BizTalk NoS Ultimate: Features Overview (Part IV)

by Sandro Pereira | Jun 15, 2020 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

In the last blog post, we analyzed the daily BizTalk Developer’s improved tasks which are provided by BizTalk NoS Ultimate; Build Project, Deploy assembly, and Fast register/unregister in GAC. Today, we will continue to analyze the list of available features present in this Visual Studio extension, focusing on the developing features that will improve your productivity significantly.

Locate It

How many times do you open your old or new project and several files are opened in the Visual Studio MDI window, and you want a simple way to locate a file in your project’s structure? For example:

• You are working in a transformation and you need to:
  • locate the map file to specify a TestMap Input Instance
  • locate a specific schema in the Solution Explorer in order to change the structure of the Schema
• You have used another BizTalk NoS Ultimate features to open the map, pipeline, or schema and now you need to find it on the solution explorer

If you don’t know exactly where it is, you need to check the full path of the map or the schema and then manually navigate in the solution explorer to the file that you want.

Finally, you will have an easy way to accomplish this! This will save us much time in the developing process, for me this is basic stuff and this is a timesaver feature!

Note: Even if you don’t have the Solution Explorer Window opened, this feature will find the file that you are looking for and will automatically open (or give the proper focus to) the Solution Explorer window.

You can access these features by:

• On the Visual Studio MDI window, right-click in tab with the name of the file and select Locate it! option

As you can see in the picture below, the result is that the project will be expanded and the desired file will be selected:

Again, this is very useful for a BizTalk Developer because he needs to locate the file to test or generate schema instances or test, validate or debug maps or other artifacts.

Test Pipeline

There are many ways to test BizTalk pipelines, for example:

• Using the Biztalk Pipeline Framework to create unit testing
• Using the Pipeline.exe tool
• By deploying them and testing in execution time (BizTalk Administration Console) with real messages

But to be honest, there isn’t a proper build-in support feature in Visual Studio to test our custom pipelines.

Once again, BizTalk NoS Ultimate will provide that for you. This feature will allow us to easily test our custom pipelines, directly from Visual Studio, by simply right clicking on the pipeline, expand BizTalk NoS Testing, and select the Test Pipeline option:

• First, you need to go to the Properties window of the pipeline and set the BizTalk NoS Input Instance Filename property, with an instance of the message that you want to try against the pipeline

• It will show you the result of the pipeline test directly in VS IE

Test Pipeline Component

As the previous, one testing or debugging a custom pipeline component can be a challenge and most of the time you will need to test them in runtime. If you want to debug them then you will need to attach the pipeline component code to the BizTalk process in Visual Studio.

Once again, there isn’t a proper build-in feature in Visual Studio to test and debug our custom pipeline components. Now with NoS, you will be able to debug your pipeline component without having to deploy and run them in runtime. Now, from Visual Studio, you will be able to attach this test execution to an external process without caring about BizTalk environment by:

• Right-click on the pipeline that contains the custom pipeline component that you want to try, expand BizTalk NoS Testing, and select the Test Pipeline Component option:

• • This will automatically attach Visual Studio to a process called BTSG.TestPipeline.exe process (the title will also contain the name of our pipeline)
• Make sure that the instance of a message is correct and make sure that you have set breakpoints in your custom pipeline component, and then click Run Test



• You should be able to start debugging your custom pipeline component code.

I hope you are enjoying these features and stay tuned because this extension has more! Feel free to try this amazing extension for BizTalk Server here: Download BizTalk NoS Ultimate for BizTalk Server 2020.

The post BizTalk NoS Ultimate: Features Overview (Part IV) appeared first on BizTalk360.

BizTalk NoS Ultimate: Features Overview (Part III)

by Sandro Pereira | Jun 10, 2020 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

In the last blog post, we analyzed the report capabilities of BizTalk NoS Ultimate – Reflector and Refactor. Today, we will continue to analyze the list of available features present in this Visual Studio extension, focusing on the daily BizTalk Developer’s improved tasks.

These are, what I call, simple tasks that will improve the BizTalk developer experience which will reduce the development and deployment time in new or existent BizTalk projects.

Build Project

You are probably thinking, why do I need another Build option? The reason is simple: sometimes we have a huge solution with several projects inside, and in these situations trying to build one simple project with the out-of-the-box Visual Studio option can be a challenge. It will take a huge amount of time trying to build the project because of all of the dependencies.

The option in NoS will build the desired project without any interaction with the Visual Studio design environment, making this operation faster than the native build operation in Visual Studio.

You can access these features by:

• Right-click on your project name, expand BizTalk NoS and select the Build project option

Fast Register/Unregister in GAC

How many times have you desired to have a simple easy and quick way to install a DLL, and (why not) also uninstall, in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC), and why not directly from your favourite developer tool: Visual Studio? Instead, we need to install DLL’s using the Gacutil.exe tool, and don’t get me wrong, it is an excellent tool, but it is not practical in the day-by-day work!

Finally, now you have this option! 

You can access these features by:

• Select your project name, expand BizTalk NoS and select the Register in GAC or Unregister from GAC option

Note: This works with all DLL’s, it doesn’t have to be a BizTalk DLL, you can easily register a C# Helper Class used by BizTalk Projects into the GAC with this functionality.

Deploy Assembly

Again you are probably thinking, why do I need another Deploy option? And the reasons are exactly the same as the Build project option which we described earlier.

This operation will deploy a single BizTalk assembly directly from the Visual Studio without trying to deploy also all of its BizTalk Server project dependencies.

You can access these features by:

• Select your project name, expand BizTalk NoS and select the Deploy assembly option

The equivalent we have to this feature is the add/update resources from the BizTalk Server administration console.

What’s the purpose of this feature? In some situations, you just simply don’t want to use the Visual Studio out-of-the-box functionality, as it will deploy all the dependencies and other stuff which will take a huge amount of time. What we want sometimes is only to deploy one specific assembly easily and fast.

This option will allow you to make this directly from Visual Studio, making this operation faster than the native deploy operation on Visual Studio.

I hope you are enjoying these features and stay tuned because this extension has more! Feel free to try this amazing extension for BizTalk Server here: Download BizTalk NoS Ultimate for BizTalk Server 2020.

The post BizTalk NoS Ultimate: Features Overview (Part III) appeared first on BizTalk360.

BizTalk NoS Ultimate: Features Overview (Part II)

by Sandro Pereira | May 12, 2020 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

In the last blog post, we analysed two of the basic features of BizTalk NoS Ultimate – Expand solution and Wild Card Search. Today, we will continue to analyze the list of available features present in this Visual Studio extension, focusing on the report capabilities of BizTalk NoS Ultimate.

Reflector

This feature will create a report with a lot of useful information about your entire solution or for a particular project for analysis. It will provide some statistics and metrics, for example:

• • Solution metrics – number of projects, artifacts, orchestrations, transformation, schemas, and pipelines
  • Artifact metrics – Information about the  average Kilo bytes used by the artifact in memory or some metrics to understand the complexity of the artifact (orchestration, map and so on)

But, also information about:

• • • Which artifact is using this artifact or what is this artifact doing (very useful with orchestrations)
    • Show all the information like:
      • Artifact dependencies
      • Which port(s) is/are using this orchestration or schema or map?
      • How many shapes exist in the orchestration or how many Transactions (Atomic, Long-Running) exist, Compensation, or Error handling?
      • How many Construct messages or even how many transformations?
      • How many Functoids or links exist inside a transformation?
    • And so on

This is basically an interactive report or documentation of your solution. Interactive, because you can interact with the report and it will automatically open the artifact while you are reading it. You can open the directory, maps, orchestrations, schemas, and so on directly from the report.

The reflector can be used at all levels of your solution, from a simple artifact, a single project or just to produce a full report of your entire solution. The last means that you will have a report of all of the artifacts in the solution).

This also can be used to produce good documentation of your BizTalk Projects.

You can access this feature by:

• Right-click on your solution/project or artifact name, expand BizTalk NoS and select the Reflector option

Refactor

Similar to the Reflector feature, however, the Refactory will create a more simple report with a circular reference (internal and external) with other artifacts that can be very useful to understand the refactory strategy to use.

Another difference is that this report can only be made at the artifact level (orchestrations, pipelines, maps, and schemas). It isn’t available at the solution or project level.

You can accomplish this by access this feature by:

• Right-click on your artifact (Orchestration, map, schema…), expand the BizTalk NoS Reporting and select the Refactor option

This feature will provide some statistics and information about:

• Which artifact(s) is/are using this artifact
• Which artifact(s) is/are consumed by this resource
• Some general information like complexity, persistence points and error handling (in orchestrations), and so on.

I hope you are enjoying these features and stay tuned because this extension has more! Feel free to try this amazing extension for BizTalk Server here: Download BizTalk NoS Ultimate for BizTalk Server 2020.

The post BizTalk NoS Ultimate: Features Overview (Part II) appeared first on BizTalk360.