This post will try and explain how BAM tracking can be used in SOAP based request response scenario in BizTalk 2006. It important to notice that some of the issues discussed in the post are specific to the SOAP adapter and are non-issues if the scenario would for example use the the WCF adapter or […]
A little over a year ago I posted
an entry about a new feature included in the MSMQ Send Adapter in BizTalk 2006
which provided a way to send messages through MSMQ from BizTalk to legacy applications
that required the message contents to be formatted using the ActiveXFormatter, or
that simply used the old COM-based MSMQ API.
However, I didn’t mentioned anything about how to enable the opposite scenario: How
to receive and parse a text message in BizTalk 2006 coming from one of those legacy
applications. Someone recently asked about this on the BizTalk Newsgroup and, as It
turns out, BizTalk Server 2002 happens to fall in this category as well.
Fortunately, this scenario is a lot simpler, if we assume that the contents of the
message will be plain text (say, some string content or XML). The ActiveX message
serialization rules dictate that a message with a BodyType of String will simply be
serialized on the wire as a set of bytes encoded using UCS-2 (UTF-16LE), without a
Byte Order Mark (BOM).
BizTalk can parse UTF-16 contents without problems, but without a BOM, the standard
disassemblers can’t figure out the encoding of the message on it’s own.
Fortunately, most of the time you can work around this by setting the message Charset
before parsing (for example using my own FixEncoding pipeline
component).
BizTalk, MSMQ
Last week I presented at the ASP.NET Connections Conference in Orlando. I gave a general session talk on Monday, and then two breakout talks later that day. You can download my slides+samples below:
The slides for my keynote can be downloaded here.
In the talk I demonstrated how to debug the .NET Framework source code. You can learn how to set this up with VS 2008 here.
I also demonstrated building a site using the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data support – which you can learn more about here. I also demonstrated using the new ASP.NET MVC Framework – which you can learn more about here.
I also showed off the new Hard Rock Memorabilia site built with Silverlight 2. You can try out the Hard Rock application yourself here. You can learn more about Silverlight from my links page here.
The slides + demos for Silverlight breakout talk can be downloaded here.
You can learn more about Silverlight from my links page here. In particular, I recommend reading my tutorial posts here and here.
The slides + demos for my ASP.NET MVC talk can be downloaded here.
You can learn more about the latest ASP.NET MVC source refresh here. Stephen Walther also just posted a really good set of slides + demos from his post conference tutorial on ASP.NET MVC here.
Hope this helps,
Scott
” …I have published an orchestration as a web service and consumed it from an aspx page. now, how do I see if I triggered the orchestration and how and where do I get the output (transformed message of the orchestration)? …“
This post is for those of you who are administrators rather then developers, and don't keep track of the latest downloads around BizTalk . Microsoft has, at the same time that they released a revised version of the developer centric tutorials , released…(read more)
Hilarious video here. Check it out.
Looking at the R3 information post i’m thinking that, if the Oslo vision is realised then maybe one day someone will have a clinic for Biztalk addicts !! (Right now, many times it seems we need more Nurofen or Prozac) . Hey, maybe Biztalk will get a Silverlight based designer […]
I’ve recently inherited a large BizTalk system and needed a quick way to determine which custom stored procedures accessed which tables/views and called other sprocs. Thanks to my co-worker Shaun, I now have the power of the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views at my disposal!
Information Schema Views
Information schema views provide an internal, system table-independent view of SQL Server […]
We’ve now got official Management Pack support for R2 and the newer things in R2 such
as EDI and RFID.
I’ve had many students come up to me and say “Mick – what in the world are you talking
about?”
(mind you I get that at home as well – but let’s not go there)
Have you ever asked the question:
I wonder how our BizTalk (et. al.) servers are going?
(this is where you could send the work experience kid around to all the servers gathering
details and report back to you by lunch…..but not all of us have work experience
kids)
The answer to this is relatively complex – as you’ll need know things like:
SCOM2007 with the management pack gives you that – in near enough realtime with all
sorts of graphs and charts.
One of the *best* things I like about SCOM2007 is that you install the Management
Pack(s) only on *one* machine – usually the SCOM2007 Central Administration machine,
and as more applications are installed on servers on the network, the appropriate
management bits are ‘auto-deployed’.
Grab it here –
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=389FCB89-F4CF-46D7-BC6E-57830D234F91&displaylang=en&displaylang=en
I've read alot of posts on how to interpret and evaluate your blogs statistics, most lately Scott Hanselmans post entitled 7 Blogging Statistics Rules – There is a life after page views so I realise and agree that how many people has visited your…(read more)
The latest release of the Rule Manager allows to import external functions into the business vocabulary. As a little exercise I tried to get the current weather condition for a zipcode (maybe I can write some rules if I should bring my umbrella while I leave my house in L.A.)
Initially I intended to call a webservice, but it seems that all free weather webservice calls is something from the past. Yahoo offers weather information as an RSS feed. So a simple XPath query can select the information that I’m interested in:
Here is the code (note the FunctionAttribute decoration on the method)
1 using System.IO;
2 using System.Net;
3 using System.Xml;
4 using AcumenBusiness.IModel;
5 using Type=AcumenBusiness.IModel.Type;
6
7 namespace TestCallWebService
8 {
9 [Concept(“Weather info”, “Try to get weather forecast from different services”)]
10 public class WeatherInfoProvider
11 {
12 private static readonly string YahooWeatherURLFormat = “http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss?p={0}”;
13
14 [Term(“workaround”, “import function requires one field. (bug)”)]
15 private string dummyField;
16 public string DummyField
17 {
18 get { return dummyField; }
19 set { dummyField = value; }
20 }
21
22 [Function(“Get temperature”, “Get the weather info from Yahoo”,
23 ReturnType = Type.text,
24 ArgumentTypes = new Type[] { Type.integer })]
25 public static string GetWeatherInfoAsFeed(int zipCode)
26 {
27 HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest) WebRequest.Create(string.Format(YahooWeatherURLFormat, zipCode));
28 // execute the request
29 HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse) request.GetResponse();
30
31 // we will read data via the response stream
32 Stream resStream = response.GetResponseStream();
33 XmlDocument rssFeed = new XmlDocument();
34 rssFeed.Load(resStream);
35
36 //set an XmlNamespaceManager since we have to make explicit namespace searches
37 XmlNamespaceManager xmlnsManager = new System.Xml.XmlNamespaceManager(rssFeed.NameTable);
38 //Add the namespaces used in the xml doc to the XmlNamespaceManager.
39 xmlnsManager.AddNamespace(“yweather”, “http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/ns/rss/1.0”);
40
41 XmlNode weatherCondition = rssFeed.SelectSingleNode(“/rss/channel/item/yweather:condition/@temp”, xmlnsManager);
42 if (weatherCondition != null) {
43 return weatherCondition.Value;
44 }
45 return null;
46 }
47 }
48 }
With the Import Schema adapter I can import this function and call it from my business rules. The coolest part is that you can invoke this from the Interactive Rule Map. So you can see how your rules are executing with this external data. It seems to be 76 fahrenheid in L.A.
Nice weather to jump on the bike and cycle to work…
