3th Edition of 101 Talk Arena is here and now I’m joining forces with Nino Crudele to interview the one and the only Michael Stephenson!
Michael Stephenson is a highly experienced Cloud Architect who has many years working with large enterprise customers delivering integration solutions with Microsoft technologies on-premise, in the cloud, and with hybrid technologies. Not only he is a brilliant mind, and an unstoppable researcher, he is also a regular blogger and host of Integration Monday!
He is a good friend, and it will be an honor to have him with us on February 18th, 2021, at 2 PMUTC. Once again this will be an open conversation about Integration and Azure:
Cloud automation
Serverless patterns and practices
Today Integration landscape
BizTalk migration
and many more topics
I will invite all of you to join us it is free. This is a one to one talk without filters, no marketing, nothing planned, and where people can also jump in with any question.
Last February 4, the roles were reversed, and I had the pleasure to interview Nino Crudele on our series 101 Talk Arena on a talk about Azure Nightmares without any filters, and it was a blast!
Now I’m happy to announce that the record of the second edition of 101 Talk Arena is online and available for all of you to watch on youtube were address topics like Azure Subscription strategies, costs and security.
And the roles are reversed! After the success of the first edition and before we move on to different topics of different guests, we will be inverting the roles, and now I will be the host of this conversation and “interview” Nino Crudele and extract from that obscure brain his knowledge and experience about Microsoft Azure.
This open and friendly talk will take place on February 4th at 19.30 UTC. As always, all of you will be invited to join us and participate and make any question on this one-to-one talk without filters, no marketing, and where nothing is planned!
What is one of the biggest problems with having to set up BizTalk in a new Environment? Creating all the Hosts, Host Instances, and assigning the Adapters to these new hosts. This process has been made much simpler with the help of the BizTalk Host Setup Tool.
This tool is fed by a configuration file to set up the Hosts, install Host Instances, and assign Adapters to those Hosts. This tool also has the ability to prompt for a user password and reset all the Adapters back to the default Host (this was used extensively when I was testing the tool).
This will allow one developer to create the solution host layout and easily distribute it to others!
How should you set up your Hosts? For starters, you should have a Receive Host, a Send Host, a Process Host, and a Tracking Host. Then, continue to build out the Hosts as needed. In general, it is best for each Adapter to run in its own Host. But I’m a big fan of not taking this to extremes – specifically on single or double server BizTalk installations.
This tool will help you design and build your solutions by making it easy to separate out your processes into multiple hosts even on your developer boxes. It will also make sure all your developers and environments are using Hosts with the same names – a total nightmare to manage.
You can find the download here.
Note: This is intended as a starting point and you are free to build off of it and customize it as needed. It is nothing exciting as I am just wrapping WMI calls with what I hope is more user friendly XML tags. Please remember this and all other code on BizTalkGurus.com is AS-IS and not intended for production use.
I have included two sample config files. The two samples are HostConfig-Demo.xml and HostConfig.xml. Both have comments that should make it easy to figure out what is going on.
I have not tested this tool with remote setups or on anything other than BizTalk 2006 R2 (but anything 2004 to present should work).
Here is a sample of the XML Configuration File:
<BizTalkHostConfig Version=”1.0″ defaultHost=”BizTalkServerApplication” defaultIsoHost=”BizTalkServerIsolatedHost”> <MakeHosts> <!– Basic Sample to create a HOST <Host> <HostName>MyTestHost</HostName> Host Type: Isolated or InProcess <Type>InProcess</Type> <NTGroup>BizTalk Application Users</NTGroup> <AuthTrusted>false</AuthTrusted> Action: true to install or false to skip <InstallServers Action=”false” /> Action: true to set adapters or false to skip <SetAdapters Action=”false” /> AdapterName Type: Receive or Send </Host> Detailed sample to create a host, install it, and set up an adapter to use the new host <Host> <HostName>MyTestHost123</HostName> Host Type: Isolated or InProcess <Type>InProcess</Type> <NTGroup>BizTalk Application Users</NTGroup> <AuthTrusted>false</AuthTrusted> Action: true to install or false to skip <InstallServers Action=”true”> <Server> Start: true to start host or false to not <ServerName Start=”true”>LPT154</ServerName> <UserName>SomeUserSomePassword</UserName> Prompt: true to get a pop up to end password or false to enter it here <Password Prompt=”false”>SomeUserSomePassword</Password> </Server> </InstallServers> Action: true to set adapters or false to skip <SetAdapters Action=”true”> <Adapter> Type: Receive or Send <AdapterName Type=”Receive”>File</AdapterName> </Adapter> </SetAdapters> </Host> –> </BizTalkHostConfig>
