All posts by : Richard Seroters Architecture Musings

1 of 105 | Interview Series: Four Questions With … Yossi Dahan - We continue our monthly look at thought leaders in the “connected systems” space by interviewing Yossi Dahan.  Yossi is a great technologist,  prolific blogger, Microsoft MVP as well as a good tipper.  Yossi recently attending Microsoft’s PDC conference in Los Angeles, and I wanted to get some insight from him as to what he saw there. Yossi provides some great insight into technology, and also tests the PG-13 limits of my blog with his answer to this month’s “stupid question.”  Enjoy. Q: At the just-completed Microsoft PDC conference, we saw a wide range of new technologies announced including Azure, Oslo, and Dublin. Given that you have a real job and can’t play with technology all day, ......

2 of 105 | I, For One, Welcome our New Cloud Overlords - I’m trying really hard to not pay attention to PDC today, but, damn them and their interesting announcements!  The “Cloud OS” turned out to be Azure.  Good stuff there.  “BizTalk Services” are dead, long live .NET Services.    Neat that you have both Java and Ruby SDKs for .NET Services. Also, we got a full release of the Microsoft Federation Gateway (whitepaper here) and a preview of the Microsoft Service Connector (announcement here).  For companies tackling B2B scenarios with a myriad of partners, these technologies may offer a simplified route. Ok, back to real work.  Stop distracting me with your sexy cloud products. Technorati Tags: Azure, .NET Services Posted in .NET, BizTalk, Genera......

3 of 105 | Reason #207 Why the BizTalk WCF Adapter is Better Than the SOAP Adapter - In writing my book, I’ve had a chance to compare the two BizTalk service generation wizards, and I now remember why the BizTalk Web Services Publishing Wizard (ASMX) drove me nuts. Let’s look at how the WCF Wizard and ASMX Wizard take the same schema, and expose it as a service.  I’ve purposely included some complexity in the schema to demonstrate the capabilities (or lack thereof) of each Wizard.  Here is my schema, with notations indicating the node properties that I added. Now, I’ve run both the BizTalk Web Services Publishing Wizard (ASMX) and the BizTalk WCF Service Publishing Wizard (WCF) on this schema and pulled up WSDL of each.   First of all, let’s look at the ASMX WSDL.  Here i......

4 of 105 | In-Memory BizTalk Resequencer Pattern - I was asked a couple days ago whether it was possible to receive a related but disjointed set of files into BizTalk Server and both aggregate and reorder them prior to passing the result to a web service.  Below is small sample I put together to demonstrate that it was indeed possible. You can find some other resequencer patterns (most notably, in the Pro BizTalk Server 2006 book), but I was looking for something fairly simple and straightforward.  My related messages all come into BizTalk at roughly the same time, and, there are no more than 20 in a related batch. Let’s first take a look at a simplified version of the schema I’m working with. I’ve highlighted a few header values.  I kno......

5 of 105 | Splitting Delimited Values in BizTalk Maps - Today, one of our BizTalk developers asked me how to take a delimited string stored in a single node, and extract all those values into separate destination nodes.  I put together a quick XSLT operation that makes this magic happen. So let’s say I have a source XML structure like this: I need to get this pipe-delimited value into an unbounded destination node.  Specifically, the above XML should be reshaped into the format here: Notice that each pipe-delimited value is in its own “value” node.  Now I guess I could chained together 62 functoids to make this happen, but it seemed easier to write a bit of XSLT that took advantage of recursion to split the delimited string and emit the desi......

6 of 105 | Interview Series: Four Questions With … Matt Milner - I’m continuing my series of interviews where I chat with a different expert in the Connected Systems space and find out their thoughts on technology. This month, we’re having a powwow with Matt Milner.  Matt’s a Microsoft MVP, blogger, instructor and prolific author in MSDN Magazine.  Matt’s a good sport who was subjected to my stupidest stupid question so far and emerged unscathed. Q: You’ve recently delivered a series of screencasts for Microsoft that explain how to get started with WCF and WF. What has the reaction to these offerings been so far? Do you believe that these efforts make development in WCF and WF more approachable? Why do you think that uptake of these technologies has se......

7 of 105 | Differences in BizTalk Subscription Handling for SOAP and WCF Adapter Messages - I recently encountered a bit of a “gotcha” when looking at how BizTalk receives WCF messages through its adapters.  I expected my orchestration subscription for messages arriving from either the SOAP adapter or WCF adapter to behave similarly, but alas, they do not. Let’s say I have two schemas.  I’m building an RPC-style service that takes in a query message and returns the data entity that it finds.  I have a “CustomerQuery_XML.xsd” and “Customer_XML.xsd” schema in BizTalk. Let’s assume I want to be very SOA/loosely-coupled so I build my web service from my schemas BEFORE I create my implementation logic (e.g. orchestration).  To demonstrate the point of the post, I’ll need to create on......

8 of 105 | Building Enterprise Mashups using RSSBus: Part IV - We conclude this series of blog posts by demonstrating how to take a set of feeds, and mash them up into a single RSS feed using RSSBus. If you’ve been following this blog series, you’ll know that I was asked by my leadership to prove that RSSBus could generate a 360° view of a “contact” by (a) producing RSS feeds from disparate data sources such as databases, web services and Excel workbooks and (b) combining multiple feeds to produce a unified view of a data entity.  Our target architecture looks a bit like this:   In this post, I’ll show you how to mash up all those individual feeds, and also how to put a friendly HTML front end on the resulting RSS data. Building the Aggregate Feed Fir......

9 of 105 | New Microsoft KB Article on BizTalk Database Support - If you have any responsibility for planning or maintaining BizTalk Server databases, I highly encourage you to check out the brand new Microsoft Knowledge Base article entitled How to maintain and troubleshoot BizTalk Server databases.  The article contains details on SQL Server instance settings, the SQL Server Agent jobs, handling deadlocks, how to delete data from BizTalk databases, and how to troubleshoot database-related issues. Much of this data is floating around elsewhere, but it’s a useful bookmark for a consolidated view. On a completely unrelated note, I’ve enjoyed poking around the newly opened up Stack Overflow site and learning a few new C# language things and seeing some nic......

10 of 105 | Building Enterprise Mashups using RSSBus: Part III - In the first two posts of this series, I looked at how to aggregate data from multiple sources and mash them up into a single data entity that could be consumed by an RSS client.  In this post, I will show off the new SOAP Connector from RSSBus. Earlier in this series, I talked about mashing up data residing in databases, Excel workbooks and existing web services.  In my scenario, I have an existing web service that returns a set of master data about our customers.  This includes contact details and which sales reps are assigned to this customer.  Let’s see how I can go about calling this service through RSSBus. Building an SOAP Feed First of all, let’s take a look at what parameters are a......

11 of 105 | Building Enterprise Mashups using RSSBus: Part II - In the previous post, I laid out a data visibility problem and proposed using RSSBus to build an enterprise mashup that inflates a single data entity whose attributes reside in multiple disparate systems. Before a mashup can be built, we actually need the source data in a ready-to-mashup format.   For the mashup I am building, my “contact” data resides in 3 different repositories: Database containing the interactions we’ve had with a particular contact Web service talking to a CRM system which holds core contact information Excel spreadsheet containing external reference data such as the contact’s public web page and blog On top of this, my mashup will also return a Google result set base......

12 of 105 | Building Enterprise Mashups using RSSBus: Part I - I’ve been a fan of RSSBus from /n software for some time. A few weeks ago our Executive Director / Chief Architect / Technology Overlord recently asked me to build a real, live enterprise mashup application to demonstrate for our IT leadership group. Our goal was to show that RSSBus could be used to quickly and efficiently aggregate data in compelling new ways.   In the next few posts, I’m going to walk through our use case, and how I built a solution to solve this. Before getting into the “what” and “how”, I want to first say that the “how I built a solution” line above isn’t entirely true.  The folks at RSSBus actually built most of the solution for me, and all I did was tweak and customi......

13 of 105 | Goodbye BizTalk 2006 R3, Hello BizTalk 2009 - Good communication today about not only the name change, but more importantly, the updated roadmap for BizTalk Server (read Q & A here, see roadmap here, and see BizTalk home page here, see Steve Martin’s announcement here). For me, the most important things communicated were: greater clarification on what the Oslo release means to BizTalk Server specific features in BizTalk Server 2009 a commitment to a continued 2+ year release rhythm of BizTalk releases recognition of the types of new features we’d like to see added to BizTalk (low latency support, developer enhancements, more platform integration) This is a great lead in to the upcoming PDC, and a smart move to reassure BizTalk custom......

14 of 105 | Interview Series: Four Questions With … Alan Smith - Last month I started a new blog series where I interview a different “connected systems” thought leader each month and get some insight into their experiences and thinking in our space.  Our first victim/subject was Tomas Restrepo. We continue the series by chatting with everyone’s favorite Swedish BizTalker, Alan Smith. Q: You spend a healthy amount of time facilitating the MSDN BizTalk R2 forums. What are some common assumptions or misunderstandings about BizTalk Server that you frequently see questions about? A: There are quite a few people asking about using BizTalk for heavy database integration, taking flat files, inserting the data in databases and processing it. SQL Server Integra......

15 of 105 | Odds and Ends - A couple things to share on this glorious Wednesday.  First, one of our BizTalk developers came across an odd scenario, and I just learned that everyone’s favorite Dahan (Yossi Dahan) wrote about it a couple years ago.  Our issue was that an orchestration needed to consume a service with a multi-part input, but the complex type parameter wouldn’t show up as message for mapping.  After a quick poke around, I see that Yossi explained how multi-part messages that have a mix of complex parts and simple type parts cannot be used in a map.  I tried it out, and sure enough, if you create a multi-part orchestration message that does not have all parts set as schema types, then that message isn’t a......

16 of 105 | Odds and Ends - A couple things to share on this glorious Wednesday.  First, one of our BizTalk developers came across an odd scenario, and I just learned that everyone’s favorite Dahan (Yossi Dahan) wrote about it a couple years ago.  Our issue was that an orchestration needed to consume a service with a multi-part input, but the complex type parameter wouldn’t show up as message for mapping.  After a quick poke around, I see that Yossi explained how multi-part messages that have a mix of complex parts and simple type parts cannot be used in a map.  I tried it out, and sure enough, if you create a multi-part orchestration message that does not have all parts set as schema types, then that message isn’t a......

17 of 105 | Impact of Database Availability on BizTalk Web Services - My buddy Victor asked me the other day about the relationship between IIS and the BizTalk databases.  That is, if we restart the SQL Server service or server, what happens to messages that are still submitted to the BizTalk web services on an active IIS server? So, I put together a really quick application where I tested four scenarios: downstream host unavailable, IIS unavailable, receive location offline, and SQL Server unavailable. Also, to legitimately gauge service behavior, I exposed both classic ASMX services and WCF services for my BizTalk application.  Both services were built as one-way HTTP services hosted in IIS.  The published data is then routed to a single FILE send port via ......

18 of 105 | Trying *Real* Contract First Development With BizTalk Server - A while back on my old MSDN blog, I demonstrated the concept of “contract first” development in BizTalk through the publishing of schema-only web services using the Web Services Publishing Wizard.  However, Paul Petrov rightly pointed out later that my summary didn’t truly reflect a contract-first development style. Recently my manager had asked me about contract-first development in WCF, and casually asked if we had ever identified that pattern for BizTalk-based development.  So, I thought I’d revisit this topic, but start with the WSDL this time.  I’m in the UK this week on business, so what better use of my depressing awake-way-to-early mornings than writing BizTalk posts? So like Paul h......

19 of 105 | Interview Series: Four Questions With … Tomas Restrepo - There are a plethora of great technologists in the “connected systems” space, and I thought it would be fun to interview a different one each month.  These are short, four question interviews where I ask about experiences with technology.  The last question will always be a fairly stupid, silly question that might only amuse me.  So be it.  I used to do these sorts of interviews when I wrote newsletters for Avanade and Microsoft, so if I happen to reuse a previously asked stupid question, it’s because I liked it, and assume that most of my current readers never saw those old newsletters.  I’m a cheater like that. To start things off, let’s have a chat with Tomas Restrepo.  Blogger extraordi......

20 of 105 | InfoPath Rules Grouping Behavior (And New BizTalk Posters) - A buddy at work is designing an InfoPath form and was befuddled by some awkward behavior in the way InfoPath executes its rule conditions. So let’s say that you want to execute the following comparison:  “If the sum of the order is greater than $500, and, the customer is from either CA or FL, then set a 10% discount rate.”  In essence you have a “A & (B | C)” situation.  So my pal had a rule that fired which checked these conditions.  On the first pass, his rule conditions looked like this: Makes sense, BUT, where does InfoPath put the parentheses?  Not where we first thought.  The way this rule is written, InfoPath executes it as “(A & B) | C“.  That is, if I just enter “FL” into my text......

21 of 105 | Checklist for Reviewing Services for SOA Compatibility - I’ve got SOA on the brain lately.  I’m in the process of writing a book on building service-oriented solutions using BizTalk Server 2006 R3 (due out right around the product release), and, trying to organize a service review board at my company.  Good times. So what’s a “service review board”?  It’s a chance to look at services that have been deployed within our development environment and chat with the developer/architect about various design and deployment considerations.  In reality, it’s a way to move from “just a bunch of web services” (JBOWS) to an architecture that truly supports our stated service-oriented principles.  Now, clearly there are services that are meant to solve a specif......

22 of 105 | Sending Flat File Payload in a SOAP Message - So we have a project were pieces of data are sent to an external party.  This party exposes a “service” to accept the data.  However, the “service” takes in a few pieces of metadata, and then accepts a comma-delimited string of values as the actual payload.  Ugh.  Ignoring the questionable design, how would I take what was originally XML content, turn it into a delimited structure, and then jam it into the outbound SOAP message?  Let’s see how we’d do that in BizTalk Server.  What I’ll show here is how to call the flat file assembler pipeline from an orchestration, and use a custom component to yank out the flat file content and put it into an XML element. First, I need some schemas.  I’ll ......

23 of 105 | Enabling Data-Driven Permissions in SharePoint Using Windows Workflow - A group I’m working with was looking to use SharePoint to capture data entered by a number of international employees.  They asked if SharePoint could restrict access to a given list item based on the value in a particular column.  So, if the user created a line item designated for “Germany”, then automatically, the list item would only allow German users to read the line.  My answer was “that seems possible, but that’s not out of the box behavior.”  So, I went and built the necessary Windows Workflow, and thought I’d share it here. In my development environment, I needed Windows Groups to represent the individual countries.  So, I created users and groups for a mix of countries, with an ex......

24 of 105 | New BizTalk Performance, WCF Whitepapers - I was looking for a particular download today on the Microsoft site, and came across a couple of new whitepapers.  Check out the Microsoft BizTalk Server Performance Optimization Guide which 220+ pages of performance factors, analytic tools, planning/preparing/executing a performance assessment, identifying bottlenecks, how to test, and optimizing operating system / network / database  level settings. Also check out the new whitepaper on BizTalk 2006 R2 integration with WCF.  This is a different paper than Aaron’s WCF adapter paper from last year. And not sure if you’ve seen this, but the BizTalk support engineers are blogging now and chat about orchestration performance and other topics.  ......

25 of 105 | Building InfoPath Web Forms With Cascading Lists - We’re replacing one of our critical systems, and one of the system analysts was looking for a way to capture key data entities in the existing system, and every system/form/report that used each entity.  Someone suggested SharePoint and I got myself roped into prototyping a solution. Because of the many-to-one relationship being captured (e.g. one entity may map to fields in multiple systems), a straight out SharePoint list didn’t make sense.  I have yet to see a great way to do parent/child relationships in SharePoint lists.  So, I proposed an InfoPath form. I started by building up SharePoint lists of reference data.  For instance, I have one list with all the various impacted systems, an......

26 of 105 | New WCF Management Pack for SOA Software - I was on a conference call with those characters from SOA Software and they were demonstrating their BizTalk Management Pack.  They also spent a lot of time covering their in-development WCF binding. Moving forward, SOA Software is releasing Microsoft-friendly agents for … IIS 6.0 (SOAP/HTTP) WCF (any transport) BizTalk (any transport) BizTalk-WCF (any transport) All of these (except the BizTalk agent) support policy enforcement.  That is, the BizTalk agent only does message recording and monitoring whereas the other agents support the full suite of SOA Software policies (e.g. security, XSLT, etc). So what is the difference between the BizTalk agent, and the BizTalk-WCF agent?  The relati......

27 of 105 | All Source Code Posted for BizTalk + WCF Articles - I just finished zipping up all the source code for my recent set of articles over at TopXML.com.  Specifically, I just added the source code for the set of articles on publishing WCF services out of BizTalk (with security, transactions, attachments) and the source code for all the BizTalk Adapter Pack demonstrations that utilized the Oracle adapter.  I make no promises that the code is attractive, contains best practices, or avoids the use of obscenities in the comments.   Series Summary  BizTalk and WCF: Part I, Operation Patterns Get the source code!  BizTalk and WCF: Part II, Security Patterns  BizTalk and WCF: Part III, Transaction Patterns  BizTalk and WCF: Part IV, Attachm......

28 of 105 | BizTalk "Message Aggregation For Email" Pattern - One of our BizTalk developers had a requirement to collect related messages and send a single email summary with details about those messages. I built the example below to help her out. In this scenario, a series of independent, but related, messages are sent to BizTalk. Each of these messages will have a “batch ID” which connects them as well as a “batch count” value which identifies the total number of messages in the batch. As you might expect, I’ll need a convoy to collect these messages. The interesting part was how to build up the email data which summarized the results of the processing for a given batch. First, I have a schema that represents an individual message. As you can see,......

29 of 105 | New BizTalkHotRod Issue Out; BizTalk Bloggers to Check Out - The latest issue of the BizTalk HotRod magazine is out.  Some of the topics you’ll find are: Detailed look at using the ESB Guidance Exception Management framework Exposing BizTalk BRE rules via WCF services Look at parallel convoys Peek at the BizTalk WCF adapters Taking control of XSLT in BizTalk solutions Hosting WF in BizTalk And much more.  As usual, a well done issue. Skimming through this issue got me thinking about where I get my BizTalk information, and reminded me to update my RSS reader so that I regularly read some of the “newer guys” who cover BizTalk topics.  Some of the original BizTalk giants (like Steven, Tomas, Charles, Scott, Jon, Lee, etc) have (naturally) shifted some......

30 of 105 | BizTalk Orchestration Throttling Pattern - I’m currently architecting a project where one of the requirements is to limit the number of concurrent calls to a web service. I’d covered a similar topic in a previous post, and outlined two ways one could try and configure this behavior. First, you could limit the number of simultaneous connections for the SOAP adapter by setting the “maxconnections” setting in the btsntsvc.exe.config file. The downside to this mechanism is that if you have many messages, and the service takes a while to process, you could timeouts. The second choice is to turn on ordered delivery at the send port. This eliminates the timeout issue, but, really slows processing. In our case, the downstream web service (a......

31 of 105 | Flowing Transactions To Oracle Using Adapter Pack - So the documentation that comes with the BizTalk Adapter Pack makes scant reference to flowing transactions to the adapters.  That is, if I want to call the “Insert” operation on an “Orders” table, but only commit that if the “Insert” operation on the “Order Items” table succeeds, how do I wrap those operations in a single transaction? WCF has great transaction support, and the BizTalk Adapter Pack is built on WCF, but the product documentation for the Oracle adapter states: The Oracle Database adapter does not support performing transactions on the Oracle database using System.Transaction. The adapter supports transactions using OracleTransaction. -Limitations of BizTalk Adapter 3.0 for Or......

32 of 105 | Material from San Diego .NET User Group Presentation - Earlier this week, I grabbed a couple new CDs, hopped in the car, and drove down to San Diego to present at the .NET User Group’s Connected Systems meeting.  The topic was the BizTalk Adapter Pack and I outlined what the BAP is, what the core use cases are, and demonstrated how to build a solution using it. My presentation is here.  I called out a few resources for folks looking to learn about the BizTalk Adapter Pack.  They include: Microsoft BizTalk Adapter Pack website Adapter Pack licensing site Trial copy download MSDN team blog for adapters Presentation on Channel9 My series of articles hosted at TopXML.com which explain common usage scenarios I’ve been accepted into the Microsoft......

33 of 105 | Article on Choosing Service Implementation Strategy with WCF - Michele recently wrote a lengthy but deliciously thorough article on MSDN (hat tip: Lynn) called Application Deployment Strategies which identifies five core scenarios for using Windows Communication Foundation within a distributed application.  Those scenarios include: Enterprise web services.   Think secure, interoperable services that may also utilize new-ish WS* standards such as WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-ReliableMessaging. Web 2.0 services.  These are your POX or REST services with a look at JSON and RSS/ATOM. Intranet applications.  These services which live inside your own organization may use something like TCP as a transport.  Or, if you’re like my company, even the internal web......

34 of 105 | Article Series on BizTalk and WCF: Part IX, BizTalk Adapter Pack BizTalk Patterns - Whew.  My 9th and final article for TopXML.com on integrating BizTalk Server and WCF is now published.  This one looks at the BizTalk Adapter Pack and how to consume the Oracle adapter from inside BizTalk Server.  I demonstrated how to insert multiple records at once, call stored procedures, build a database polling solution, and how to call the Adapter Pack from an orchestration using code. 20,500+ words and 178 screenshots later, I definitely learned a lot about WCF (and Oracle) by writing this series of articles.  I found the security and attachment topics to be challenging, the transaction topics to be quite interesting, and the BizTalk Adapter Pack to be quite compelling.  The WCF inte......

35 of 105 | Article Series on BizTalk and WCF: Part VIII, BizTalk Adapter Pack Service Model Patterns - So how would you use the BizTalk Adapter Pack to build a RESTful HTTP URI on top of an Oracle database table?  What about calling Oracle stored procedures that made use of either strong or weak ref cursors?  In my latest article for TopXML.com,  I explore how to consume the Microsoft BizTalk Adapter Pack’s Oracle adapter using the WCF service model. Specifically, I show how to … Insert multiple records into an Oracle table using a single WCF operation call Call Oracle stored procedures and process their result sets in either a strongly typed or weakly typed fashion Using the adapter’s “polling” mechanism to build an Oracle database polling WCF host Apply RESTful WCF attributes from the .NE......

36 of 105 | Article Series on BizTalk and WCF: Part VII, About BizTalk Adapter Pack - I just posted another article for TopXML.com as part of my series on BizTalk + WCF.   In this article, I explore the new BizTalk Adapter Pack. This article is mainly an introduction to the BizTalk Adapter Pack, with a couple demonstrations using the Oracle adapter.  I show how to use the WCF Oracle adapter to query Oracle data using both standard .NET code and and a BizTalk project.  Next up, I’ll close out the series with a couple articles highlighting key use cases for the Adapter Pack and how to execute those use cases via code or BizTalk.   Series Summary  BizTalk and WCF: Part I, Operation Patterns Get the source code!  BizTalk and WCF: Part II, Security Patterns  BizTalk an......

37 of 105 | Next Version of BizTalk Server Announced - Today, Steve Martin announced a few details about the next version of BizTalk that will be available in early 2009.   Called BizTalk Server 2006 R3, this amounts to an incremental release of the product that does NOT correspond to the Oslo wave.  The “headline” for this release is compatibility with the latest version of the Microsoft platform (Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio.NET 2008).   Looks like a couple additional nuggets will be added, such as new and enhanced adapters (such as WCF SQL adapter?). I’m not a fan of the naming.  Why not call it BizTalk Server 2000 R7?  If the software is going to have a “year” attached to its name, seems like a good idea to actually i......

38 of 105 | MVP Summit Thoughts - Here at the Microsoft MVP Summit in Seattle and it’s been fun bumping into old friends and putting names with faces.  Had a chance to hang out with Scott Colestock,  Charles Young, Brian Loesgen, Stephen Thomas, Tim Rayburn, Alan Smith, Paul Somers, Tomas Restrepo and Bill Chesnut.  It’s pretty wild to be around some of the smartest BizTalk folks on the planet. Today’s MVP Summit sessions were intentionally unfocused and meant to be conversations among folks with similar technology interests.  I spent my first session in a WCF roundtable moderated by Michele Leroux Bustamante where I walked away with lots of ideas and items to research (WCF null channels, security token services, etc).  I ......

39 of 105 | Using the BizTalk Adapter Pack to Load Oracle Data into InfoPath 2007 Forms - One of the glaring omissions from InfoPath 2007 is integration with non SQL Server data repositories.  For retrieving reference data (query data), your only choice is SQL Server.  That’s lousy.  For submitting data, your only choice is SQL Server or Microsoft Access, and, you can only submit to a database when using the thick client version of InfoPath.  That is, you can’t do a direct database submission on the InfoPath Forms Services version of a form.  This also sucks.  SharePoint isn’t much better, as the SharePoint Designer integration with ODBC data sources (such as Oracle) is clumsy at best, and in our experience, not really functional. But, complaining gets me nowhere.  So, how can I......

40 of 105 | Article Series on BizTalk and WCF: Part VI, Publishing Advanced Services Patterns - I just posted another article for TopXML.com as part of my series on BizTalk + WCF.   This post digs into exposing WCF services out of BizTalk that utilize security features, MTOM attachments, and transactions. Topics include: message-based security, transport security, custom role based authorization, MTOM attachments, and how to send messages to BizTalk as part of a client transaction.  I observed some odd behavior with regards to MTOM where the “request” on the request/response port correctly attached the binary content as a MIME part, but the “response” message kept the binary string inside the XML payload itself.   Series Summary  BizTalk and WCF: Part I, Operation Patterns Get t......

41 of 105 | New Collection of WCF Security Task Guidance - If you’re looking to dig a bit deeper into WCF security, and specifically how to perform particular tasks, go check out J.D. Meier’s blog for a link list of new “how tos” and videos recently posted to CodePlex. Specifically, you’ll find some useful demonstrations for creating temporary certificates for message-based security, some interesting looks at impersonation, using SQL Role Providers for authentication, and more. Technorati Tags:  WCF ...

42 of 105 | BizTalk Environment Migration Checklist - My company’s “standard operating procedure” for BizTalk Server doesn’t call out the specific requirements to deploy among environments (development to test, test to production, etc), so I’m trying to help the team get those articulated.  Here’s my first stab at a checklist that should be followed for BizTalk application migration between environments.   I don’t want the list to be abu