Biztalk 2004 Integration Experiences

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Moving to BiztalkBlogs.com

Yes, I'm moving my blog to BiztalkBlogs.com and would continue to blog from the new Blog URL http://biztalkblogs.com/deepakl/default.aspx

BiztalkBlogs.com is a brand new community site and I'm very happy to be blogging with fellow biztalk bloggers.

I would also like to thank Todd Rivers from http://www.usingbiztalk.com for providing me space to host my blog.

Monday, September 19, 2005

Windows Sequential Workflow Video

Stephen Thomas has posted a new Video and a sample on Windows Workflow. Great one. If you watch the video, you can see how things are going to be simple in .Net moving forward.

Great Sample & Video to get started with Workflow Foundation.

Friday, September 16, 2005

PDC Biztalk Surprises

I did not get a chance to attend the Microsoft PDC. The news getting out from PDC this year on new technologies is huge for Biztalk and rather exciting.

Windows Workflow Foundation:

Looks like a cool platform for integrating workflow capabilities into applications quickly. I looked at a video and it looks like the Orchestration designer in BizTalk. So the next question came up to my mind was what does this mean to Biztalk, Does this replace Biztalk?

Apparently No, this is just a base framework for workflow and does not offer all the capablities of Biztalk Server, Darren Jefford has a very good article about this here

Jon Flanders (He was my Biztalk 2004 trainer from Develop Mentor and a Sharp guy) is going to be the co-author on the Presenting Windows Workflow Foundation book from Sam's, see this announcement here.

I can't wait to get to play with the Workflow Foundation

BizTalk Server Solution Designer:

I watched this video today from channel 9 which Scott has posted in his blog today. Looks like a great concept Microsoft has come up for the future Biztalk release.

It looks like a modeling tool inside Visual Studio where you can go and design the complete Biztalk solution from the Receive Port/Location to Send Port(s) Visually. The GUI looked good in Video and allowed to give detailed information even on stuff you do outside Biztalk but is part of your Biztalk solution.

I had always felt this piece was missing while designing Biztalk Solutions. Great Job Guys!

Monday, September 05, 2005

Promoting Secondary Biztalk/SSO Server as Primary

We had dual Biztalk servers in Production and recently one of the server's crashed. We had to promote a secondary SSO Server as Primary and re-build the Primary Biztalk Server.

Promoting SSO Server is documented in Biztalk Server Documentation here and it looks simple.

We followed the documentation and promoted the server successfully. However when we opened the Biztalk Server Administration console, it just hung and nothing happened.

After some time, we realized that the Biztalk Administration console has the SSO Server name set in the Properties. As suspected promoting the SSO Server does not change the name in the Biztalk Administration console. So we had to go manually change the SSO Server name from the previous primary server name to one promoted.

It might be a good idea to pratice Diaster recovery in Development/QA before going to production, due to the glichtes in documentation here and there.

Thursday, September 01, 2005

HTTP Send Adapter - Submit to ASP Page Issue

I had an issue recently with the HTTP Send Adapter and as usual it was due to poor Biztalk 2004 documentation.

A common scenario in a B2B Application would be to post xml documents to a partner's web site, which might be an asp page. We had configured a send port with the HTTP Adapter as transport and url as "http://testing.com/submit.asp" (the asp page is at a partner site, which would do a binary read to read the data posted and update the partner's system).

This configuration was working fine till the message size was 48 KB. Once it's greater than that, we received warnings like this and eventually the send port failed to transmit.

The adapter failed to transmit message going to send port "http://testing.com/submit.asp". It will be retransmitted after the retry interval specified for this Send Port.
Details:"The remote server returned an error: (500) Internal Server Error.".


I had no clue whatsoever of why this might happen and began to do some research on this. After some time I figured out what was happening. It was not a bug in the adapter but was designed like this.

To have large message support when the size of the message is greater than 48 KB, the http send adapter is sending the data in chunks to the server instead of a full stream, also makes the contentlength to -1 (which is not supported in asp).

Shouldn't this be documented somewhere in Biztalk 2004 documentation or a support article, apparently no :)

OK, also there is a way to overcome this, ie) if you want the HTTP Send Adapter to send the data as a full stream instead of chunks, there is a registry key you can set (Which is also un-documented)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\BTSSvc{Host instance GUID} (Typically the BiztalkServerApplication host's GUID)

Create a DWORD key named "DisableChunkEncoding" and set it to "1"

I had to use reflector to go through HTTP Adapters code to figure out this, the only hit in google after finding the solution was this support article which is for different reason.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;839663