Biztalk 2004 Integration Experiences

New Blog Site

2008-03-20T18:04:00.003-04:00

I have moved my blog Biztalkblogs.com to my own site www.biztalkarchitects.com

Looks like Microsoft bought Biztalkblogs.com and I got kicked out :)

Moving to BiztalkBlogs.com

2005-09-21T19:54:00.000-04:00

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.

Windows Sequential Workflow Video

2005-09-19T13:51:00.000-04:00

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.

PDC Biztalk Surprises

2005-09-16T13:55:00.000-04:00

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!

Promoting Secondary Biztalk/SSO Server as Primary

2005-09-05T19:51:00.000-04:00

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.

HTTP Send Adapter - Submit to ASP Page Issue

2005-09-01T14:33:00.000-04:00

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

First look at Biztalk Server 2006

2005-08-27T23:39:00.000-04:00

I did work a little a bit with Biztalk 2006 for the past 2 weeks, but did not get a chance to blog.

1. Setup experience has been simplified a lot, I got it setup in the first install, which was not the case with Biztalk Server 2004. It was great that the missing prerequisite components are downloaded and installed automatically from the Web or from a pre-downloaded CAB file

2. Configuration Wizard has also been updated. There is a new "default configuration option" for Development setup. Basically it just installs the default configuration with least security.

3. The Administration tool has been re-designed and at last it's useful. One thing caught my eye was now you can connect remotely to administer another biztalk server on the network.Cool! The user interface is helpful and now you can group biztalk assemblies as an "Application". This would help a lot in deployment.

4. I noticed that there are few new Advanced (Nil Value & Assert) functiods added to the Biztalk Mapper. Haven't played with it much. Looks like the Assert functiod might be useful for writing debug code in the mapper

5. A bunch of new adapters (MSMQ, POP3, MQSeries, Sharepoint) are now available out of the box. Also Microsoft has purchased new adapters from Iway which would also be included in the next release (I heard that even if you are using Biztalk 2004, you can get these adapters from microsoft if you have software assurance. Hmm nice!).

6. SQL Server 2005 can be used with Biztalk 2006, however I'm not sure whether any SQL 2005 specific features are being used.

7. I did not notice any new shapes with the Orchestration Designer. However zooming capability has been added. Beleive it or not, I think this is the best feature microsoft could have given for the designer!

8. Did not notice any new changes to the Business Rule composer.

That's it for now, rest to come soon...

BizTalk Server 2004 Load Generation Tool

2005-08-26T16:16:00.000-04:00

There is a new tool out from microsoft which will help you load test Biztalk Server. You can download it from here.

I downloaded it and played around with it today. Looks cool to me. please note that this should be run only on the test environment.

Happy Testing!

High Availability - Enterprise SSO Issue

2005-08-18T16:44:00.000-04:00

I had to spend last couple of weeks with lot of Server related Issues and was very busy, couldn't blog as before, Anyway I wanted to write about a critical issue I ran into.

We have two Biztalk Servers load balanced in production in the Biztalk Server group. One of the Server (say Server1) is primary, hosts the Master Secret Single Sign-on Server (SSO) and the other (Server2) is secondary. The SQL Server is running on a different server.

This architecture was designed using the Microsoft High Availability White Paper here

The SSO Server was designed to be "Available not Highly Available", See the transcript from the whitepaper below

Available, but not highly available.

All the SSO servers have the master secret cached in memory, and run-time operations will
continue even if the master secret server fails. However, you will not be able to change the
configuration of ports or the SSO configuration. The BizTalk Server runtime will continue
working without problems, but you cannot make any design changes. You can create a
Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) event to notify you when the master secret server
becomes unavailable, and you can then manually promote an SSO server to master secret
server and restore the master secret on this server.

Even if this configuration is not highly available, it can be satisfactory for most scenarios and
it is consistent with scaling out the receiving, sending, and processing hosts.

Unfortunately Production Server1 crashed last week and the Secondary Server (Server2) worked fine as per the documentation. However this server has to be rebooted due to the recent Security Patch install. Once it got re-started, the SSO Service did not start, We got "RPC Server is un-available" error in the Event log.

It took me sometime to realize that the Master SSO Server is needed whenever the secondary (Server2) SSO Service is re-started. To avoid this we have to promote the Secondary (Server2) server as Master SSO Secret Server. This kind of change might not be easy to do in Production, since the protocols involved in getting some configuration changed in Production Servers.

I think the article must have stressed the importance of not to restart the Secondary Server, until the Primary Server is up.

Anyway it was a costly experience to learn.

Biztalk 2006 New Adapters

2005-08-02T16:55:00.000-04:00

Loks like Microsoft has bought iway adapters and there might be 8 new adapters added to Biztalk 2006 Release version. Wow!

Check this out

Even though they added so many adapters, I would have been happy if they had a complete adapter for EDI. Well may be Microsoft will do it in the next release

Biztalk Server 2006 Beta Program

2005-07-22T16:23:00.000-04:00

Looks like Microsoft has started the Biztalk Server 2006 Beta Program.
Check out Stephen's blog for more information.

Biztalk 2004 Stress/Load Testing - Do it Early

2005-07-08T10:31:00.000-04:00

In one of my current projects I started doing load testing and was literally shocked with the initial performance results. The application which I was testing was a simple B2B application migrated from Biztalk 2000. It has few huge schemas, couple of maps, bunch of Legacy COM components invoked in an Orchestration

When we submitted around 50 concurrent requests, the Biztalk host service which was processing the Orchestrations got bounced, these orchestrations were stuck in the middle and did not continue processing when Biztalk Host Service was restarted automatically. I also noticed the Biztalk Host started getting bounced continuously after few mins when this happened. On more research, I found that the Biztalk Host Service was getting out of memory and hence got bounced.

Also it looks like Biztalk 2004 is by default tuned to handle a lot of messages and might not be suitable to everyone based on the size of message, schemas or maps. If you have huge orchestrations or large maps, you certainly might have to follow the instructions on the Biztalk Performance Whitepaper posted in MSDN and Biztalk Performance Blog.

I followed the following recommendations to make my server handling requests with reasonable memory & CPU usage I could handle 2000 transactions without a glitch.

1. I used SvcClassSettings tool to modify the following setting for Messaging InProcess & Messaging Isolated

LowWatermark = 40
HighWatermark = 80

2. I also did the following Registry changes (refer the performance
characteristics white paper for functional descriptions on these registry
keys)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\
SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\BTSSvc*

Created a new DWORD key named MessagingThreadPoolSize and set the value to 5

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\
SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\BTSSvc.3.0
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\
SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\BTSSvc*

Created a new DWORD key named MessagingThreadsPerCpu and set the value to 10
(* is the guid created for each host)

3. I created different host for different adapters and functional orchestrations

For ex:

filehost - for all file receive processes
httpSynchost- for all http sync receive processes
defaultXlanghost - for most my orchestrations
commonXlanghost - for common orchestrations called by partner specific orchestrations

4. Also I had some legacy COM components which were written in VB and used with Biztalk 2004 Orchestration using Interop. I had to place these dll's in COM+

The lesson I learnt from this exercise is to do performance testing in the early stages of Development to avoid delays with the project.

Calling FlatFile Parser/Serializer Directly from an Orchestration

2005-06-27T11:36:00.000-04:00

I was reading some Biztalk Server 2006 documentation and one of the feature that caught me was invoking Pipelines directly from an Orchestration.For a sample on this please see a sample written by Stephen W. Thomas

It would be nice if I can do the same in Biztalk 2004. Unfortunately it's not that easy to do it in Biztalk 2004.

Currently one of my projects has an Orchestrations which has to convert to an xml file to a flat file and use a legacy component to perform an import. I had to use a send pipeline with loopback and configure the flat file disassembler in a receive pipeline to convert xml to flat file. This kind of seems expensive to me on MessageBox calls and decreases performance of the orchestration.

So as a first step to achieve calling pipelines from orchestration I wanted to at least call a Flat File Parser/Serializer directly from Orchestration. After digging deep into the Biztalk objects I was able to do this.

You can download the sample here. I'll be aslo uploading the samples to GotDotNet website

Let me know if you have any comments/suggestions/bugs

BTS 2004 Disaster Recovery Guide

2005-06-16T13:01:00.000-04:00

I was searching the Biztalk server product documentation and Microsoft web site to get a white paper on Disaster Recovery for Biztalk 2004 but I couldn't find one. While searching that I found an interesting article posted on Sydney Biztalk user group.

Check it out here

It looks like a unpublished white paper from Microsoft and It's been contributed to the user group by a Microsoft guy.

It has all the valuable information on preparing the server for Disaster Recovery. I would say it's a must for production environments.

Biztalk Server 2006 aka Path Finder Documentations

2005-05-20T14:40:00.000-04:00

Scott Woodgate has started posting some early on information on the next version of Biztalk Server "Pathfinder" (Biztalk Server 2006). You can get it from the BiztalkServerstuff msn group. (you need to be a member of the group to download documents)

Setup & Migration document

http://www.msnusers.com/BizTalkServerStuff/Documents/BizTalk%20Server%202006%20Setup%20and%20Migration.doc

Adapter Enhancements

http://www.msnusers.com/BizTalkServerStuff/Documents/BizTalk%20Server%202006%20Adapter%20Enhancements.doc

Also I heard from some reliable sources that Biztalk 2006 private beta would be available after the first week of June.

I'm excited to get my hands dirty with the new version and post the interesting things I find.

Cool un-documented HAT Feature

2005-05-11T16:00:00.000-04:00

Looks like HAT could be invoked from a command line and it accepts one parameter, the path of the query file (.trq) for HAT to execute.

Most of the time I open HAT manually and use the "Most recent 100 service instances" Query, for trouble shooting, not anymore.

I created a batch file like this one below

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004\BTSHatApp.exe" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004\Tracking\Queries\100MostRecentServices.trq"

and integrated it with Visual Studio Tools menu, so I can get to HAT quickly :)

Per-instance pipeline configuration

2005-05-06T10:02:00.000-04:00

I was reading the Biztalk Documentation and came across a interesting piece of functionality in Pipelines, which I had not used so far.

You might very well know that you can stick custom pipelines in Receive Locations or Send Ports, what is new is you can override the public properties set for the pipeline in Designer in each of the Receive location or send port i.e) you can make the pipeline work differently per each instance. Check it out here

To me it sounds great, several projects I have seen so far had Receive/Send pipelines duplicating similar kind of tasks, for ex. I had two receive pipelines for two different partners with Flat file Disassembler
Flat file Disassembler1

Document Schema : docschema1
Header Schema : headerschema1
Trailer Schema : trailerschema1

Flat file Disassembler2

Document Schema : docschema2
Header Schema : headerschema2
Trailer Schema : trailerschema2

Essentially the two pipelines above just had the public properties different in the flat file dis-assemblers, but needs two different pipelines to do the job. Instead now I can have one pipeline and override the public properties in each of the receive locations.

Sounds good? Yes, but to make this work you cannot use the Biztalk Explorer GUI instead you might have to use the Biztalk Explorer OM by code to tweak it. See the following Code for setting the xml file in a receive location

BtsCatalogExplorer objCatalog = new BtsCatalogExplorer();
objCatalog.ConnectionString = "Server=" + YOURMGMTDBSERVERNAME +
";Initial Catalog=" + YOURMGMTDBNAME
+ ";Integrated Security=SSPI;";

foreach(ReceivePort objreceivePort in objCatalog.ReceivePorts)
{
foreach(ReceiveLocation objlocation in objreceivePort.ReceiveLocations)
{
if(objlocation.Name.ToUpper() == YourReceiveLocationName.ToUpper())
{
objlocation.ReceivePipelineData = YOURXMLSTRINGDATA;

}
}
}
objCatalog.SaveChanges();

Biztalk Xml Disassembler Bug?

2005-05-03T15:19:00.000-04:00

Recently when helping out my colleague with a biztalk project and I noticed an issue with the Biztalk Xml Disassembler, which appears to be a bug to me.

The requirement was simple. It's to receive a message, remove the envelope from the message and pass it to an Orchestration. I created a prototype to illustrate this, The Biztalk project had a receive pipeline in which there was a Xml Disassembler in the Disassemble stage. I had selected an envelope schema and a few document schemas.

When I tested the solution I got an error like below

There was a failure executing the receive pipeline: "TestProject1.ReceivePipeline1" Source: "Microsoft.BizTalk.Pipeline.Components" Receive Location: "C:\TestPipeline\In\*.xml" Reason: Index was outside the bounds of the array.

After hours of troubleshooting I found that the reason was some of the document schemas specified in the property designer did not have namespace and one of them had a namespace, like below

"Schema1" - namespace ""
"Schema2" - namespace "http://testcompany.Biztalk.Schemas/EAI/Schema2"
"Schema3" - namespace ""

Looks like if you mix and match schemas with/without namespaces, the Xml Disassembler does not work.

Temporary fix was to remove the namespace from "Schema2" and it worked. Hope this would be fixed in the next Service pack.

Enabling Schema Validation on Messages

2005-04-21T16:25:00.000-04:00

Biztalk 2000 had schema validation turned on by default and I thought it was very useful in Development while I wasn't sure whether the messages were created properly from my parser.

Biztalk 2004 has them turned off by default and I would have to use a custom pipeline with Xml validator if I had to validate schema. One drawback to this approach was I did not want Validation turned on in Production. So I had to maintain different binding files for each environment and often run into configuration issues.

Recently I found the following in Biztalk Server 2004 Documentation.

You can turn on Global Schema validation by changing the BTSNTSvc.exe.config file. You can see this in the BiztalkServerInstallation folder (By default its in Program files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004)

<configuration>
<xlangs>
<Configuration>
<Debugging ValidateSchemas="true"/>
</Configuration>
</xlangs>
</configuration>

Restart Biztalk Service and there you go, all the messages entering Orchestration would be validated.

Sending String messages from an Orchestration

2005-04-06T16:57:00.000-04:00

Recently one of my colleague asked my help to send a message as "System.String" from an Orchestration. I thought it would be a simple one and did not understand why he needs my help to do this.

When I looked at it, I noticed that the string is wrapped as Xml . It was a little weird to me that in Biztalk 2004 that this cannot be done natively by just declaring as "System.String". Even Biztalk 2000 Xlang had the same kind of Xml Envelope for String, but it would remove that when the message is passed out.

After doing a little research I found that this is documented in the Biztalk 2004 Documentation under "Sending a Text E-Mail Message from an Orchestration". You can see it here

It specifically states that

"Sending a message of type System.String will not work, because the string gets formatted as an XML document in the message"

and tells you use a special class named "RawString" and the code is there in msdn.

As specified in the documentation, I took the code for "RawString" class, placed it in a dll, declared the message as type "RawString" and created an instance and passed in my string. It worked like a charm!

Post a comment if you would like the sample, I'll send you.

Biztalk 2004 Map Testing Tool Download Details

2005-04-03T12:48:00.000-04:00

I have uploaded the latest Biztalk 2004 Map Testing tool to GotDotNet. This includes some of the bug fixes reported by users. You can get it from here

Post a comment if you notice a bug or your ideas to enhance the tool.

Are you getting COM Permission Denied Errors or Query Interface Errors from Interop Dll's invoked from Orchestration

2005-03-18T15:39:00.000-05:00

Recently in our Dev Server, all the Interop components called from Biztalk stopped working. They were getting errors like this

Error at Microsoft.XLANGs.Core.SegmentScheduler.RunASegment(Segment s, StopConditions stopCond, Exception& exp)
QueryInterface for interface Interop.xxxxx._xxxxx failed.

All I could trace down was one of my colleagues just added a user "Default Access Permission to a user" in Component Services & Removed it.

So I was puzzled about why suddenly all the interop calls are failing which were working fine till that day. I was scratching my head for too long searching Microsoft support site, newsgroups etc. till the next day.

I found a support article from Microsoft for some other issue which made me to think it was related to my problem. You can see that article here

Carefully read the expert from the article below

"Note: By default, the DefaultAccessPermission binary value does not exist under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Ole registry key. The DefaultAccessPermission binary value is created when you run certain applications or when you configure the default access permissions of DCOM applications by using the Component Services tool"

Looks like the registry entry is not created by default, that means all users have default access permissions on instantiating COM components, when you add a user and remove it, it retains the registry key with value for the specific users left out in the GUI.

Xlangs Engine Runtime checks for "DefaultAccessPermissions" before instantiating COM components, so obviously it threw an exception. After removing the registry key/adding the Biztalk Service user to the default access permissions in Component Services GUI, resolved the error.

I think this deserves a detail Microsoft support article!

Commerce.Dictionary & Commerce.SimpleList COM Objects

2005-03-03T17:03:00.000-05:00

I was converting a Biztalk 2000 Map to Biztalk 2004. The map was using Commerce.Dictionary & Commerce.SimpleList COM Objects to perform some complex mapping.

I believe mscscore.dll(Commerce Server 2000 Core Components) contained these objects, was used by Biztalk 2000 and also installed as part of Biztalk 2000 Installation.

Looks like Biztalk 2004 is not installing these components, the interesting part is it's installed with Visual Studio.Net 2003. So I did not have a clue about this and everything worked fine in my box until it was deployed to the Development Server.The map got blown out in Dev Server and it took a while to figure out this issue.

In my point of view, if a component is shipped with a lower version of a product(Biztalk 2000), it should be supported in higher versions(Biztalk 2004).

If you are using COM components in maps, Beware! Take some time to test in machines which do not have Visual Studio & Biztalk Dev Tools.

Beware while using Archived Database Option in HAT

2005-02-21T16:50:00.000-05:00

I am using HAT (Health and Activity Tracking) a lot for debugging and trouble shooting in my apps.

I noticed something recently which appears to be a bug in HAT but digging deep I found it was by design.

I was using HAT to remotely connect to an Archived Database (You can do this from Tools->Preferences from HAT). Most of the options in HAT, Including the Orchestration Debugger (For an orchestration which has already completed) worked great i.e.) pulled the data from the Archived Database.

The Problem is with the form opening from menu Operations->Messages. This still points to the current Database rather than the Archived Database.

Biztalk documentation clearly states the following menus are only HAT for Archived messages and the other menu's are just for live data.

Query Builder
Find Message

Updated Biztalk 2004 Map Testing Tool with External Assembly Support

2005-02-16T17:26:00.000-05:00

I recently blogged an article about a tool I use for testing Biztalk 2004 Maps. You can see that blog here

The tool worked fine for Inline Script/XSLT mappings but it did not work well if you use External assemblies in your map. So I had some time this week to correct this.

I have an updated tool which should support all the type of Biztalk maps. If you are interested, pls post a comment, I'll send you the updated tool.

Just don't promote any Property in your Schema

2005-02-15T14:02:00.000-05:00

Yes, one of the Issues I recently faced in my current solution is an Error message like this in the event log while subscribing a message submitted by another system.

There was a failure executing the receive pipeline: "Microsoft.BizTalk.DefaultPipelines.XMLReceive" Source: "XML disassembler" Receive Location: "/test/testHTTPReceive.DLL" Reason: The property 'errordesc' has a value with length greater than 256 characters.

The issue was I had promoted a property called "errordesc" which is basically the Error Description field. This error happened when the errordesc field in the xml file was greater than 256 characters.

I noticed that Biztalk Documentation clearly states that do not promote a property whose length is greater than 256 characters and this is a limitation (or by design) in Biztalk 2004, but somehow I overlooked it.

I guess this is worthwhile of a support article for Biztalk since lot of people might have overlooked this limitation.

Biztalk WSE 2.0 Adapter Released

2005-02-10T15:14:00.000-05:00

Microsoft has released the BizTalk 2004 Adapter for Web Services Enhancement (WSE) 2.0 yesterday.

You can get it here

This is great news since publishing BizTalk orchestrations as Web services can be more secured and use a bunch of security stuff provided by WSE 2.0.

Potential Pitfall in Business Rule Composer

2005-02-08T13:24:00.000-05:00

I was replying somebody in the Biztalk Server newsgroup, which reminded me that it's worthwhile to post about a potential pitfall in Business Rule Composer.

While dealing with XML Schemas in Business Rule Composer, it allows you to select a xsd (Schema) file from a local folder(like Schema1.xsd). Beware of this!

The Document Type property in the Property editor is filled in with just the name of the file (for ex: schema1) Instead of putting the fully qualified name like project1.schema1

You have to change it as fully qualified by editing the property in the property editor.

If you don't do this, the Policy will not list in the CallRules shape if you decide to call this from an orchestration.

Restart all Biztalk In-Process Hosts using WMI

2005-02-07T16:44:00.000-05:00

I am currently working on a Deployment Tool which can handle both BTS Assemblies Un-Deployment/Deployment with support to remove/add referrenced assemblies.

I started writing this tool in C#, still working on it and quickly noticed the value for common generic functions to help with Deployment/Un-Deployment.

The following C# Code illustrates how all the Biztalk In-Process Hosts can be re-started using WMI.

private static void RestartBiztalkInprocessHosts()
{
System.Management.EnumerationOptions enumOptions =
new System.Management.EnumerationOptions();
enumOptions.ReturnImmediately = false;
// HostType = 1 for In-Process Hosts
string strQuery = "Select * from MSBTS_HostInstance where HostType=1";

System.Management.ManagementObjectSearcher objSearch =
new System.Management.ManagementObjectSearcher
("root\\MicrosoftBizTalkServer",strQuery,enumOptions);

foreach(System.Management.ManagementObject inst in objSearch.Get())
{
//Check if ServiceState is 'Running'
if(inst["ServiceState"].ToString() == "4" )
{
inst.InvokeMethod("Stop",null);
inst.InvokeMethod("Start",null);
}
//Check if ServiceState is 'Stopped' or 'paused'
if(inst["ServiceState"].ToString() == "1"
inst["ServiceState"].ToString() == "7" )
inst.InvokeMethod("Start",null);
}

if (objSearch!= null)
objSearch.Dispose();
objSearch = null;

}

How to Get Length of a Message Field in an Orchestration?

2005-02-04T16:25:00.000-05:00

The title question might sound a bit stupid, but one of the main limitations I have seen with the Xlang C# Pseudo syntax in Orchestration is it lacks certain simple programming abilities.

For example in C# if you want to find length of string you can easily do it as below

string strTest = "Test string";
int intTestLen = strTest.Length;

You cannot do the above in the Expression Editor or Message Assignment shape in an Orchestration, which is frankly a bit disappointing.

So if you have to find a length of a field in a message, the proper thing to do would be to send that message to a custom .Net Assembly and get the length back.

To me it sounds it's a lot of work for just finding the length of string, so I tried something else.

I used the xslt "string-length" function in xpath function (Which is very powerful and useful in Orchestration) to fetch the length of a field. for ex. if msg1 is your message and field1 is the field whose length you want to find, you can write the statement as below in a Expression editor to get the length

intTestLen = xpath(msg1,@"string-length(/Test/field1/@value)");

This is just a workaround and to me it's convenient than passing the message to a .Net component

Creating Biztalk 2004 Service Restart Batch File

2005-02-03T13:52:00.000-05:00

I wrote some useful tools and utilities recently.

One of them was a batch file which can restart the default Biztalk Server NT Service. This provides a great value when deploying assemblies to my local box and also to avoid various cache issues.

The Batch file looks like this (It's just usual net stop and start commands)

net stop BTSSvc{088886359-D424-4853-BCCB-B2F887F1F86D}
net start BTSSvc{088886359-D424-4853-BCCB-B2F887F1F86D}

The Interesting thing is if you just copy the above two lines and put it in a batch file, it won't work. Hmm why?

Do you notice the GUID in the above batch file. This is different for each machine and each host (yes, 1 physical NT service is being created for every In-Process Host). You can get this GUID from the Services mmc snap-in (The Service name starts with "BizTalk Service BizTalk Group :")

Microsoft BizTalk Server Adapter Migration Toolkit

2005-01-27T13:55:00.000-05:00

Microsoft BizTalk Server Adapter Migration Toolkit has been released by Microsoft and I had an opportunity to take a look at this when it was in Private Beta. It would help a lot if you just want to migrate your Biztalk 2000 to Biztalk 2004 with minimal architecture changes.

Some of the Interesting things about this Toolkit is it has an adapter which is similar to Submit & SubmitSync methods in Biztalk 2002, so still you can continue using the old way. It could also convert Biztalk 2002 AIC's to custom adapters.

You can download it from here

Biztalk 2004 VB Samples

2005-01-26T09:45:00.000-05:00

I did work quite a bit with C# and VB.Net with Biztalk 2004. I noticed that there are lot of samples in C# with the Biztalk 2004 SDK but a very few for VB.Net.

So I thought of posting some VB Samples which might be helpful. In a series of VB Samples posting, the first one is a sample VB Disassembler Pipeline component.

You can download it from here

Biztalk 2004 Map Testing Tool

2005-01-25T15:55:00.000-05:00

In my current Biztalk 2004 solution, I have quite a bit of Biztalk maps with complex mapping. In my point of view testing each field mapping is crucial for defect free releases since it's very easy to miss a field while mapping thousands of fields. So Initially I used Biztalk mapper's "Test Map" feature, which is good, but was slow. I had to wait for some time till the map test is complete and get the results file to view. So as a techie I thought it would be very useful if I have a tool like I had in Biztalk 2000 for Testing maps. So I built one for testing Biztalk 2004 maps.

In Biztalk 2000\2002 world the map was a simple XML file, I had a sample VB Application which would dynamically pull the XSL based on a given map, the input file given, do the Transform and show the result in a Browser.

The difference between Biztalk 2000 tool and this is the complexity to attain this functionality. This tool uses Reflection to identify a Map class of a Biztalk assembly and dynamically gets the XSLT for a specified map and performs a Transform an xml file you specify. Although I'm not sure whether this will work for Mapper Shared Assemblies, it should work for all inline mappings.

Post a comment if anybody needs the source code, I'll send you.

Getting References of a Biztalk Assembly Programatically

2005-01-24T16:40:00.000-05:00

I was a bit disappointed with the Deployment options shipped out of the Box with Biztalk 2004. Even though there a lot of tools like NAnt are avaiable, I prefer having a simple tool (Similar to Biztalk Explorer) which can spit out VBScript for all the selected assemblies with binding information, so to design the tool, I was doing some prototyping and wrote a recursive function to get all the BiztalkReferences of an assembly. All you need to do is pass in an Assembly Name and an empty ArrayList, in which the References Full Name would be filled in with.

You can download the code from here

Biztalk 2000 to 2004 Map Scripting Functoid Migration Tool

2005-01-15T13:28:00.000-05:00

The client I am currently working with heavily used Biztalk 2000 mapper for doing complex mapping. Most of the maps had about at least 300 scripting functoids and not migrating these maps automatically to BTS2004 was not an option.

I found a way to migrate the map 90% automatically except for the global initialization code which VB Script allowed in Biztalk 2000 maps.

I wrote a VisualStudio.Net macro which grabs all the VBScript Code and upgrades it to VB.Net and does a series of replacement (Like Len function in VBScript= Microsoft.VisualBasic.Len inVB.Net) of the most common VBScipt functions.

This tool provided a great value in the migration effort. Post a comment if you are interested, I can send the code.

Handling Error in Orchestration

2005-01-12T19:55:00.000-05:00

The most fascinating part of Biztalk 2004 Orchestration compared to Biztalk 2000/2002 Xlang to me is Error Handling in Orchestration. In the recent implementation I was able to come up with a central Error handling mechanism.

All the actions in my orchestrations are wrapped under a common Scope with two Exceptional handlers

Orchestration

Scope
{
Step1
Step2
. . . }

Catch1 (System.Exception)
{
build Error message
Call Orchestration ErrorHandler
}
Catch2 (General Exception)
{ build Error message
Call Orchestration ErrorHandler
}

The important thing to note above is you should use System.Exception and not System.SystemException as the Catch Error object (Which is a common mistake)

Promoted Properties in Included or Imported schemas

2005-01-10T20:06:00.000-05:00

I was playing with Schema Includes and Imports and it so helpful and awesome compared to the XDR schemas existed in Biztalk 2000/2002.

I found one interesting point while working on schemas. If you include a schema which had promoted properties, the properties does not get promoted automatically, you have to re-promote the same properties again in the included schema.

Bug in Orchestration Filter?

2005-01-09T14:15:00.000-05:00

Currently I'm architecting a EDI X12 Biztalk 2004 Implementation. Yesterday I got stuck with a issue which I'm still not sure whether I'm missing something or it's bug in Biztalk. I'll explain the issue below.

I have a Biztalk assembly which holds all the common schemas named Common.Schemas.dll and promoted two properties(SOURCE_ID & DEST_ID) in this schema in a Property schema named propertyschema.xsd

I also have a EDI partner based schema named sch_EDI_872.xsd in an assembly named EDI.Schemas.dll. which references the Common.Schemas.dll and assigns two fields (SOURCE_ID & DEST_ID) to the property schema Common.Schemas.propertyschema.xsd.

In an orchestration if I receive an incoming file with schema type sch_EDI_872.xsd, I could not see the SOURCE_ID & DEST_ID promoted properties in the filter expression.

Has anybody seen this happening?

Viewing Biztalk 2004 Orchestration Pseudo C# Code

2005-01-06T17:10:00.000-05:00

Biztalk 2004 Orchestration is nothing but an XML file with Pseudo C# Code in it. I'm really comfortable in seeing the C# code to see what's going on behind the scenes. I found really an easy way to see the code without going back and forth with various editors.

To see the C# code in the same Visual Studio IDE do the following

1. Open your Biztalk project which contains the Orchestration
2. Close all the files in the solution
3. Declare a variable in the Orchestration which is not used (If you have already one, its' fine. This is just to produce a warning while building)
4. Build the Biztalk project
5. See the Output Tab, you will get warning for the variable which is initialized but not used
6. Double click on that warning

Here we go, this will show the Pseudo C# Orchestration Code

What's with btproj.user file?

2005-01-05T16:55:00.000-05:00

Have you ever seen a .btproj.user file being created with your
Biztalk project. Looks like this is a xml file which contains the user
specific information like References path, test file names,
ConfigurationDatabase name etc. So you might ask what's interesting about
this file?

The interesting thing is, Imagine you develop a Biztalk project on Machine1
with a local SQL Installation and it's now copied to your buddy's machine
Machine2 If your buddy does deploy by right clicking on the btproject, the biztalk
assembly will be deployed to your machine, provided your buddy has access to
your SQL Server.

Now you see where I'm going...I have spent countless hours
till I found this.

In my point of view a file named with extension btproj.user should never be
checked in into your Code Repositories (Like Visual SourceSafe, StarTeam
etc.) if your code might be shared.

My First Post

2005-01-05T15:42:00.000-05:00

Well I'm a Biztalk Developer working on Biztalk, C# pretty much most of microsoft technologies.

I wanted to enter the blogger world for a long time but did not do that (You know why! Yes lazy...)

So my new year resolution this year was to start blogging my development experiences with a thought "might be useful to someone, somewhere".

I'll be blogging about Biztalk 2004 since I'm architecting quite a bit of Biztalk solutions recently. Thanks for stopping by!