V to virtualize BizTalk Server environments. This guidance was derived from a 6 week performance lab conducted by the BizTalk Customer Advisory Team and Premier Field Engineering.  It will be refreshed for future versions of Microsoft BizTalk Server.

The key sections of the guide are:

• Getting Started: provides conceptual information about Hyper-V, the virtualization technology introduced with Windows Server 2008, and an introduction to the Hyper-V architecture.


• Deploying BizTalk Server on Hyper-V: describes the steps that were followed to set up the lab environment, which was used to compare the performance of a BizTalk Server solution running on Hyper-V environment to the same BizTalk Server solution running on comparable physical hardware.


• Evaluating BizTalk Server Performance on Hyper-V: details the important considerations when measuring the performance of a BizTalk Server solution running on a Hyper-V virtualized environment.


• Testing BizTalk Server Performance on Hyper-V: provides detailed results of four distinct testing scenarios that compare the performance of a BizTalk Server solution running on Hyper-V environment to the same BizTalk Server solution running on comparable physical hardware.

The target audience for this guide is Microsoft field, partner organizations, and customers who plan, deploy, and maintain BizTalk Server installations.

Full MSDN URL:     http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc768518.aspx

Adding a new BizTalk Server Isolated Host needs a new Application Pool

by community-syndication | Jul 23, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Recently, we tried creating a secondary Isolated Host to separate receive and send processing for WCF. After reconfiguring the servers, we were faced with the “Receive location for address ” not found. (The BizTalk receive location may be disabled)”. Puzzled, we looked around for configuration issues. After some reading (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa559328.aspx), we remembered a new isolated host needs a new application pool. Adding another application pool to the mix the the new host fixed our trouble…

Jotted down for posterity 😉

Word Document Formats

by community-syndication | Jul 22, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

In generating an xml from a word document we were required to extract data from different formats. An example of each is below (the differences can be subtle sorry if its monotonous). The documents were generated by a software from White Hill Technologies (now Skywire Software).

Parsing Timecard from Word to XML

by community-syndication | Jul 22, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

We had to take a timecard that was in MS Word 2003 format and create XML. An example of the word document is as follows.

The red box indicates text that was hidden in the document which I have made visible for clarity. The program reads through the document, extracts text from the fields we are interested in and then converts it to XML as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<ns0:file xmlns:ns0="http://schemas.stottis.com/thomson/3e/proforma/detail">
    <record>
        <date>Jun 04 08</date>
        <narrative>Time Entry Narrative</narrative>
        <hours>5.00</hours>
        <timecard>3330372</timecard>
    </record>
    <record>
        <date>Jun 05 08</date>
        <narrative>Time Entry Narrative</narrative>
        <hours>2.00</hours>
        <timecard>3330371</timecard>
    </record>
    <record>
        <date>Jun 07 08</date>
        <narrative>Time Entry Narrative</narrative>
        <hours>5.00</hours>
        <timecard>3330370</timecard>
    </record>
    <record>
        <date>Jun 08 08</date>
        <narrative>Time Entry Narrative</narrative>
        <hours>3.00</hours>
        <timecard>3330369</timecard>
    </record>
</ns0:file>

Here it is: the answer to all SOA and ESB questions….

by community-syndication | Jul 22, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

[[ OK, I am writing this with tongue-in-cheek, which for anyone not familiar with that term, means “not really serious”!!! ]]

Funny thing happened today on the ESB project that I’m on….

After a day of hard work, solving some really tough technical challenges (the kind that makes your head throb, your eyes glaze over and make you think that becoming a carpenter could be a smart career move), I leaned back in my chair and surveyed the landscape (my desk). A piece of tattered paper caught my eye, the piece of paper the team had been using all day long to describe concepts, flow and “you are here” type information to ourselves. But, I saw it as if I was seeing it for the first time, and I was struck by what it had evolved into. Then I noticed that it was actually just the latest diagram in a series (we had no white board in that room). The first one was crisp, and not marked up, and on a relatively small piece of paper (could have been a cocktail napkin). All the others in the series (there were three more leading up to the final one) were progressively more marked-up, scribbled on, and tattered, and all on A4 size paper. So, I though I would share with you that vital piece of paper that some very bright people spent the day with. And, I’m not sure what happened to that bottom-left corner.

This my friends, is actually the architecture of a very cool world-class, country-scale ESB. It solves ALL problems associated with ESB and SOA architecture. It is a comprehensive solution that also even layers on end-to-end governance. We have intermediaries, bus services, generic on-ramps, SLA enforcement, itinerary repository… we have it all. In fact, if you have ANY questions about how all these things fit together, it’s probably clearly explained in this diagram. This, in all its blazing glory, is real-world goodness I just had to share, for the benefit of the community.

Although this could be confidential in nature, I felt I was pretty safe posting it on my blog as the intellectual property is pretty much naturally protected. To the untrained eye, this looks like, well, I’m not sure what it would look like, probably just an unintelligible mess. But to us, it’s pure gold, and the roadmap to success. Enjoy!!!

And no, I will NOT do a webcast to explain it. Tomorrow is a whole new day, and, who knows, maybe even worthy of a fresh piece of paper. This, however, is perhaps one of the finest pieces of “software architecture art” in existance 🙂

Joe does SOA

by community-syndication | Jul 22, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Tomorrow Joe Klug will be presenting a session about Microsoft’s Real World SOA vision at the Microsoft’s offices in Downers Grove, IL. As part of the session Joe will present a version of a demo we built last year as an example of how to use Microsoft…(read more)