All posts by : Stephen Kaufmans WebLog

1 of 12 | More Information on UpdateGrams - In previous blog posts I have mentioned this large project that I am working on.  This project has been a great project for finding lots of material to blog about.  What I have not mentioned so far are the people that I am working with.  This project is a joint effort between Microsoft Consulting Services and Microsoft Global Services India (MGSI).  There have been great contributions by all of the off-shore team (unfortunately, far to many to list) and I would recommend them anytime as an off-shore group if you are looking to implement an off-shore model.  I have been very fortunate to be working closely with a small tight knit sub team.  This team is made......

2 of 12 | Validating Schemas During Runtime - I recently came across an interesting scenario.  In my application, we are transforming multiple incoming messages to a a canonical format.  We then take the output and place it in the MessageBox for some other downstream subscriber to process.  The Mapper did the transformation and created the output, however, based on the processing that we were doing during the mapping we found that some of the output messages we created did not always get created so that they would pass validation against the canonical schema.  Since we were doing our processing without the use of an Orchestration we did not have the ability to call a pipeline component to do the validation. &......

3 of 12 | System Center Operations Manager and BizTalk - The SCOM 2007 BizTalk Management Pack has finally been released.  The Management Pack is a complete rewrite and covers BizTalk 2006, BizTalk R2 as well as the new features of R2 including RFID and the EDI functionality. You can download the Management Pack here.   Also, If you were familiar with the Management Pack for MOM 2005 you will notice a number of changes.  The biggest is the change to the alerting functionality.  In SCOM you create subscriptions which will provide you with alerts for all of the events.  If you are looking for the alerting functionality that MOM 2005 had (the ability to pick a rule and provide an alert based only on that rule) you can find......

4 of 12 | Matching the BizTalk Service Name with its PID - I have been working with pipeline components quite a bit recently and when I try to attach to the BizTalk Server process I find that there are a lot of host instances and I need to determine which one to attach to. If you run the tasklist utility from a command prompt it will enable you to get a list of the host instances (services) as well as the name and PID.  Exactly what we need to determine what to attach to. If you have a 32 bit hosts then run the following: tasklist /SVC /fi "imagename eq btsntsvc.exe" and if you have 64 bit hosts then run this: tasklist /SVC /fi "imagename eq btsntsvc64.exe" the /fi is a filter and the eq is equals.  The results that will come ......

5 of 12 | Removing XML elements from an input document (with large message support) - In my last post I talked about taking an XML message and stripping out elements.  In that post I used a standard MemoryStream object and a reader requested that I also talk about how this pipeline could be created to deal with streaming of large messages.  Lets take a look at what those modifications would look like.   When dealing with large incoming messages you don't always want to load the message into memory - which is typically what the MemoryStream object does.  BizTalk has included a set of objects in the Microsoft.BizTalk.Stream.dll (located in the GAC) that provide a means of handling large messages.  Within this assembly is the VirtualStream class (the ......

6 of 12 | Processing multiple queues in FIFO order with WCF - In my previous entry on Processing FIFO MSMQ Messages using WCF I said that I would cover processing multiple queues and processing each queue in FIFO order.    If you remember, our requirement was to processe messages we receive from a legacy system through MSMQ in FIFO order.  Well we found that there were a couple of issues.  Neither of them was a surprise - FIFO processing is slow and there is no scale out.      So, we did a little more investigation and we found that we could segment our processing by message types (each being sent through their own queue) and then process each in FIFO order.  The FIFO processing is the same as in the ......

7 of 12 | MSMQ Label Property and WCF - The label property of an MSMQ message has been used for many things.  Developers still use the label property and want to continue to use it.  So, how do you get access to this property in WCF before posting your message to the queue.  It turns out that if you are using the NetMSMQBinding you can't.  After thinking about this a bit it makes sense since the NetMSMQBinding only uses MSMQ as an transport mechanism between two endpoints.  In this case any data you want to send between these two endpoints needs to be in the message body.  This is so your endpoints can be agnostic to the underlying transport and allow you to swap it out without having to modify you......

8 of 12 | I will be speaking at TechEd EMEA's IT Forum - I am very excited that I will be presenting at TechEd EMEA this year. I am presenting on Monitoring BizTalk Server SOA solutions with MOM.  If you are going to be there stop by and say hello. My session is: WSI301 Creating and Managing SOA Solutions with BizTalk Server and Microsoft Operations Manager...

9 of 12 | Processing FIFO MSMQ Messages using WCF -   I have been having fun working on the middle tier of an application which is using BizTalk, Windows Workflow, MSMQ and the Windows Communication Framework.   One of the requirements is to processes messages we receive from a legacy system through MSMQ in FIFO order.    We used WCF to communicate with MSMQ and used the msmqIntegrationBinding binding since the legacy application was placing the messages on the queue.   The FIFO processing seemed to be little more difficult to iron out.  It turns out that by default a service's InstanceContextMode is PerSession.  If the channel is a datagram then the IntanceContextMode degrades to PerCall.  So......

10 of 12 | I will be speaking at TechEd 2007 -   I am very excited that I will be presenting at TechEd this year.  I am presenting on Monitoring BizTalk Server with MOM.  The last time that I spoke at TechEd was back in 2000.  I have been a speaker at many other events and enjoy speaking but there is something really enjoyable about speaking at this event.   If you are going to be there this year, stop by and say hello. Here is the official info: SOA307 - Managing and Monitoring Microsoft BizTalk Server Solutions with Microsoft Operations Manager Track(s): SOA and Web ServicesLevel: 300Speaker(s): Stephen Kaufman...

11 of 12 | XSLT and a Commerce Server Catalog Query - I am becoming more and more convinced that you need to have good XSLT skills to work with the Commerce Server Adapters for BizTalk.  Well, I came across a situation that called for a custom XSLT solution.  I have written about some of these cases in past blog entries and as I find more situations I will add blog entries.   In this case, I needed to download images from a third party site for products in our catalog that were missing images.   I needed to query Commerce Server and pass in a list of items that I wanted to return.  In this case it was based on the VendorUPC element (as shown in the screen shot below).          I ne......

12 of 12 | Querying Commerce Server with Commerce Servers' BizTalk Adapters - I am working on a large project  where we need to query Commerce Server to create data feeds to send to such sites as MSN Shopping, Yahoo Shopping, PriceGrabber, etc.   When we create these data feeds we need to query for every item in the catalog.    There are a couple of blogs out there with examples of querying for a specific item but in this case I needed to get every single item.    One of the things that was not clear to me was if I was supposed to use the field name defined in Commerce Server or if I was supposed to use the column name that I found in the database.   Well, it turned out that I was supposed to use the column name of th......