New Blog Site

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

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

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

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

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.