BizTalk 2004

1 of 211 | BizTalk's mapper allows drag and drop replace - I learned a little trick the other day about the mapper which I have never seen documented. It works for BizTalk 2004 and also 2006.Have you ever had to change a functoid and gone thru the task of dragging the new functoid onto the grid and then reconnecting all of the lines, then having to check to make sure you got them all in order?Well, what I realized quite by accident is that you can actually just drag the new functoid over the one you want to replace and all your links will maintain themselves. The old functoid will disappear and be replaced by the new one.Of course there is a limitation when you have different maximum inputs, etc, but for the most part this works with everything e......

2 of 211 | Some items in the removed assembly are still being used by items not defined in the same assembly - When trying to redeploy a BizTalk 2004 solution I received the following error message:"Some items in the removed assembly are still being used by items not defined in the same assembly, thus removal of the assembly failed. Make sure that items in the assembly you are trying to remove fulfill the following conditions: 1. Pipelines, maps, and schemas are not being used by Send Ports or Receive Locations 2. Roles have no enlisted parties."When you execute the following query against the configuration database, the result gives you the name(s) of the BizTalk artifact(s) which block(s) the deployment of your solution:select 'RcvPort' PortType, r.nvcName Port, item.name MapName,assem.nvcName Ass......

3 of 211 | Biztalk Server issue affecting the # of running orchestrations in R2 - Recently I noticed a trend occurring while working on several performance cases that I would like to share with the blogsphere.    In one case in particular, the problem was that, under stress, many hundreds of Biztalk orchestrations were running at one time.   This was because typically Biztalk Receive locations can bring messages into the messagebox faster than orchestrations instances can complete, so if several thousand messages are brought into a system, we were seeing several hundred running orchestrations.  This was confirmed using the performance counter  XLANG/s Orchestrations - Running Orchestrations.   In the old days of Biztalk 2004 o......

4 of 211 | BizTalk 2009 Testing Features - Warning: This post is about a beta product. Details might change before final release. The beta of BizTalk Server 2009 brings a welcome new feature: Some basic support for Unit Testing BizTalk artifacts; specifically for Pipelines, Maps and Schemas. You can read the basics about how the new feature works in the product documentation; there’s not too much yet, but it’s enough to get a good idea of how you use it. I’d like to now share a few thoughts on this feature. Note: This is just my personal opinion from playing with the API for a bit. The Good The first really good......

5 of 211 | BizTalk 2009 Testing Features - Warning: This post is about a beta product. Details might change before final release. The beta of BizTalk Server 2009 brings a welcome new feature: Some basic support for Unit Testing BizTalk artifacts; specifically for Pipelines, Maps and Schemas. You can read the basics about how the new feature works in the product documentation; there’s not too much yet, but it’s enough to get a good idea of how you use it. I’d like to now share a few thoughts on this feature. Note: This is just my personal opinion from playing with the API for a bit. The Good The first really good......

6 of 211 | BizTalk 2009 Testing Features - Warning: This post is about a beta product. Details might change before final release. The beta of BizTalk Server 2009 brings a welcome new feature: Some basic support for Unit Testing BizTalk artifacts; specifically for Pipelines, Maps and Schemas. You can read the basics about how the new feature works in the product documentation; there’s not too much yet, but it’s enough to get a good idea of how you use it. I’d like to now share a few thoughts on this feature. Note: This is just my personal opinion from playing with the API for a bit. The Good The first really good......

7 of 211 | For the Love of God, Don't Change the SSO Account Password! - I'm on a bit of a fun project here at work: while most of the team is away me and a co-worker have been tasked with setting up an internal BizTalk environment that we can set up with a sample application and use as demo/reference material. We hit a snag though, and I'm putting this post out as a warning to others that may tempt fate and walk in our path: DON'T CHANGE THE SSO PASSWORD OR ACCOUNT! But I digress...how did we get here? Well, we noticed that there were a bunch of BizTalk services that weren't running, and when we tried to start the SSO service we didn't get an option for 'Start'. Odd...especially since there's a user and password specified for the account. Maybe if we ju......

8 of 211 | New Whitepaper on Developing BizTalk Solutions - The BizTalk team blog alerted all of us to a new BizTalk-related whitepaper.  This paper, Developing Integration Solutions using BizTalk Server 2006 and Team Foundation Server, is the direct descendent of the seminal BizTalk 2004 paper.  I just skimmed through this newest document, and had a few thoughts to share. First off, the paper is misnamed.  The “TFS” in the title initially dimmed my interest since we don’t use TFS at my company.  This paper is actually about how to design and develop BizTalk solutions with a few pages dedicated to capabilities introduced by TFS.  You should read this paper regardless of your source control and software lifecycle management platform. I found the “Gat......

9 of 211 | Slides as promised - Here are the slides from the presentation I gave to the UK BizTalk User group (now the UK SOA/BPM group). I gave two sessions – firstly an overview of the work we had done at my current employer and then running through some code, configuration and live demos. The download location might change if I find a more suitable home. The initial project was part of the Integration story in rolling out a global instance of SAP. The first interfaces we put live were those between the UK Warehouse Management Systems and SAP using BizTalk 2002. We formed an “Integration Competency Centre” and continued to wire up more systems as we moved to BizTalk 2004 and then to 2006. The move to 2004 was obviously......

10 of 211 | BizTalk's mapper allows drag and drop replace - I learned a little trick the other day about the mapper which I have never seen documented. It works for BizTalk 2004 and also 2006.Have you ever had to change a functoid and gone thru the task of dragging the new functoid onto the grid and then reconnecting all of the lines, then having to check to make sure you got them all in order?Well, what I realized quite by accident is that you can actually just drag the new functoid over the one you want to replace and all your links will maintain themselves. The old functoid will disappear and be replaced by the new one.Of course there is a limitation when you have different maximum inputs, etc, but for the most part this works with everything e......

11 of 211 | Some items in the removed assembly are still being used by items not defined in the same assembly - When trying to redeploy a BizTalk 2004 solution I received the following error message:"Some items in the removed assembly are still being used by items not defined in the same assembly, thus removal of the assembly failed. Make sure that items in the assembly you are trying to remove fulfill the following conditions: 1. Pipelines, maps, and schemas are not being used by Send Ports or Receive Locations 2. Roles have no enlisted parties."When you execute the following query against the configuration database, the result gives you the name(s) of the BizTalk artifact(s) which block(s) the deployment of your solution:select 'RcvPort' PortType, r.nvcName Port, item.name MapName,assem.nvcName Ass......

12 of 211 | BizTalk: Interview Skill measurment - This is a Part 4 of the Interview articles. Part 1: " BizTalk 2004, Questions for interview without answers " http://geekswithblogs.net/LeonidGaneline/archive/2006/05/22/79267.aspx Part 2: " BizTalk interview questions and principle "...(read more)...

13 of 211 | Read this before using bts_CleanupMsgBox stored procedure. - Subject: Losing subscriptions after running the sproc, resulting in complete redeploy of BizTalk application(s). bts_CleanupMsgBox is not something new and it's been there from BizTalk 2004 SP1. Basically this script is used to clear the MessageBox...(read more)...

14 of 211 | Why Archive and Purge when you can just Purge? - In BizTalk 2004 SP2, the BizTalk Team gave us the Archive and Purge SQL Server Maintenance Job for managing the size of the Tracking Database. This was a great tool and really took away some of the admin headaches in maintaining this particular database...(read more)...

15 of 211 | Updated BizTalk naming conventions... - Minor update to the BizTalk naming conventions here.  The big thing is that for a long while now I’ve thought physical send/receive ports should be named with just a plainly-worded phrase that will be as transparent as possible to operations staff.  (Whereas, back in the days of BizTalk 2004, you wanted something brief enough to fit in a HAT column…) ...

16 of 211 | Extracting Raw Schemas from BizTalk 2004 and 2006 Assemblies - When BizTalk compiles a project that contains a schema it generates a wrapper class for each schema.  Take for example the typical Biztalk Project below.  It contains a PropertySchema + 4 other schemas.        Compiling this project and opening it up with .NET Reflector, we'll get the following.  The important stuff to note from this are  A class was generated for each schema (including the Property schema) The generated classes inherit from "Microsoft.XLANGs.BaseTypes.SchemaBase" (See Figure 2) SchemaBase has a property called "XmlContent" which is overriden by the generated class.  This property contains the raw schema string! Figure 1.  Reflector output......

17 of 211 | Sharepoint and Biztalk Job Syndicate - If you are a developer that specializes in Sharepoint (2003 or 2007), or Biztalk (2004, 2006, 2006R2), and lives in the New Jersey, New York City, Conn. area, I'm putting together an informal "Job Syndicate".  Basically, a loose network of individuals that will share information about open employee and consulting opportunities in our area.  If you have tried Dice and Monster and have been swamped by all the Resume Trawler's spam, you might have realized that the only way to find the decent jobs is via a personal network.  Now, we all know that we should spend time cultivating a personal network, but most of us (myself included), have been ne......

18 of 211 | Solving BizTalk "error X2044" - I encountered a strange compilation error recently in BizTalk 2004 when importing a web service. While I can’t put my finger on the exact cause yet, I do have a fix that works. When you see an error message like: C:\Project\Web References\ExtRef\MyOrch.odx(445,23):...(read more)...

19 of 211 | BizTalk's mapper allows drag and drop replace - I learned a little trick the other day about the mapper which I have never seen documented. It works for BizTalk 2004 and also 2006.Have you ever had to change a functoid and gone thru the task of dragging the new functoid onto the grid and then reconnecting all of the lines, then having to check to make sure you got them all in order?Well, what I realized quite by accident is that you can actually just drag the new functoid over the one you want to replace and all your links will maintain themselves. The old functoid will disappear and be replaced by the new one.Of course there is a limitation when you have different maximum inputs, etc, but for the most part this works with everything e......

20 of 211 | Solving BizTalk "error X2044" - I encountered a strange compilation error recently in BizTalk 2004 when importing a web service.While I can’t put my finger on the exact cause yet, I do have a fix that works.When you see an error message like:C:\Project\Web References\ExtRef\MyOrch.odx(445,23): error X2044: symbol '@@@@' is already defined; the first definition is in assembly @@@.dll : It may be possible to disambiguate by using fully qualified names.The way to fix this error is to do the following: Open the orchestration in Notepad (In my case MyOrch.odx)Do a find (Ctrl+F) for “#endif // __DESIGNER_DATA”Delete all the code below that lineSave your file in NotepadSay yes when Visual Studio asks if you want to update your f......

21 of 211 | Some items in the removed assembly are still being used by items not defined in the same assembly - When trying to redeploy a BizTalk 2004 solution I received the following error message:"Some items in the removed assembly are still being used by items not defined in the same assembly, thus removal of the assembly failed. Make sure that items in the assembly you are trying to remove fulfill the following conditions: 1. Pipelines, maps, and schemas are not being used by Send Ports or Receive Locations 2. Roles have no enlisted parties."When you execute the following query against the configuration database, the result gives you the name(s) of the BizTalk artifact(s) which block(s) the deployment of your solution:select 'RcvPort' PortType, r.nvcName Port, item.name MapName,assem.nvcName Ass......

22 of 211 | Some items in the removed assembly are still being used by items not defined in the same assembly - When trying to redeploy a BizTalk 2004 solution I received the following error message: "Some items in the removed assembly are still being used by items not defined in the same assembly, thus removal of the assembly failed. Make sure that items in the assembly you are trying to remove fulfill the following conditions: 1. Pipelines, maps, and schemas are not being used by Send Ports or Receive Locations 2. Roles have no enlisted parties." When you execute the following query against the configuration database, the result gives you the name(s) of the BizTalk artifact(s) which block(s) the deployment of your solution: select 'RcvPort' PortType, r.nvcName Port, item.name MapNa......

23 of 211 | BizTalk 2004 - end of topic - Because I will change jobs per Januari 1st, I will be moving away from the BizTalk projects and operations. I will no longer blog about BizTalk. ...

24 of 211 | BizTalk Server 2006: The Compensation Model - The week before last, I spent some time updating an existing document on BizTalk exception handling for a client.   I added a couple of pages on the use of compensation.   I hoped to be able to reference a comprehensive article or paper on the subject, but after spending some time searching,  I largely drew blanks.   As always, the Microsoft documentation proved fragmented, terse and incomplete, although it has certainly improved since BizTalk 2004 days.   The small (but growing) number of BizTalk books did little better.    A few blog articles describe the compensation model to some degree.  There are a handful of academic pa......

25 of 211 | Anyone familiar with ebXML? - My company developed ebXML Accelerator for Biztalk 2004 and I'm working on a project using the Accelerator for building eTrade system of one of the national banks in Korea. I wonder if any of you familiar with this ebXML. Any personal experience or any opinion would be appreciated. :)...

26 of 211 | Biztalk 2004 script - A few script usages that I've used last project.It covers,--BizTalk Assembly DeployBizTalk Assembly StartGAC Un/InstallBizTalk Assembly Unenlist, StopBizTalk Assembly Undeploy...

27 of 211 | Configuring HIS 2004 With BizTalk 2004 - this article describe how to configure HIS 2004 with BizTalk 2004...

28 of 211 | Performance counter for Biztalk Server - Isn't performace all about Biztalk Server? Performance Counters in BizTalk 2004 by Stephen W. Thomas is defenitely worthwhile to read. ...

29 of 211 | Constructing BizTalk 2004 XML Messages (In an Orchestration) - Choices - This one is very well organized tutorial for constructing Biztalk Messages. I just want to put it here and come back to reference. Constructing BizTalk 2004 XML Messages (In an Orchestration) - Choices...

30 of 211 | BizTalk 2004 - Parsing flat files with optional records - For a project, I have been setting up a schema using the flat file extension. The file to read looks like a modified Edifact message. This is what it looks like: PNA,H123 LIN,2,XYZ0001 RFF,REFNO01 IMD,C,CODE1, VALUE1 IMD,C,CODE2,VALUE2 IMD,C,CODE3, VALUE3 The schema was created so that it reflects the structure of the message. For reading flat files, a few things had to be changed: Add the flat file extension to the schema Set the tag-identifier for each record that can be in the flat file (note: some additional group nodes were added to allow for 'group repeat' Set the child delimiter character, type and order for all nodes in the schema  A good indication about the effects of......

31 of 211 | Date/Time tracked with BAM must be expressed in Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) - All date/time tracked by BAM must be expressed in UTC. BAM depends on this to provide accurate durations, among many other things. This is clearly explained here. It was also the case for BizTalk 2004 even if the documentation gave subtle hints instead of describing it: es.UpdateActivity("PurchaseOrder", poid, "POShipped", DateTime.UtcNow); This rule is unfortunately easy to forget. For instance, let's assume you have a message with a date/time field you want to track with BAM. You start...(read more)...

32 of 211 | More BizTalk Samples, oh my... - Seems like they are making up for the fact that the samples for BizTalk 2004 weren't that great and some never worked at all without massive changes.  Here are the new pile of great samples for BizTalk 2006.  Thanks Luke.  Happy downloading.  Now I just need to find the time to look at these.  Here's the full sample site from Microsoft. -B  ...

33 of 211 | .NET 2.0 and BizTalk 2004... - Update: Andy pointed out that Tom Abraham has given this a thorough treatment here. There appear to be cases where having BizTalk 2004 and the .NET 2.0 framework installed on the same machine may cause you some difficulty.  I've seen a few instances where the BizTalk service will not start...or where the BizTalk 2004 process is loading (gulp) the 2.0 runtime (so says Process Explorer.)  This latter behavior will result in the VS2003 debugger not attaching correctly (among other things...)  See this kb. To fix this, you can modify the BTSNTSvc.exe.config file to include the following (after 'configSections'):     &......

34 of 211 | .NET 2.0 and BizTalk 2004... - There appear to be a few cases where having BizTalk 2004 and the .NET 2.0 framework installed on the same machine may cause you some difficulty.  I'm not sure why this might be - and it works fine in my environment.  However, I've seen a few cases where the BizTalk service will not start...or where the BizTalk 2004 process is loading (gulp) the 2.0 runtime(so says Process Explorer.)  This latter behavior will result in the VS2003 debugger not attaching correctly (among other things...) To fix this, you can modify the BTSNTSvc.exe.config file (for BT2004) to include the following (after 'configSections'):   &n......

35 of 211 | Speaking at MSDN Briefing and Software Arhitects Forum in Cluj, Romania - On April 6th, during MSDN Briefing, technical event dedicated to developers, testers and system architects, I had a presentation about some practical aspects (like big message maps and automated deployment) of the development process with BizTalk 2004. The presentation had a good feedback from the Microsoft representatives. Interesting enough, nobody in the MSDN audience had experience with BizTalk.On April, 7th, during the Solution Architect Briefing, I presented a case study of service oriented arhitecture and enteprise application  integration and the SCRUM methodology used in that project. The presentation was a real success, the audience being mostly interested in......

36 of 211 | BizTalk 2004 - xpath rules! - Over the past 2 years, I have developed most of the functionality in BizTalk using maps. You'll spend the days dragging and dropping functoids, and changing their properties. BizTalk maps are not much more than a graphical layer on top of XSLT, with some convenient (database) functoids, and allowing for inline scripting. It has been pointed out that the BizTalk maps are stored (and executed) as highly inefficient XSLT "code". Personally, I am not in favor of coding XSLT myself, as an alternative to the BizTalk maps. It reminds me of writing assembler for 68000 processors: even though the toolbox is well-equipped, building something complex requires a considerable amount of bespoke spa......

37 of 211 | Contract-First Development With BizTalk Server (And A Gotcha) - In my last MSDN webcast I briefly demonstrated true contract-first development using BizTalk with schemas and orchestrations. I wanted to walk through the steps here, and point out a huge "gotcha" that stumped me for a bit. So I started constructing this sample app to prove that I could build out and deploy my contract and service before adding any "guts" to the process underneath. I did this by first creating two schemas, representing the messages that go both into and out of my service. At this point, all I have is a deployed BizTalk project with two schemas. Next, I walked through the BizTalk Web Services Publishing Wizard, and chose to Publish schemas as web services.......

38 of 211 | BizTalk's mapper allows drag and drop replace - I learned a little trick the other day about the mapper which I have never seen documented. It works for BizTalk 2004 and also 2006. Have you ever had to change a functoid and gone thru the task of dragging the new functoid onto the grid and then reconnecting all of the lines, then having to check to make sure you got them all in order? Well, what I realized quite by accident is that you can actually just drag the new functoid over the one you want to replace and all your links will maintain themselves. The old functoid will disappear and be replaced by the new one. Of course there is a limitation when you have different maximum inputs, etc, but for the most part this works with ever......

39 of 211 | BizTalk's mapper allows drag and drop replace - I learned a little trick the other day about the mapper which I have never seen documented. It works for BizTalk 2004 and also 2006. Have you ever had to change a functoid and gone thru the task of dragging the new functoid onto the grid and then reconnecting all of the lines, then having to check to make sure you got them all in order? Well, what I realized quite by accident is that you can actually just drag the new functoid over the one you want to replace and all your links will maintain themselves. The old functoid will disappear and be replaced by the new one. Of course there is a limitation when you have different maximum inputs, etc, but for the most part this works with eve......

40 of 211 | BizTalk's mapper allows drag and drop replace - I learned a little trick the other day about the mapper which I have never seen documented. It works for BizTalk 2004 and also 2006. Have you ever had to change a functoid and gone thru the task of dragging the new functoid onto the grid and then reconnecting all of the lines, then having to check to make sure you got them all in order? Well, what I realized quite by accident is that you can actually just drag the new functoid over the one you want to replace and all your links will maintain themselves. The old functoid will disappear and be replaced by the new one. Of course there is a limitation when you have different maximum inputs, etc, but for the most part this works with eve......

41 of 211 | Biztalk 2004 FAQs - some problems related to biztalk 2004 and their solutions...

42 of 211 | Business Activity Monitoring: GenerateTypedBAMAPI Tool (BizTalk 2004 release uploaded) - Following on from my post last night, I've just uploaded a BizTalk Server 2004 version of GenerateTypedBAMAPI to the GotDotNet workspace. It's functionally identical to the 2006 release already up there but will only work with BizTalk Server 2004 as the BAM XML file was changed slightly for the 2006 release. One note on dependencies, as the tool uses Excel to crack the BAM Excel Workbook you will have to ensure Office System 2003 is installed which is a pre-requisite for BAM anyway. Let me know if you have any problems or have any feature requests....

43 of 211 | Creating a custom name for a Send message in BizTalk 2004 - Creating a custom name for a send file within BizTalk 2004....

44 of 211 | Flattening out the complexity from Flat file schemas in BizTalk 2004 - Part 2 - An article explaining how to write various Flat file schemas in BizTalk Server 2004...

45 of 211 | BizTalk 2004 - Serialization of send actions - An existing orchestration, that reads Siebel-messages from an MSMQC-queue, maps them, and posts them to a remote http-server had to be upgraded. Together with the upgrade, the performance had to be reconsidered, as the orchestration would be dealing with an increased number of messages. We did some stress tests and found out that it was easy to get the remote http server into trouble. For a test, we dropped ~20 or more message files in a directory on the file system. This directory is read by a test orchestration that posts the messages in an MSMQC-queue. As of that moment, the upgraded orchestration receives the messages out of the queue, processes them and posts them. Because we drop man......

46 of 211 | BizTalk Usability Study - The BizTalk product team is looking for your feedback! We are conducting baseline usability studies of BizTalk Server 2006 over the next several months (Feb – May) and are looking for BizTalk 2004 hands-on users (IT Pro/Developer/Business) to give feedback and help direct the vision for future versions of BizTalk! Your input and participation as we develop our products is extremely valuable to us and helps us ensure that our products address your needs. You will receive a free piece of Microsoft software (or choice of an MSPress book) for your time and feedback. If you are in the Seattle/Redmond area and would like to participate, please contact nancyp[-at-]microsoft.com as soon as possibl......

47 of 211 | The BizTalk product team is looking for your feedback! - Here is a little announcement that Nancy asked me to post for your attention: The BizTalk product team is looking for your feedback! We are conducting baseline usability studies of BizTalk Server 2006 over the next several months (Feb – May) and are looking for BizTalk 2004 hands-on users (IT Pro/Developer/Business) to give feedback and help direct the vision for future versions of BizTalk! Your input and participation as we develop our products is extremely valuable to us and helps us ensure that our products address your needs. You will receive a free piece of Microsoft software (or choice of an MSPress book) for your time and feedback. If you are in the Seattle/Redmond area and wou......

48 of 211 | The BizTalk product team is looking for your feedback! - Here is a little announcement that Nancy asked me to post for your attention: The BizTalk product team is looking for your feedback! We are conducting baseline usability studies of BizTalk Server 2006 over the next several months (Feb – May) and are looking for BizTalk 2004 hands-on users (IT Pro/Developer/Business) to give feedback and help direct the vision for future versions of BizTalk! Your input and participation as we develop our products is extremely valuable to us and helps us ensure that our products address your needs. You will receive a free piece of Microsoft software (or choice of an MSPress book) for your time and feedback. If you are in the Seattle/Redmond area and wou......

49 of 211 | The BizTalk Server product team is looking for your feedback! - We are conducting baseline usability studies of BizTalk Server 2006 over the next several months (Feb – May) and are looking for BizTalk 2004 hands-on users (IT Pro/Developer/Business) to give feedback and help direct the vision for future versions of BizTalk! Your input and participation as we develop our products is extremely valuable to us and helps us ensure that our products address your needs. You will receive a free piece of Microsoft software (or choice of an MSPress book) for your time and feedback.  If you are in the Seattle/Redmond area and would like to participate, please contact nancyp@microsoft.com as soon as possible to get on the schedule!...

50 of 211 | UnzipDisassembler - A custom pipeline component for Biztalk 2004 - This article show how to create a custom pipeline component in Biztalk Server 2004. The component receive a zipped message, uncompress it and returns the .zip file contents to biztalk server....