Biztalk

Log Parser: An elegant utility that does all the real grunt work. It is well worth spending some time with this guy as it will come in handy for other unexpected situations, like analysing your web server logs, or parsing through custom CSV files etc. Microsoft Office 2003 Web Components: Some COM components that provide for graph generation of the statistical data. Performance Analysis of Logs: A script that automates the “leg work” involved in real-world performance analysis, such as managing the set of counters to be used for particular situations (eg. BizTalk 2006 analysis), invocation of log parser to do the actual analysis of each counter, detection of threshold breaches when things seem to be fishy. PAL is implemented as a VBScript, and comes with a little .NET WinForm GUI which can be (optionally) used to setup the arguments to be fed into the VBScript. The result, a comprehensive HTML report complete with alerts (threshold breaches), graphs and explanations. ...

When ingesting (importing) BizTalk application bindings between different environments/machines it is important that its dependencies (hosts, host instances and adapters) are setup before running the import. Otherwise you run the risk of getting the following somewhat misleading error message: Failed to update binding information. The following items could not be matched up to hosts due to name and/or trust level mismatches: Item: ‘FILE’ Host: ‘MyBizTalkHost’ Trust level: ‘Untrusted’ You must do one of the following: ...

Last week I had to rebuild a BizTalk 2006 development box, running Windows Server 2003 R2. Im not sure where or how the base image came about, but through installing BizTalk I hit a number of interesting snags, all relating to not having a functional Distributed Transaction Coordinator or MSDTC; commonly employed for managing transactions across distributed resources. OK, so the basic “installation” procedure ran fine. That is the necessary files to facilitate a functional BizTalk Server were copied and registered without error. Running the BizTalk Configuration tool to actually get the various pieces working together were where things were halted to a stop. ...

Last week, I needed branch a BizTalk codebase off so some enhancement work could take place. After re-jigging a dozen or so projects, was quiet proud of the new (and in my opinion) more logical solution structure. OK, first test… shut-down VS.NET, re-open it and do a get-latest. I get the following: Soon after I discovered this post by Michal Talaga. He suggests that a corruption to the VS.NET SUO (Solution User Options) file is responsible, and that simply deleting it and having VS.NET recreate it remedies the problem. While skeptical at first, was pleasantly surprised to find that it fixed the problem. ...

I currently work in an environment where Windows XP is deployed across the organisation. Consequently, it is also the OS on which we write code. Today I booted my machine to find my IIS 5.0 web server was no longer functioning. When I attempted to fire up the service, I received a handy “The World Wide Web Publishing service terminated with the following error: The specified procedure could not be found”. Interesting…my box has been nice and stable for the last few months. What gives? ...

This is an unusual one. Today I was faced by a general question from management on the kind of technology we are capable of integrating with. We use (and love) BizTalk. My initial thoughts were “BizTalk can integrate with anything”… failing that a built-in adapter could do the job, one could then look to purchasing a third-party adapter or even look at rolling one in-house. Adapters plumb data to and/or from a variety of different mediums—that more or less fall into one of four categories: line-of business system (eg. SAP, Business Application XYZ), middleware (eg. TIBCO) , transport (eg. WCF, file system) or database (eg. SQL Server, Oracle). ...

Alan Smith has a fairly dated (2004), but useful post on The Seven Habits of Highly Effective BizTalkers. Alan’s article has inspired me to discover what else help make an “effective BizTalk developer”… a work in progress. Update: Marty Wasznicky and Scott Zimmerman have put together a quality article published in May 2007 MSDN Magazine called 8 Tips And Tricks For Better BizTalk Programming. This article offers a number of seasoned tips which I found to be very insightful, such as the “always use multi-part message types” tip. Check it out here. ...

Last week I was involved with the maintenance of a class library responsible for validating a message against its schema. This was being invoked from an orchestration. As an older utility library, was based on .NET 1.1 base classes (e.g. XmlValidatingReader) and took in an XLANGMessage parameter to extract both the message content and the associated schema (as per the BizTalk message definition). For various reasons the XLANGMessage dependency was to be broken, and some 2.0 optimisation put in place. In my experience, I have never had the need to do XSD validation straight from an orchestration — so the real need for this still escapes me. ...

DebugView: An indispensable utility from SysInternals. I use it as a UI for BizTalk, by printing debug information using System.Diagnostics.Debug with its default trace listener, messages end up getting fed into the Win32 OutputDebugString function. DebugView monitors and displays this debug output in realtime. TCPTrace: Tunnels packets between a client and server, and displays the payload. Unreal for tracing HTTP traffic between web services, WCF endpoints, and so on. XPathMania: Extends the VS.NET 2005 XML Editor, by providing a “scratch pad” to enter and execute XPath queries against the active document. ...

In the drive for gathering tips and tricks from industry experts and maintaining a “fresher” awareness of BizTalk developments, I have added the following (active) BizTalk centric blogs to my news aggregator. I am amazed at the number of BizTalk gems I have already picked up… Richard Seroter Patrick Wellink Charles Young Ben Cops Jeff Lynch Jesus Rodriguez Jon Flanders Mick Badran Alan Smith Kevin Lam Demystifying Direct Bound Ports Marco Ensing Martijn Hoogendoorn Matt Meleski Scott Colestock Stephen Thomas