BizTalk Blogs

Lista de “Erros e avisos, Causas e Soluções” sobre o BizTalk disponível na TechNet Wiki

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:14:36 GMT

Este artigo pretende ser uma knowledge base de todos os erros/avisos documentados, o porquê de acontecerem e respectivas soluções, em todas as etapas do BizTalk Server: desenvolvimento, publicação (deploy), adaptadores, BizTalk runtime, instalação e configuração,… À medida que encontra novos erros e solução irei atualizando esta lista, no entanto deixo o desafio a todos vocês a participarem e a contribuir com novos conteúdos por forma a mantermos esta lista sempre atualizada. Eu sei que...

Leia Mais..

BizTalk Community series: Introducing Abhijit Mahato

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:46:00 +0000

Writing these stories so far on community members has been a great experience and I received a lot of positive feedback. The stories continue with the fourth story in the BizTalk Community Series that brings active BizTalk community members to the foreground. The story today is on Abhijit Mahato. He is a Microsoft Community Contributor since 2011, a blogger and an active BizTalk forum member.

Abhijit is married to his lovely wife Laxmi, and they are expecting their first child in March 2012. His family lives in Kolkata, also known as “The City of Joy, City of Palaces, the Cultural capital of India”, located in the eastern part of India.

Abhijit currently works as a Senior BizTalk Consultant at Capgemini, one of the world’s largest IT Services, Consulting and Outsourcing companies with over 115,000 people operating in 40 countries. His job involves working with customers on integration projects especially using BizTalk Server, WCF (.Net) and SQL Server (SSIS). He loves to design, architect, and develop BizTalk Solution. Also he likes to install and configure BizTalk Server.

He had his first integration project using BizTalk Server 2004 in the year 2005. His senior project manager and customer highly appreciated his work and effort. This motivated him to do more integration projects. Since then Abhijit has worked on many large and complex integration projects with BizTalk.

Abhijit feels that the best thing about working in any integration project is learning BizTalk (Integration product) and also the opportunity to learn other technologies like SAP, EDI, MS CRM and so on. What he likes the most about BizTalk Server product and I quote is:

“It is currently one of the most mature, reliable and stable integration server in the industry.”

Furthermore he describes the product in the following manner:

“It has got a huge number of “out of the box” adapters; and there is a long list of other features like message persistence, recovery in case of failure in communication, correlation, long running transactions, monitoring of business processes, complex mapping, and the ESB. Furthermore BizTalk contains a number of tools like BRE, BAM, SSO, BizTalk Admin console and so on enhancing productivity.”

Finally Abhijit is very excited about Microsoft’s recent announcement of the forthcoming release of BizTalk Server 2010 R2, and is looking forward to exploring and working with this new release.

In his spare time, Abhijit loves to spend time with his family and friends, take participation in various quiz competitions and enjoy solving mathematical and logical puzzles. Besides that he loves reading technical blogs on new Microsoft technologies like Windows AppFabric,Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Azure. Finally he also spends time in contributing to MSDN BizTalk forums and write blogs posts about BizTalk issues and related topics.

Abhijit would like to thank people for reading his posts and appreciates if they can also provide feedback. This will keep him motivated to continue to contribute. He feels this will also improve the online BizTalk community experience for others.

A final quote from Abhijit:

“I believe that one doesn’t ever get tired until he makes the last attempt and doesn’t ever make the last attempt until he is successful.”

I would like to thank Abhijit for his contributions to the community and the time he took to have a chat with me.

Artigo “BizTalk Server – Princípios Básicos dos Mapas (Parte 2)” na Revista “Programar”

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:48:25 GMT

Já está disponível a 33ª edição da Revista PROGRAMAR, uma publicação digital gratuita com diversos artigos relacionados com desenvolvimento de software. Esta edição contém um artigo da minha autoria sobre o editor de mapas do BizTalk Server e têm como objectivo explicar como os mapas são processados internamente pelo motor do produto à medida que exploramos o editor de mapas do BizTalk Server. Espero que gostem! E aproveitem para dar a sua opinião votando nos 3 melhores artigos...

Leia Mais..

Artigo “BizTalk Server – Princípios Básicos dos Mapas (Parte 2)” na Revista “Programar”

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:38:20 +0000

For the BizTalk Portuguese Community, I publish an article call “BizTalk Server – Basics principles of Maps (Part 2)” on the Magazine “Programar” and soon I will translate to English. Já está disponível a 33ª edição da Revista PROGRAMAR, uma publicação digital gratuita com diversos artigos relacionados com desenvolvimento de software. Esta edição contém um [...]

Azure: My Great Windows Azure Idea

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 06:44:20 GMT

After ranting on a couple of emails today about a particular Azure issue, I’ve popped up a couple of features to vote on.

http://www.mygreatwindowsazureidea.com/forums/34192-windows-azure-feature-voting

Add yours now

List of BizTalk Errors and Warnings, Causes and Solutions available in TechNet Wiki

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 02:33:38 +0000

This article is intended to be a knowledge base of all Errors and Warnings, Causes and Solutions documented in all stages/components of BizTalk: different stages of development, deployment, adapters, runtime, setup and configuration… As soon I find new errors and solutions, I’ll try to keep this list updated. However I challenge you all to add [...]

Azure: Current IP Range of Data Centers

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 02:15:07 GMT

With the ever changing Azure space, chances are you’ve had services working a treat and then one day just fail.

“Can’t connect…" etc.

This has happened to me twice this week – with over 14 IP Address ranges defined in the client’s firewall rules.

It appears that my service bus services were spun up or assigned another IP outside the ‘allowed range’.

It gets frustrating at times as generally the process goes as follows:

1) fill out a form to request firewall changes. Include as much detail as possible.

2) hand to the client and they delegate to their security/ops team to implement.

3) confirmation comes back.

4) start up ServiceBus service

5) could work?? may fail – due to *another* IP address allocated in Windows Azure not on the ‘allowed list of ranges’.

6) fill out another form asking for another IP Address…
…
By the 3rd iteration of this process it all is beginning to look very unprofessional. (in comparison, these guys are used to tasks such as ‘Access to SQL Server XXX – here’s the ports, there’s the machine and done’. Azure on the other hand – ‘What IP Addresses do you need? What ports?’… we need better information in this area)

Anyway – here’s the most update to date list 10/02/2011.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazureappfabricannounce/archive/2010/01/28/additional-data-centers-for-windows-azure-platform-appfabric.aspx

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns Book Give Away

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 05:42:34 GMT

It is amazing how time flies! It seems like just yesterday my book on Applied Architecture Patterns hit the shelves, but that was almost a year and a half ago now.

A few months ago, a new BizTalk patterns book written by fellow BizTalk MVP Dan Rosanova has been released. It is called Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns published by Packet Publishing.

What separates this book from other BizTalk books is it covers both BizTalk Basics & Patterns and a detailed overview of a real-life BizTalk Solution.

This book is available from Packet and Amazon. Currently, the Amazon Kindle version is available for around $18. This will be the best $18 you spend toward bettering your BizTalk knowledge!

Thanks to Packet Publishing I have a few copies of the book to give away!

This week I am going to give away a copy to a random comment on this blog post. Simply post a comment below (make sure you are a registered BizTalkGurus.com user or you include your email address so I can contact you if you win) about a BizTalk Pattern you use today or about Why You Need To Learn About BizTalk Patterns. I will pick a random winner from all comments received before the end of the day on Wednesday February 8th Central Time.

I will cover shipping of the book to any address the USPS delivers to worldwide.

If you do not win this time, watch for more upcoming ways to win!

Criando Custom Pipeline Disassembler - Quebra de FF em N Registros. Parte 1

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:00:56 GMT

E ae Pessoal? Td bem? Nesse post vou falar como criar um Disassembler component no Biztalk 2010, e quebrar o Flat File em uma quantidade N de registros. O Biztalk ele faz o split automático do Flat File quebrando o arquivo em 1 registro por vez. Isso significa que se um arquivo chegar com 200 registros o Biztalk abrirá 200 instancia de orchestration para tratar esse arquivo. Agora vamos supor que a necessidade seja quebrar o arquivo em 50 registros por vez. E agora? A solução é criar...

Leia Mais..

Setando Porta Dinamica SQL Adapter

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:56:25 GMT

E ai Pessoas? Tudo certo? Faz tempo que não posto nada aqui, andei preguiçosa, já que o Sandro Pereira está fazendo todo o trabalho. Ta postando muito, fazendo um ótimo trabalho, enriquecendo nossa comunidade Brasil/Portugal. O B R I G A D A Sandro! Hoje vou falar do Adaptador antigo, o SQL Adapter, isso mesmo, muitos clientes ainda utilizam esse adapter. Já postamos muito sobre criar portas dinamicas, mas nunca sobre esse cara. Como fazer? Então já vou supor que a...

Leia Mais..

Setando Porta Dinamica WCF-SQL

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:54:54 GMT

Aproveitando que o assunto do meu último post foi sobre setar portas do antigo SQL Adapter dinamicamente, aproveito para colocar o código para setar portas dinamicas do novo Adapter WCF-SQL.Já falamos aqui, sobre setar portas dinamicamente com o novo Adapter WCF, mas nesse aqui a configuração é um pouco diferente. 1: Request2=Request1; 2: Request2(WCF.Action)="TableOp/Insert/dbo/NomeTabela"; 3: Request2(WCF.BindingType)="sqlBinding"; 4: Request2(WCF.UserName)="usuario"; 5: ...

Leia Mais..

Azure ServiceBus: Fixing the dreaded ‘The X.509 certificate CN=servicebus.windows.net chain building failed’ error

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 03:08:41 GMT

Scotty & myself have had this error going for over 2 weeks now, and have tried many options, settings, registry keys, reboots and so on.
(we have had this on 2 boxes now, that are *not* directly connected to the internet. They are locked down servers with only required services accessible through the firewall)

Generally you’ll encounter this error is you install Azure SDK v1.6 – there has been people that have revert back to Azure v1.5 SDK when this error has been encountered and this seems to fix most of their problems.

Here I’m using netTcpRelayBinding, BizTalk 2010 but this could just have easily have been IIS or your own app.

Finding the outbound ports and Azure datacenter address space is always the challenge. Ports 80,443,9351 and 9352 are the main ones with the remote addresses being the network segments of your Azure Datacenter.

The problem: “Oh it’s a chain validation thing, I’ll just go and turn off Certificate checking…” let me see the options.
(this is what we thought 2+ weeks ago)

Here I have a BizTalk shot of the transportClientEndpointBehaviour with Authentication node set to NoCheck and None (you would set these from code or a config file outside of biztalk)

We found that these currently have NO BEARING whatsoever…2 weeks we’ll never get back.

Don’t be drawn into here, it’s a long windy path and you’ll most likely end up short.

I am currently waiting to hear back from the folks on the product team to see what the answer is on this – BUT for now as a workaround we sat down with a network sniffer to see the characteristics.

Work around:

1. Add some Host Entries

2. Create a dummy site so the checker is fooled into grabbing local CRLs.

Add these Entries to your HOSTs file.

127.0.0.1    www.public-trust.com
127.0.0.1    mscrl.microsoft.com
127.0.0.1    crl.microsoft.com
127.0.0.1    corppki

Download and extract these directories to your DEFAULT WEB SITE (i.e. the one that answers to http://127.0.0.1/…..)
This is usually under C:\inetpub\wwwroot (even if you have sharepoint installed)

-------------------- The nasty error -------------------

The Messaging Engine failed to add a receive location "<receive location>" with URL "sb://<rec url>" to the adapter "WCF-Custom". Reason: "System.ServiceModel.Security.SecurityNegotiationException: The X.509 certificate CN=servicebus.windows.net chain building failed. The certificate that was used has a trust chain that cannot be verified. Replace the certificate or change the certificateValidationMode. The revocation function was unable to check revocation because the revocation server was offline.
---> System.IdentityModel.Tokens.SecurityTokenValidationException: The X.509 certificate CN=servicebus.windows.net chain building failed. The certificate that was used has a trust chain that cannot be verified. Replace the certificate or change the certificateValidationMode. The revocation function was unable to check revocation because the revocation server was offline.

   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.Security.RetriableCertificateValidator.Validate(X509Certificate2 certificate)
   at System.IdentityModel.Selectors.X509SecurityTokenAuthenticator.ValidateTokenCore(SecurityToken token)
   at System.IdentityModel.Selectors.SecurityTokenAuthenticator.ValidateToken(SecurityToken token)
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.SslStreamSecurityUpgradeInitiator.ValidateRemoteCertificate(Object sender, X509Certificate certificate, X509Chain chain, SslPolicyErrors sslPolicyErrors)
   at System.Net.Security.SecureChannel.VerifyRemoteCertificate(RemoteCertValidationCallback remoteCertValidationCallback)
   at System.Net.Security.SslState.CompleteHandshake()
   at System.Net.Security.SslState.CheckCompletionBeforeNextReceive(ProtocolToken message, AsyncProtocolRequest asyncRequest)
   at System.Net.Security.SslState.StartSendBlob(Byte[] incoming, Int32 count, AsyncProtocolRequest asyncRequest)
   at System.Net.Security.SslState.ProcessReceivedBlob(Byte[] buffer, Int32 count, AsyncProtocolRequest asyncRequest)
   at System.Net.Security.SslState.StartReceiveBlob(Byte[] buffer, AsyncProtocolRequest asyncRequest)
   at System.Net.Security.SslState.StartSendBlob(Byte[] incoming, Int32 count, AsyncProtocolRequest asyncRequest)
   at System.Net.Security.SslState.ProcessReceivedBlob(Byte[] buffer, Int32 count, AsyncProtocolRequest asyncRequest)
   at System.Net.Security.SslState.StartReceiveBlob(Byte[] buffer, AsyncProtocolRequest asyncRequest)
   at System.Net.Security.SslState.StartSendBlob(Byte[] incoming, Int32 count, AsyncProtocolRequest asyncRequest)
   at System.Net.Security.SslState.ProcessReceivedBlob(Byte[] buffer, Int32 count, AsyncProtocolRequest asyncRequest)
   at System.Net.Security.SslState.StartReceiveBlob(Byte[] buffer, AsyncProtocolRequest asyncRequest)
   at System.Net.Security.SslState.StartSendBlob(Byte[] incoming, Int32 count, AsyncProtocolRequest asyncRequest)
   at System.Net.Security.SslState.ForceAuthentication(Boolean receiveFirst, Byte[] buffer, AsyncProtocolRequest asyncRequest)
   at System.Net.Security.SslState.ProcessAuthentication(LazyAsyncResult lazyResult)
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.SslStreamSecurityUpgradeInitiator.OnInitiateUpgrade(Stream stream, SecurityMessageProperty& remoteSecurity)
   --- End of inner exception stack trace ---
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.SslStreamSecurityUpgradeInitiator.OnInitiateUpgrade(Stream stream, SecurityMessageProperty& remoteSecurity)
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.StreamSecurityUpgradeInitiatorBase.InitiateUpgrade(Stream stream)
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ConnectionUpgradeHelper.InitiateUpgrade(StreamUpgradeInitiator upgradeInitiator, IConnection& connection, ClientFramingDecoder decoder, IDefaultCommunicationTimeouts defaultTimeouts, TimeoutHelper& timeoutHelper)
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ClientFramingDuplexSessionChannel.SendPreamble(IConnection connection, ArraySegment`1 preamble, TimeoutHelper& timeoutHelper)
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ClientFramingDuplexSessionChannel.DuplexConnectionPoolHelper.AcceptPooledConnection(IConnection connection, TimeoutHelper& timeoutHelper)
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ConnectionPoolHelper.EstablishConnection(TimeSpan timeout)
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ClientFramingDuplexSessionChannel.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)
   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.RelayedOnewayTcpClient.RelayedOnewayChannel.Open(TimeSpan timeout)
   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.RelayedOnewayTcpClient.GetChannel(Uri via, TimeSpan timeout)
   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.RelayedOnewayTcpClient.ConnectRequestReplyContext.Send(Message message, TimeSpan timeout, IDuplexChannel& channel)
   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.RelayedOnewayTcpListener.RelayedOnewayTcpListenerClient.Connect(TimeSpan timeout)
   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.RelayedOnewayTcpClient.EnsureConnected(TimeSpan timeout)
   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)
   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.RefcountedCommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)
   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.RelayedOnewayChannelListener.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)
   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)
   at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ChannelDispatcher.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)
   at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostBase.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)
   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.SocketConnectionTransportManager.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)
   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.TransportManager.Open(TimeSpan timeout, TransportChannelListener channelListener)
   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.TransportManagerContainer.Open(TimeSpan timeout, SelectTransportManagersCallback selectTransportManagerCallback)
   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.SocketConnectionChannelListener`2.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)
   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)
   at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ChannelDispatcher.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)
   at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostBase.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)
   at Microsoft.BizTalk.Adapter.Wcf.Runtime.WcfReceiveEndpoint.Enable()
   at Microsoft.BizTalk.Adapter.Wcf.Runtime.WcfReceiveEndpoint..ctor(BizTalkEndpointContext endpointContext, IBTTransportProxy transportProxy, ControlledTermination control)
   at Microsoft.BizTalk.Adapter.Wcf.Runtime.WcfReceiver`2.AddReceiveEndpoint(String url, IPropertyBag adapterConfig, IPropertyBag bizTalkConfig)".

BizTalk Orchestration error: "Errors exist for one or more children."

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 23:30:00 +0000

For some reason after having migrated a BizTalk 2006/Visual Studio 2005 solution to BizTalk 2010/VS 2010 using VS Conversion Wizard, I got the following error: "Errors exist for one or more children." Following for another saying he did not recognize certain message, which honestly was a little strange, I should have a total about 20 [...]

Azure: An unexpected VIP Swap ERROR

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 10:23:24 GMT

Windows Azure cannot perform a VIP swap between deployments that have a different number of endpoints.

Which begs the question – what happens as part of an upgrade if you add-endpoints???

So clearly the VIP Swap operation is not a simple process.

Now off to delete some production instances so I can get the changes through…

A new blog for BizTalk Administrators

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 21:19:00 +0000

There is a new BizTalk blog. Another one, yes targeted for BizTalk administrators. Why? There are many blogs out there. Yet most of them are focused on the developer. There is not much on BizTalk administrative topics nor one blog where BizTalk administrators share their knowledge, and experience between each other and with the community. Jeroen Hendriks from Axon Olympus started an initiative to create a blog for BizTalk professionals with a heart for managing BizTalk. He talked this through with me sharing some thoughts and a game plan. We took from there and blog is live now!

You can join as contributor by contacting Jeroen (administrator and owner) through Contact Us. Currently besides me and Jeroen, two more professionals from the field joined: Tord Glad Nordahl and Howard S. Edidin. Probably more BizTalk professionals will join over time. I hope many will contribute and even more will read this blog.
Enjoy.

BizTalk Community series: Introducing Rene Brauwers

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:18:00 +0000

The third story of the BizTalk Community Series that brings active BizTalk community members to the foreground is on Rene Brauwers. He is mainly an active blogger on BizTalk Server. His blog contains highly valuable posts on setting up a BizTalk infrastructure, how to integrate with CRM 2011 and on many other topics. Last year he also acted as technical reviewer for BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns book and for my forthcoming BizTalk Server 2010 Cookbook.

Rene is 34 years old, born in Venlo, the Netherlands, and he moved to The Hague in 1996 to study. Ever since he has stayed in or close to that city. He currently lives together with his girlfriend Miranda in Rijswijk.

Rene is a BizTalk Specialist at Motion10 and is he considers himself as one of those people who is lucky enough to say that he can make a living out of his hobby. His BizTalk expertise ranges from the early stage involvement like pre-sales, proof-of-concepts, requirements gathering, architecting, developing to administration. Besides BizTalk he still finds the opportunity to do some programming as well like C#, SQL, WCF, Entity, WF, Azure and so on.

Rene’s integration background started years ago with WebMethods. The main reason for his involvement with this product back then was that BizTalk according to his employer was not mature enough. His employer choose WebMethods. However Rene has never been a Java kind of guy. He liked Microsoft more, so in the end he was thrilled to get his hands-on experience with BizTalk.

Rene loves the versatility of the BizTalk Server product. Iin fact nowadays it (almost) fits into the complete .Net software stack. He feels that almost every integration challenge can be solved with it.To his opinion there is not another product that offers so much out of the box functionality as BizTalk Server (BRE,BAM, B2B, B2C, ESB, SOA etcetera). All this functionality for such a relative small investment. With this level of versatility Rene believes a developer should be pretty broadly skilled (infra-structure knowledge, security, LOB applications, SQL, .NET, WCF, Cloud, PAAS, SAAS, being able to think in processes, think publish/subscribe, creative, Communicator, Team-player, Documenter etcetera). Besides that as a developer you have to stay on top of the latest developments, which makes it so interesting. He thinks all of this makes us BizTalkers so scarce!!!

In his spare time Rene likes to:

Spends a lot of time together with his girlfriend Miranda on decorating their house and planning/discussing on how to decorate it. Well actually she comes up with the good ideas and he usually agrees.
Loves to spend time together with friends, have a few drinks and some laughs.
Likes to dig into new (Microsoft) Technologies and play around with them.
Big a fan of (summer) music festivals like Pinkpop, Valtifest, LoveLand, Extrema, Parkpop and so on.
Study, well that’s one of the perks when you’re in IT, you always have to keep learning and luckily he doesn’t mind.
Mostly he just chills and relaxes, enjoying live to it’s fullest extent.

Currently Rene doesn’t practice any sports, except for the occasional swim in the morning. Yet he has the intention to start picking up table-tennis again, something he enjoyed when was young. Besides that he loves to watch soccer. He mainly likes to watch 'Oranje' (our National Soccer Team) play. Yet he is still disappointed by the fact that the Dutch lost the World Cup 2010 final from Spain. Rene simply can't wait for the sweet revenge this year with Euro 2012 ;-)

A final quote from Rene:

“Simply treat people as you would like to be treated. Respect each other and be honest. It all sounds so easy, but only if it would be that easy…. “

Rene also has a request for my readers:

If you have a 457 visa for Australia to give away ;-) Feel free to contact him through LinkedIn.

BizTalk360 - We are hiring - Looking for 2 outgoing BizTalk developers in India

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 05:35:15 +0000

Last month we setup our India development/support centre based in Coimbatore, Tamilnadu, India. The main aim of the team in India is to focus primarily on testing and supporting BizTalk360. Now we wanted to expand that operation with future development/R&D work for BizTalk360. We are looking for 2 experienced BizTalk developers in India to join our team.

About the job:

As with all jobs at a small startup, the basic criteria is you must be prepared to do variety of things. We promise you'll learn lot of things, which you typically don't learn in big corporate environments. We need help in three areas (at least at this stage)

1. Maintain, support and improve BizTalk360: BizTalk360 is used by customers world wide covering wide geographic area, so we are looking for someone who are happy to talk to customers, understand their problems and willing to help them.

2. Work on future R&D of BizTalk360: From time to time we either get ideas from our existing customers, community or our own ideas in the pipeline. You must be capable of converting those ideas into nice little modules within BizTalk360.

3. Automate the regression testing tasks: We wanted to fully automate and enhance our regressing testing capability. At the moment we got some automated and some manually, it basically delays the release cycle.

About you:

This is a job for multi-talented person: You need to be a BizTalk expert, a tech support, a developer, a tester, a document writer and sometimes sales/marketing guy all at once.

You must have worked minimum 5 years in .NET, C#. 2 years in BizTalk
You like to work in a challenging startup rather than a boring corporate world.
You have real world experience as a BizTalk developer
You know what most of these terms mean: WCF, Adapter, Pipeline, Schema, Orchestration, BAM, Tracking, Team foundation server, MSBuild, Unit testing, Host, Host instance, SSL?.you get the idea
If you are familiar with front-end technologies like asp.net, Silverlight, HTML5 it's a bonus
You stand out among your peers for your communication skills. Past experiences speaking in public, writing blogs/articles, doing direct customer support are a BIG plus
You are looking for a job that will let you use ALL of your talents and develop new ones
You are self motivated and set you own schedule. Basically you don't need a manager to tell what you need to do.
You have an unquenchable thirst for learning
You are not scared by this list: you know that you can rise to the occasion and fill the gaps if given the chance and time
You are willing to work in Coimbatore.

What we can do for you:

For the right candidate we are prepared to pay above average market rates. We are also working on a profit sharing program for the employees. We guarantee you to give a environment where you can learn and grow. You also will get a chance to work with some of the industry leaders in BizTalk. We promise to train and groom you.

IMPORTANT: if you've read so far and are thinking: this isn't for me, please think for a moment about someone else you know who'd be perfect for this job and pass them this link! Even if you're not totally sure, we'd be super-grateful if you could send out an email or two.

How to apply:

Simply send us your CV to contact@biztalk360.com with subject: CV: Your Name and a small note saying why we should hire you?

Nandri!

Saravana Kumar

Some considerations that we should have when migrating databases to a new SQL Server

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:07:43 +0000

This post is not really about BizTalk… but since I’ve been configuring several environments in my client I decided to take this notes. Basically we have some BizTalk processes that communicate with database in SQL Server that we are moving to SQL Server 2008 R2. Consideration 1: Change Edit Top 200 Rows and Select Top [...]

TechNet Wiki: The number of BizTalk articles is growing …

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:27:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post for the Official blog of TechNet Wiki with the topic “Wiki-Ninjas on Technology: BizTalk Server”. In that blog post I wrote a story on contributions of the community and Microsoft employees for the TechNet Wiki. Mid December there were little of 40 BizTalk Wiki Articles and over a month’s time it has grown to little over 70. That is a tremendous growth of articles (around 30). It show increasing popularity of the TechNet Wiki as a channel of information on Microsoft technology and products.

The newly added articles on BizTalk Server have been written by myself, Tord Glad Nordahl, Sandro Pereira, Howard S. Edidin, and Mick Badran. All these articles (existing and new) are being improved every day by people mentioned here and others (Microsoft employees and the community). I expect the number will grow over time to over 100+ articles as more community members will probably join.

With the wealth of information on TechNet Wiki, MSDN and other Microsoft channels combined you can fully leverage the BizTalk Server platform. You can reach all the BizTalk related wiki articles through BizTalk Server Resources on the TechNet Wiki article.

Enjoy reading any of the articles and hopefully you will find them useful.

BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns Book Review

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:15:30 +0000

Patterns and Practices are very critical in any software development project. Problems tend to recur, and we tend to solve them time and time again. Over time we tend to address these problems in a more and more elegant way. Understanding the common patterns and solutions that's already been widely in the industry greatly increases the chances of success for any solution.

That's exactly what Dan Rosanova attempted to address in his book BizTalk Serve 2010 patterns. He is a good friend of mine from the MVP community and I can safely attest he is a knowledgeable guy when it comes to BizTalk Server.

In this book Dan provided a thorough introduction to Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010, covering breadth of the product in the first half of the book. In the second half of the book Dan has taken a real world scenario and embarked on the process of adapting BizTalk Server 2010 with interesting patterns and best practices.

The book also covers the breadth of the BizTalk solution life cycle right from defining Visual Studio solution structure to disaster recovery and administration. Various topologies, clustering options, etc are covered.

As the heading suggests various patterns like convoys, zombies, parallel processing, broker pattern etc are explained in detail. I'll highly recommend this book for anyone starting to look into BizTalk Server. A success of the product will depend on the level of documentation and resources available. In that sense, it really exciting time to be in BizTalk world with the list of books that's came in 2011

and the line up for 2012.

-Saravana

With Microsoft backing, Democracy Live brings ballot box to G.I.s overseas

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:50:39 GMT

Great use of Azure platform for voting…

Democracy Live is playing an important role in the presidential primaries in Florida, Virginia and California by making it easier for American military personnel stationed overseas and other citizens living abroad to vote in U.S. elections.

Since voting began, more than 1,200 Florida voters in 40 countries have accessed ballots using LiveBallot, a technology developed by Issaquah-based Democracy Live and hosted on Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform.

With Microsoft backing, Democracy Live brings ballot box to G.I.s overseas

BizTalk360 - 3 great features added to the upcoming 3.1 version

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 06:26:44 +0000

We released version 3.1 beta on 1st of December 2011. Two of the main functionalities we introduced in the beta were

Graphical Message Flow Viewer, and
SMS/Text alerting capability

in addition to the various minor improvements and bug fixes. Since then we been focusing on 3 super cool features silently. As always we are super excited to show the world what they are.

Throttling analyser
Tracking manager
Enhanced Advanced event viewer

Note: RTM version number will be 3.2. Estimated release date 31st of January

Throttling analyser:

Throttling is one of the cool at the same time complicated technical bit in BizTalk Server. Majority of the time, people struggle to understand what throttling is and how it's working. You really need to have a deep technical understanding of BizTalk internals to understand throttling. Even experienced BizTalk people struggle to constantly keep up with the values of throttling state on top of their head (ex: 4-process memory, 5- system memory, 10 - user override etc.). BizTalk360 throttling analyser helps to resolve this issue by giving visual representation of the throttling condition in a near real time basis. We'll shortly be releasing a demo video, stay tuned to see the full capabilities.

Tracking Manager

One of important aspect of a middleware platform like BizTalk server is it's ability to track information flowing through the system. Tracking comes with a performance cost and it's important you choose your tracking strategy correctly. In some instances we have seen customers switching off tracking completely at environment level for performance. BizTalk360 tracking manager gives you a visual representation of your tracking configuration at application level as shown below. This helps administrators to visualize the tracking configuration easily.

Advanced Event Viewer (AEV)

BizTalk360 AEV collects all the event log information in the BizTalk environment and persist in the BizTalk360 SQL database (zero configuration required). This give the ability for the user to query it from a central console. AEV was in BizTalk360 from day1, based on various customer feedbacks we enhanced it completely in the upcoming release. In previous version, AEV monitoring service blindly collected all the event log information, which resulted in lot of unnecessary data and unusual database growth issue. In the new release, super user can configure which logs and event sources to collect. This increases performance, at the same time security. You can eliminate certain confidential event not displayed to your support staff.

If you are interested to get your hands on, please drop us an email at contact@biztalk360.com

Nandri!

Saravana Kumar

http://www.biztalk360.com | http://support.biztalk360.com
@biztalk360 | http://facebook.com/biztalk360 | http://getsatisfaction.com/biztalk360

BizTalk: Registering a WCF Message Inspector–hours I’ll never get back!!!

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 05:52:20 GMT

Hi folks, welcome to Monday…so I thought.

Here I was registering a message inspector which should take 5 mins tops.

Find the right config, make sure the .NET full assembly name is cool and away we go.

I wanted to use this guy from my custom WCF Adapter within BizTalk – so I needed my new message inspector to be seen by BizTalk.

So I used:

and added this guy to the <behaviorExtensions> element in the Machine.Config for .NET 4.0 x64/.NET 4.0 (& .NET 2.0 for good measure)

As if a scene from SpongeBob,… 3 hours later….

I had triple check GACs, caches, full assembly names etc…Scotty popped his head around and said “Oh yeah I had this one ages ago you need to use this…”

Can you spot the difference?

SPACES!!!!

Interestingly enough – this work is part of a .NET plugin I wrote for IIS 7.5 and to register the plugin you use “Breeze.WCF.Extensions.BreezeMessagePromoteBehaviour,Breeze.WCF.Extensions,Version=1.0.0.0,Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=c2c8c7e827e9dd6a"

NO SPACES!

My head hurts for a Monday…

Hopefully you reclaim the hours I’ve lost here.

Mick.

New Azure ServiceBus Demo Available

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:40:41 +0000

I’m pleased to announce that I FINALLY have finished and packaged up a cool little ServiceBus demo.

I say “finally” because this demo has a long lifeline, it began over a year ago. I enhanced it, and showed it to a colleague, Tony Guidici, for his comments. He ended up enhancing it, and putting it into his Azure book. I then took it back, enhanced it further, and, well, here it is. Thanks also to my colleagues David Chou and Greg Oliver for their feedback.

There are several resources associated with this demo:

High def video walkthrough: http://youtu.be/xKHl87_BFT0
Low def video walkthrough: http://youtu.be/c3KLhsjstco
Complete source code, http://servicebuseventdemo.codeplex.com/

Note that this is based on the current-when-I-did-this version 1.6 of the Azure SDK and .NET libraries.

At a high level, the scenario is that this is a system that listens for events, and when critical events occur, they are multicast to listeners/subscribers through the Azure ServiceBus. The listeners use the ServiceBus relay bindings, the subscribers use the topical pub/sub mechanism of the ServiceBus.

Why relay *and* subscription? They serve different models. For example, using the subscription model, a listener could subscribe to all messages, or just a subset based on a filter condition (in this demo, we have examples of both). All subscribers will get all messages. By contrast, a great example of the relay bindings is having a Web service deployed on-prem, and remoting that by exposing an endpoint on the ServiceBus. The ServiceBus recently introduced a load balancing feature, where you could have multiple instances of the same service running, but if a message is received only one of them is called.

Both models work very well for inter-application and B2B scenarios. Note that this demo is intended to show the various parts of the ServiceBus, in a real world scenario you would likely not have a subscription listener that in turn publishes to a relay.

The moving parts in this particular demo look like this:

Subscriptions are shown above as ovals, the direct lines are relay bindings. The red lines are critical events, the black line is all events.

The projects in the solutions are:

Their purposes are:

Client
EventPoint.ConsoleApp	Listens for critical messages multicast through the ServiceBus relay binding
EventPoint.ConsoleApp.Topics	Listens for critical messages multicast through the ServiceBus eventpoint-topics namespace
EventPoint.Generator	Test harness, publishes messages to the ServiceBus eventpoint-topics namespace
EventPoint.Monitor	WinForms app that listens for critical messages multicast through the ServiceBus relay binding
Cloud
EventPoint.CriticalPersister	Listens for critical messages multicast through the ServiceBus relay binding and persists them to SQL Azure
EventPoint.Data	Message classes
EventPoint_WebRole	Table browser UI to see all events that have been persisted to Azure table storage
EventPoint_WorkerRole	Worker role that sets up eventpoint-topics subscriptions for 1) All events and 2) critical (priority 0) messages that get multicast to the ServiceBus relay
Common
EventPoint.Common	Config, message factory to support push notifications
Microsoft.Samples.ServiceBusMessaging	NuGet package to support push notifications

There are a few things you’ll need to do in order to get the demo working. Remarkably few things actually, considering the number of moving parts in the flow diagram!

First off, in the admin portal, you will need to create two ServiceBus namespaces:

NOTE THAT SERVICEBUS NAMESPACES MUST BE GLOBALLY UNIQUE. The ones shown above are ones I chose, if you want to run the code you will have to choose your own and cannot re-use mine (unless I delete them).

The “eventpoint-critical” namespace is used for the relay bindings, the “eventpoint-topics” is used for the pub/sub (apparently you cannot use the same namespace for both purposes, at least at the time this was written). You don’t have to use those names, but if you change them, you’ll need to change them in the config file too, so I’d suggest just leaving it this way.

Because there are multiple types of apps, ranging from Azure worker roles through console and winforms apps, I created a single shared static config class that is shared among the apps. You can, and need to, update the app.config file with your appropriate account information:

Note: there are more things you need to change that did not fit in the screen shot, they will be self-evident when you look at the App.Config file.

To get the ServiceBus issuer name and secret, you may need to scroll as it is bottom-most right-hand side of the ServiceBus page:

Lastly, you’ll need to add the name/creds of your storage account to the Web and worker roles.

When you run the app, five visible projects will start, plus a web role and a worker role running in the emulator.

In the screen shot below, I generated 5 random messages. Three of them were critical, and you can see they were picked up by the console apps and the WinForms app.

Just as with Windows Azure queues, the Azure ServiceBus is a powerful tool you can use to decouple parts of your application. I hope you find this demo helpful, and that it gives you new ideas about how you can use it in your own solutions.

Azure Discovery Events

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 20:15:22 +0000

We are going to be running another series of Windows Azure Discovery events in US West region.

Azure Discovery Events

We would like to offer you the opportunity to attend the Windows Azure Platform Discover Event. A Discover Event will provide a business and technical overview of the Windows Azure Platform. The target audience for these events includes business decision makers, technical decision makers, architects, and development leads. The sessions are targeted at the 100-200 level with a mix of business focused information as well as technical information.

DATE	LOCATION	TIME	REGISTERATION LINK
January 31, 2012	Redmond, WA	9:00 AM – 1:00 PM	Register here
February 8, 2012	Boulder, CO	9:00 AM – 1:00 PM	Register here
February 27, 2012	Mountain View, CA	9:00 AM – 1:00 PM	Register here
March 1, 2012	Irvine, CA	9:00 AM – 1:00 PM	Register here

To register by phone, call: 1.877.MSEVENT (1.877.673.8368).

BizTalk and 0MQ (ZeroMQ)

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:23:50 GMT

It is stupid to compare those two beasts.

BizTalk Server is a pricey, huge development and run-time system, it includes tons of the tools, supports tons of protocols and systems. It works for very specialized middle ware integration stack. It integrates big and complex systems as SAP, CRM, Oracle and intermediates many protocols and standards as SOAP, EDI, SWIFT, FTP, tons of them.

It is a messaging system.

ZeroMQ is a low-level, wire-level protocol, the same level as TCP. It has ultra-simple API. It is implemented as a library for dozens languages as C#, Java, Python, PHP, C++, COBOL, Ada, Haskel, F#, Erlang, etc. It works in the most OS: Windows, Linux, QNX... It is free and works under open-source license.

It is a messaging system.

BizTalk implements many messaging exchange patterns: Request-Response, Pub-Sub, Queue, Message Broker, Router, Convoy.

0MQ implements the same: Request-Response, Pub-Sub, Pub-Sub with Topics, Queue, Message Broker, Router...

BizTalk development stack is compounded of several editors. BizTalk run-time stack includes several services on top of SQL Server, several tools, and tons of dll-s and SQL code.

0MQ is just a library, a dll. Library per language, per OS. No dedicated services.

...
Why I feel so comfortable with this 0MQ?
Why I think it is a serious choice to do messaging in my real-life messaging?
Do I want to abandon the comfort of a big track to ride almost bare-bone wheels?

I am not the only one who comparing 0MQ with big brokers. There is interesting article comparing RabittMQ (AMQP) and 0MQ.

BizTalk Community series: Introducing Rohit Sharma

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 19:46:00 +0000

This is the second story in the BizTalk Community Series bringing active BizTalk community members to the foreground. I have received a lot of positive feedback from the first post on Tord Gald Nordahl. The series will continue with the second person from the BizTalk community I like to introduce: Rohit Sharma. He has recently been awarded MVP for BizTalk Server, and is an valuable contributor to BizTalk forums and active blogger.

Rohit is 28 years old and lives in Chandigarh, also known as "The City Beautiful", located in the northern part of India. He works in Mohali as a Senior Software Developer at Ionnor Solutions Pvt. Ltd, which is part of EDB ErgoGroup, Norway.

Rohit loves to design and develop BizTalk solutions, and he likes the challenge of tuning the BizTalk environment for performance optimizations. His journey with BizTalk started early 2007 and working with BizTalk since then gave him the opportunities to explore different tools and technologies during various integrations projects. When he started exploring technologies like Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Server AppFabric his BizTalk background came in handy.

Rohit loves to spend time with his family and friends, and going through different articles and blog posts on various technologies. He enjoys providing responses to technical issues on the BizTalk forums. Besides contributing to the forums he likes to blog about BizTalk related topics and issues. He likes to play and watch cricket as he is a huge fan of the Indian Cricket Team.

Rohit likes to share the following with the community:

“The difference between a successful person and others is not lack of knowledge, but rather the lack of willingness to share it. Steef-Jan Wiggers is a knowledgeable expert and he has the will to share his knowledge with others through his blogs, speaking engagements and other channels.”

Rohit thinks sharing is the secret to his success.

I would like to thank Rohit for his time and his highly valuable contributions on the BizTalk forums and his blog.

Cheers.

Azure: Storage client goes open source!

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:45:19 GMT

Just came across this one – Microsoft of recently released the Storage Client source code.

Could come in handy!

https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-for-net

Cheers,

Mick.

My next ten TechNet Wiki Articles on BizTalk

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 20:01:00 +0000

Last couple of weeks I written a number of wiki articles for TechNet Wiki. The TechNet Wiki is a place, where content is generated by the community and Microsoft employees about Microsoft technologies and products for the community. I very much like the concept and in November 2011 I completed my first ten articles. I continued to work on some articles and now below you will find a list of my next ten completed wiki articles on BizTalk and one on Windows Azure Service Bus EDI/EAI:

First are a couple of articles on the adapters available through BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010:

Next an article on unit testing for BizTalk Server
An article on BizTalk High Availability
Overview of all the MSDN BizTalk Code Gallery Samples
A survival guide for BizTalk Business Rules Engine
Windows Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs – Introduction article I wrote just after CTP was released. I updated it later with some more resource links to blogs.

I hope you will find these articles useful. Feel free to edit any of them (correct, add, enhance). The complete list of BizTalk wiki articles can be found here. I myself will be working on next couple of articles in the near future, which will contain some in depth ones.

Cheers!

BizTalk Blogs

Lista de “Erros e avisos, Causas e Soluções” sobre o BizTalk disponível na TechNet Wiki

BizTalk Community series: Introducing Abhijit Mahato

Artigo “BizTalk Server – Princípios Básicos dos Mapas (Parte 2)” na Revista “Programar”

Artigo “BizTalk Server – Princípios Básicos dos Mapas (Parte 2)” na Revista “Programar”

Azure: My Great Windows Azure Idea

List of BizTalk Errors and Warnings, Causes and Solutions available in TechNet Wiki

Azure: Current IP Range of Data Centers

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns Book Give Away

Criando Custom Pipeline Disassembler - Quebra de FF em N Registros. Parte 1

Setando Porta Dinamica SQL Adapter

Setando Porta Dinamica WCF-SQL

Azure ServiceBus: Fixing the dreaded ‘The X.509 certificate CN=servicebus.windows.net chain building failed’ error

BizTalk Orchestration error: "Errors exist for one or more children."

Azure: An unexpected VIP Swap ERROR

A new blog for BizTalk Administrators

BizTalk Community series: Introducing Rene Brauwers

BizTalk360 - We are hiring - Looking for 2 outgoing BizTalk developers in India

Some considerations that we should have when migrating databases to a new SQL Server

TechNet Wiki: The number of BizTalk articles is growing …

BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns Book Review

With Microsoft backing, Democracy Live brings ballot box to G.I.s overseas

BizTalk360 - 3 great features added to the upcoming 3.1 version

BizTalk: Registering a WCF Message Inspector–hours I’ll never get back!!!

New Azure ServiceBus Demo Available

Azure Discovery Events

BizTalk and 0MQ (ZeroMQ)

BizTalk Community series: Introducing Rohit Sharma

Azure: Storage client goes open source!

More cloud based integration posts coming up

My next ten TechNet Wiki Articles on BizTalk