Always funny returning to an old BizTalk Server solution I did in the past! Today while modifying an existing solution for the first time in 3 years! – you have to love BizTalk Server for that consistency and reliability that is difficult to find in any other platform or service! – I got a weird issue while trying to rebuild the solution:
The operation could not be completed. The parameter is incorrect.
with no more details! which is always lovely!
Cause
It has been a constant these days, but that is honestly true: I don’t know exactly the reason why. And the solutions describing this type of issue are not consistent and range from restarting visual studio, and deleting files to restarting the machine!
But my feeling is that is more related to Visual Studio security execution permissions and user permissions.
Solution
To solve this issue you should run Visual Studio as an administrator. To do that you need:
Select the Start button, and then in the Search box, type Visual Studio.
Next, right-click either Visual Studio , and then select More > Run as administrator.
Open your BizTalk Visual Studio Solution and try to build it. It worked for me!
Build started…
Build succeeded
Hope you find this helpful! So, if you liked the content or found it helpful and want to help me write more content, you can buy (or help buy) my son a Star Wars Lego!
Author: Sandro Pereira
Sandro Pereira lives in Portugal and works as a consultant at DevScope. In the past years, he has been working on implementing Integration scenarios both on-premises and cloud for various clients, each with different scenarios from a technical point of view, size, and criticality, using Microsoft Azure, Microsoft BizTalk Server and different technologies like AS2, EDI, RosettaNet, SAP, TIBCO etc.
He is a regular blogger, international speaker, and technical reviewer of several BizTalk books all focused on Integration. He is also the author of the book “BizTalk Mapping Patterns & Best Practices”. He has been awarded MVP since 2011 for his contributions to the integration community.
View all posts by Sandro Pereira
Unfortunately, until this date, there isn’t available an Azure Logic Apps Tools for Visual Studio Extension for Visual Studio 2022, which means that we still need to use Visual Studio 2019 to create Logic App Consumption projects with Visual Studio.
An opposite to other Azure Services like Azure Functions that have a dedicated Azure Function project Template:
There isn’t a Logic App Consumption Visual Studio project template. Instead, we need to use the Azure Resource Group project template, and inside we will select that it will be applying a Logic App template.
Creating a Visual Studio Logic App Consumption project
The Logic Apps designer integrates with the current Azure Resource Group project. That saying, you will not find any Logic App template in the list of templates. Instead, we need to create an Azure Resource Group project to get started, and to do that, we need:
Open Visual Studio, and on the Create a new project panel, select C# -> Azure -> Cloud, or search for Azure Resource Group:
From the list of project templates, select the Azure Resource Group template.
On the Configure your new project panel, give a proper Project name, Location, and Solution name. Leave the Framework as .NET Framework 4.7.2 and select Create.
Finally, on the Select Azure Template panel, from the Visual Studio Templates list, select the Logic App template and select OK.
This will create an empty Visual Studio Logic App solution. Now on the Visual Studio solution:
Right-click on the LogicApp.json file and select Open With Logic App Designer.
This will open a Logic App Properties window, where you need to:
Define the credentials to authenticate on the Azure subscription.
Define the Subscription and Resource Group where you want to create these resources.
Define if you want the Location to be in the same Region or in an Integration Service Environment (ISE) – be aware the ISE is being deprecated.
And then select OK.
This will embed the Logic App designer inside the Visual Studio.
Now you need to select a common trigger, a template, or use a blank Logic App to start creating your business process.
Hope you find this helpful! So, if you liked the content or found it helpful and want to help me write more content, you can buy (or help buy) my son a Star Wars Lego!
Author: Sandro Pereira
Sandro Pereira lives in Portugal and works as a consultant at DevScope. In the past years, he has been working on implementing Integration scenarios both on-premises and cloud for various clients, each with different scenarios from a technical point of view, size, and criticality, using Microsoft Azure, Microsoft BizTalk Server and different technologies like AS2, EDI, RosettaNet, SAP, TIBCO etc.
He is a regular blogger, international speaker, and technical reviewer of several BizTalk books all focused on Integration. He is also the author of the book “BizTalk Mapping Patterns & Best Practices”. He has been awarded MVP since 2011 for his contributions to the integration community.
View all posts by Sandro Pereira
Today while developing an existing Logic App Consumption in Visual Studio 2019, yes, we still don’t have support for Visual Studio 2022, I realized that for some unknown reason, one of the actions, in my case a For each action, didn’t have the normal arrow – that indicates the precedence of the previous step in the Logic App designer as you can see in the picture above – for some unknown reason it evaporated:
I tried to re-order (or move) the For each action in the designer to see if I could fix this issue, without success. A good option that you should always try is to close that file and open it again to force a refresh on the designer – that solves many issues – but it didn’t do the trick on this issue.
I couldn’t by Designer solve this issue because the property Configure run after settings were disabled:
I honestly don’t know what would happen if I tried to deploy this Logic App in this situation, but it shouldn’t be good. And this situation was causing me inconvenience when moving and reordering the actions. So I have no other option than try to fix it.
Cause
When inspecting the Code view, I realized that, again, for some unknown reason, the runAfter property was empty. The Logic App designer normally fills this value to run if the previous action Succeeded.
Solution
To fix this issue or behavior, we need to manually configure the runAfter property like:
Where the Name_Previous_Action is the name of the previous action on the workflow, the spaces in the action name are replaced by underscores.
After that, if you return to the designer, you will see everything back to normality:
Hope you find this useful! So, if you liked the content or found it useful and want to help me write more content, you can buy (or help buy) my son a Star Wars Lego!
Author: Sandro Pereira
Sandro Pereira lives in Portugal and works as a consultant at DevScope. In the past years, he has been working on implementing Integration scenarios both on-premises and cloud for various clients, each with different scenarios from a technical point of view, size, and criticality, using Microsoft Azure, Microsoft BizTalk Server and different technologies like AS2, EDI, RosettaNet, SAP, TIBCO etc.
He is a regular blogger, international speaker, and technical reviewer of several BizTalk books all focused on Integration. He is also the author of the book “BizTalk Mapping Patterns & Best Practices”. He has been awarded MVP since 2011 for his contributions to the integration community.
View all posts by Sandro Pereira
One error never comes alone! Following the error reported in my last blog post while working last week with one of my clients, I was able to catch an error that I never saw during these long years working with BizTalk Server while trying to build a BizTalk Server Visual Studio solution in this specific case a custom pipeline component:
Couldn’t process file XMLAttributesStripper.resx due to its being in the Internet or Restricted zone or having the mark of the web on the file. Remove the mark of the web if you want to process these files.??????????????????
Indeed I download that resource from the Internet, from my GitHub page, like I do thousands of times for many clients and projects!
Cause
This issue happens due to the fact that you downloaded from the web these files/resources from a machine with security restrictions configured. So, when Visual Studio attempts to build the project, this error occurs because The .NET Framework resource compiler honors this marker and refuses to compile those resource files for security reasons.
The underlying cause is that the respective resource file has the so-called mark of the web applied to it. This is a marker that browsers place on downloaded files so that other applications can make informed decisions on whether to trust that file or not.
Solution
To fix this issue, the solution is quite simple. Nevertheless, there are many ways to solve or avoid this issue.
Solution 1: Fix the issue
To solve this issue, we need to remove the mark of the web, to do that, we need to:
Right-click on the file in windows explorer and select Properties.
On the General tab, at the bottom under Security, there is a check box to remove mark of the web.
Unselect the Unblock check box and click OK.
Note: This needs to be done with Visual Studio closed.
Solution 2: Fix the issue with PowerShell script
We can also do the same functionality as Solution 1 using the following PowerShell script:
On the folder for the project, run the following script
dir -Path . -Recurse | Unblock-File
or
Get-ChildItem -Path . -Recurse | Unblock-File
Solution 3: Fix the issue from Visual Studio
Didn’t try this approach, but apparently, we can also fix this issue directly from Visual Studio by:
Select the menu option Tools > Options
From the Options windows, select the option Trust Settings under Environment and add the project path as a trusted path.
I’ve been a big fan of this amazing Visual Studio Addin for BizTalk Server since the first days that Nino Crudele decided to create this resource. I still remember the long hours during the night that we were discussing the features and testing this addin using skype. And I have continued to be a fan since BizTalk360 took over this resource.
The purpose of BizTalk NoS Ultimate is to help all BizTalk Developer, and why not, all BizTalk Administrators, in a lot of different situations, by improving the developer experience and reducing the development time in new or existing BizTalk projects, providing better documentation and help to troubleshoot some scenarios/issues you may encounter. But it is mainly a Visual Studio Add-in that enables BizTalk Server developers to be more efficient.
BizTalk development is not pretty easy and requires a lot of patience sometimes, and anyone who has worked with BizTalk long enough will acknowledge this statement. For instance:
It takes immense effort to find out the internal & external dependencies between different artifacts (schemas, maps, orchestrations, and so on).
Testing pipelines within the Visual Studio is not possible.
Some tasks occupy a massive time during development and eventually may delay the project. Unfortunately, no other tool in the market helps in making the BizTalk developer’s lives easier. That is why I love this tool: BizTalk NoS Ultimate.
BizTalk NoS: Your BizTalk Dev Buddy
And now, I also decided to create a whitepaper in a way to be a step-by-step guide to help you get started with the tool and explain all the features available like:
Quick search inside artifacts
Fast DLL register/unregister in GAC
Find critical, internal, or external dependencies
JackHammering, which will compare your VS artifact with the artifact deployed in the BizTalk environment
With this feature, you can also extract the artifact (Orchestration, map, Schema, and so on) from the BizTalk environment and put it in the VS solution
Test your pipeline in VS simply
And many more functionalities that will be useful in our day-by-day work and a time saver in a lot of situations.
BizTalk NoS Ultimate is available for the following BizTalk Server versions:
The full 7.3 version is complete with the release of v.7.3.1. This was a massive work of adding new shapes of new services that appear on Azure and changing the existing one with the new version of the shapes. Work is done and I hope you enjoy it!
What’s new in this version?
This is the list of changes and additions present in this release:
New shapes on MIS Azure Stencils, MIS Azure Additional or Support Stencils, MIS Developer Stencils, and MIS Security and Governance packages: add a considerable amount of new shapes of new services that appear on Azure has both changing the existing one with their new layout.
Move old versions of the shape layout to MIS Azure Old Versions package.
New shapes on MIS AI and Machine Learning Stencils: several new shapes add it to this package with several Cognitive Services.
New shapes on Microsoft Integration Stencils: some new shapes add it to this package describing Schemas, Maps, Aggrements, Partners, Assemblies and so on.
Lock the aspect ratio of the new stencil icons: This was a requested made that can be very handly to protects against accidental resizing with another shape aspect.
SVG files: new SVG files added.
Microsoft Integration, Azure, Power Platform, Office 365 and much more Stencils Pack
Microsoft Integration, Azure, Power Platform, Office 365 and much more Stencils Pack it’s a Visio package that contains fully resizable Visio shapes (symbols/icons) that will help you to visually represent On-premise, Cloud or Hybrid Integration and Enterprise architectures scenarios (BizTalk Server, API Management, Logic Apps, Service Bus, Event Hub…), solutions diagrams and features or systems that use Microsoft Azure and related cloud and on-premises technologies in Visio 2016/2013:
BizTalk Server
Microsoft Azure
Integration
Integration Service Environments (ISE)
Logic Apps and Azure App Service in general (API Apps, Web Apps, and Mobile Apps)
Azure API Management
Messaging: Event Hubs, Event Grid, Service Bus, …
Azure IoT and Docker
AI, Machine Learning, Stream Analytics, Data Factory, Data Pipelines
SQL Server, DocumentDB, CosmosDB, MySQL, …
and so on
Microsoft Power Platform
Microsoft Flow
PowerApps
Power BI
Office365, SharePoint,…
DevOps and PowerShell
Security and Governance
And much more…
… and now non-related Microsoft technologies like:
SAP Stencils
The Microsoft Integration Stencils Pack is composed of 28 files:
Microsoft Integration Stencils
MIS Additional or Support Stencils
MIS AI and Machine Learning Stencils
MIS Apps and Systems Logo Stencils
MIS Azure Additional or Support Stencils
MIS Azure Black and Gray
MIS Azure Old Versions
MIS Azure Stencils
MIS Black and Cyan
MIS Buildings Stencils
MIS Databases and Analytics Stencils
MIS Deprecated Stencils
MIS Developer Stencils
MIS Devices Stencils
MIS Files and Message Types Stencils
MIS Generic Stencils
MIS Infrastructure and Networking Stencils
MIS Integration Fun
MIS Integration Patterns Stencils
MIS IoT Stencils
MIS Office, Office 365 and Dynamics 365
MIS Power BI Stencils
MIS Power Platform Stencils
MIS SAP Stencils
MIS Security and Governance
MIS Servers (Hexagonal) Stencils
MIS Users and Roles Stencils
MIS API Connectors
Organisational Stencils
That you can use and resize without losing quality, in particular, the new shapes.
Download
You can download Microsoft Integration, Azure, BAPI, Office 365 and much more Stencils Pack for Visio from GitHub Here:
The full 7.3.0 version is not yet complete, but I decided to release it in small pieces instead of taking a long time to make all the planned changes and being the Azure part that will require the most work.
What’s new in this version?
This is the list of changes and additions present in this release:
New shapes on MIS: Office, Office 365 and Dynamics 365 package: add some new Dynamic 365 shapes like Dataverse, SCM Warehousing, Project Timesheet, Return To School orReturn To Work, and several new Office/Office 365 shapes.
Remove API Connectors shapes from MIS: Power Platform package: there goal was to simplify this package and migrate that stencils to a dedicated package, since there are more then 600 connectors. Also these connectores are common to Power Automate, Power Apps and Logic Apps.
Create a new package MIS: API Connectors: This package will provide stencils to all connectors currently provided for Microsoft Power Automate, Microsoft Power Apps, and Azure Logic Apps.
Lock the aspect ratio of the new stencil icons: This was a requested made that can be very handly to protects against accidental resizing with another shape aspect.
SVG files: new SVG files added.
Microsoft Integration, Azure, Power Platform, Office 365 and much more Stencils Pack
Microsoft Integration, Azure, Power Platform, Office 365 and much more Stencils Pack it’s a Visio package that contains fully resizable Visio shapes (symbols/icons) that will help you to visually represent On-premise, Cloud or Hybrid Integration and Enterprise architectures scenarios (BizTalk Server, API Management, Logic Apps, Service Bus, Event Hub…), solutions diagrams and features or systems that use Microsoft Azure and related cloud and on-premises technologies in Visio 2016/2013:
BizTalk Server
Microsoft Azure
Integration
Integration Service Environments (ISE)
Logic Apps and Azure App Service in general (API Apps, Web Apps, and Mobile Apps)
Azure API Management
Messaging: Event Hubs, Event Grid, Service Bus, …
Azure IoT and Docker
AI, Machine Learning, Stream Analytics, Data Factory, Data Pipelines
SQL Server, DocumentDB, CosmosDB, MySQL, …
and so on
Microsoft Power Platform
Microsoft Flow
PowerApps
Power BI
Office365, SharePoint,…
DevOps and PowerShell
Security and Governance
And much more…
… and now non-related Microsoft technologies like:
SAP Stencils
The Microsoft Integration Stencils Pack is composed of 27 files:
Microsoft Integration Stencils
MIS Additional or Support Stencils
MIS AI and Machine Learning Stencils
MIS Apps and Systems Logo Stencils
MIS Azure Additional or Support Stencils
MIS Azure Black and Gray
MIS Azure Old Versions
MIS Azure Stencils
MIS Black and Cyan
MIS Buildings Stencils
MIS Databases and Analytics Stencils
MIS Deprecated Stencils
MIS Developer Stencils
MIS Devices Stencils
MIS Files and Message Types Stencils
MIS Generic Stencils
MIS Infrastructure and Networking Stencils
MIS Integration Fun
MIS Integration Patterns Stencils
MIS IoT Stencils
MIS Office, Office 365 and Dynamics 365
MIS Power BI Stencils
MIS Power Platform Stencils
MIS SAP Stencils
MIS Security and Governance
MIS Servers (Hexagonal) Stencils
MIS Users and Roles Stencils
Organisational Stencils
That you can use and resize without losing quality, in particular, the new shapes.
Download
You can download Microsoft Integration, Azure, BAPI, Office 365 and much more Stencils Pack for Visio from GitHub Here:
In the last post we talked about building a Logic App from scratch and gave a few hints on what we would change to prepare for CI/CD.
In this post, we will show you how to prepare your Logic App and template files, how to set and rename your parameters and will hint on how it will correlate with the Azure Pipeline.
So lets recap. We saw that the needed requirements are having VS installed, Azure SDK, Logic Apps for Visual Studio tools extension and an active Azure subscription. We built a new Azure Resource Group project with the Logic Apps template and added a few actions to our LA, nothing too fancy, just enough to show what’s needed.
Now, let’s look at how we will change the code to get it ready.
Changing the JSON code to prepare it for CI/CD is simple but requires attention, because if not done properly, you won’t be able to deploy your template and it might take you a while to find where the problem is. Even though VS gives you a few hints, because Intellisense helps, it might still not explain why it’s failing.
The first thing I like to do is to rename the connection parameters, having “servicebus_1_connectionString” is just horrible and does not help you understand what kind of connection you have. For this case, because we only have one connection, I’ll rename it to “arm_serviceBus_connectionString”, because we’re using an ARM (Azure Resource Manager) template and because this is the type of parameter. I will also add a template variable, named “SingleQuote”, which will be, as you’ve might have guessed, a single quote mark.
If you have other connectors, I suggest you continue changing names to match the same naming convention. It will help you and others to know what that is supposed to be.
After the Logic App file is taken care of, you will also need to apply these changes in the Parameters file.
By default, it will be almost empty, just having the logicAppName parameter with a Null value. This will make your deployment fail, because the template isn’t valid.
In fact, you won’t even be able to deploy it, because VS is smart enough to prompt you for the missing values, taking the default ones from the LogicApp.
At this point, we’re no longer dealing with the definition, we’re dealing with the values we want the Logic App parameters to have. So, “type” and “defaultValue” no longer apply, you should use “value” directly or, if you’re dealing with KeyVault secrets, you can just reference KV and the secret name.
In this example, I’m setting the SB connection string both ways, to show how it can be done.
If you’ve done everything right, you’re Logic App should be deployed without any fuss.
Now comes the fun part, that is dealing with the Parameters Template file. It is incredibly difficult to do this and it’s going to take several hours. So grab that coffee and get confortable.
You will need to change your values to a token and an identifier, to later use in the Pipeline and releases.
Wow, that took us… 30 seconds, maybe. I’m exhausted and I need a break. You can even get that KV value with the token, you just need to change the identifier to the KV secret name.
We’re sweating over here with all this work.
In the next blog post, we will build the Pipeline and give the hints for the Release as well.
I have been working on a new BizTalk Server project on a new client for a few weeks. Now that we are beginning the development phase, I was getting annoying with an Internet Explorer security blocking windows every time I try to open a schema document on Visual Studio with the BizTalk Server Schema Editor:
Internet Explorer
Content within this application coming from the website listed below is being blocked by Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration:
about:security_devenv.exe
To be honest, I initially ignored this issue and immediately clicked on the Close button, and everything would work as usual. But starting to work every day on the project and facing this issue every time I tried to open a Schema was simple to annoying.
Cause
We don’t need the IE to develop BizTalk Schemas, but the XSD viewer, in fact, opens an IE embedded inside Visual Studio. And that is the reason for this issue.
I typically don’t get this “warning” message because I usually turn off Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration on my BizTalk Servers.
Solution
The solution is simple:
You can turn off Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration by:
Start by running the Server Manager, if it is not already open, from either:
On the Windows taskbar, click the Server Manager button
On the Start screen, click Server Manager
In the Server Manager Dashboard, from the scope pane (on the left side) click on Local Server
In the Server Properties for the Local Server, you’ll see the option for IE Enhanced Security Configuration. Click On to change the option
A dialog box appears, letting Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration be enabled/disabled separately for normal users and administrators; turn off both. After disabling both options, click OK
Click the Refresh button at the top of the Server Manager and the IE Enhanced Security Configuration should now show as Off
Or, if don’t want to turn off Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration , you can on the blocking pop-up window click on Add
On the Trusted sites window, make sure Require server verification (https:) for all sites in this zone is not marked and then click Add
After one of these two options/settings that annoying blocking behavior inside Visual Studio will be gone.
A few days ago, I wrote a blog post about a similar topic, but in that case, it was the BizTalk Server Application Project Visual Studio that was missing. In fact, at that point, the Empty BizTalk Server Project Visual Studio template was also missing in the development environment.
It is not a common situation in a BizTalk Server Development environment, but I cannot say that this is the first time I have found this issue.
I tried to see if the project template was available on the local system. Normally VS stores the available templates at Program Files(x86) -> Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0 -> Common7 -> IDE -> ProjectTemplates, but the template was there:
Cause
I don’t know very precisely why Visual Studio was not loading the most critical BizTalk Server Visual Studio template, and it is hard to find the proper cause of this issue.
Of course, this problem was not related to the lack of installation of the development tools and the SDK. The Developer tools and SDK component was installed during the BizTalk Server installation.
On a quick search over this issue, I found several mentions that you could solve this issue by installing the template available on the Visual Studio Marketplace. According to the documentation, this template is available for Visual Studio 2015, 2017 (?), and 2019.
Note: I don’t know any version of BizTalk Server that works on Visual Studio 2017
However, trying to install this template using the marketplace, I got a dependency alert for Visual Studio MPF 16.0. I try to follow the instructions provide by Microsoft to overcome this problem in which you can get more information here, but without any practical effect.
So, I went applying the traditional method to solve the problem of the missing template.
Solution
To fix this issue, the solution is quite simple:
You need to Repair the Visual Studio installation
After you repair the Empty BizTalk Server Project will be available
