BizTalk 2006

1 of 197 | Creating Multi-Part Messages in BizTalk - Last year I wrote an entry about adding arbitrary binary attachments to a Multi-Part message in BizTalk 2006 using a helper C# component. That entry has been fairly popular (as far as BizTalk posts go, which is not usually much!), and I occasionally get questions about it. The sample uses a bit of clever code to insert arbitrary attachments into an existing XLANGMessage instance during construction. However, it's not very clear that this is actually a supported scenario and so there's always a chance it might get you into trouble. I recently thought of another way, possibly much better supported to accomplish the same in BizTalk 2006, though ......

2 of 197 | BizTalk 2006 'R3'....starts to form - Christmas has gone, Easter too.....but here's something to smile about. There's some HUGE things cooking on the horizon in the land of BizTalk. We want SQL2008....we want VS2008 and we want the world of connectivity to/from BizTalk to be *easy*. Also as BizTalk RFID goes mobile....we want to go there too! Control, manage, deploy/stop/start processes etc etc. Here's a start.... Steve Martin (heads up the Connect Systems Division - CSD at Microsoft in Product Management) spilt the beans and let me tell you....when are the betas coming out!!!!!!! http://blogs.msdn.com/stevemar/archive/2008/04/23/biztalk-server-platform-updates.aspx &......

3 of 197 | Speaking at Developer Summit on Masterdata Management using BizTalk 2006 - I recently spoke at the leading developer conference here in Sweden called Developer Summit. The talk was called Masterdata Management using BizTalk 2006. The slides can be found here. I can really recommend Developer Summit as a conference. Everything...(read more)...

4 of 197 | 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......

5 of 197 | 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...(read more)...

6 of 197 | BizTalk 2006 R3 first half of 2009 - More details on investments Microsoft has made in this new version: http://blogs.msdn.com/nabeelp/archive/2008/04/22/biztalk-2006-r3-is-coming.aspx ...

7 of 197 | BizTalk 2006 R3 is coming! - With the amazing wave of new platforms (Windows Server 2008, .NET Framework 3.5, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008) coming out of Redmond recently, some of the most asked questions are "When will BizTalk be able to utilise these new platforms...(read more)...

8 of 197 | Consuming pipeline issue fix for BizTalk 2006 - I previously blogged about an issue I was experiencing building a custom pipeline component in BizTalk Server 2006, and that I had found it was fixed and was not longer an issue in R2. Now there is a KB ( KB941802 ) out that deals with a fix for that...(read more)...

9 of 197 | Taking my mouthwash - About four years ago I got my first glimpse of BizTalk.  When I first saw it, I could see lots of possibilities and real potential if this tool was implemented and used properly. Roughly three years ago I began working in an environment which had a BizTalk solution built.  Now, this solution relies heavily on several web sites which use HTTP post methods to do extra transformations of the messages to strings and from strings to XML.  Not the best solution, in my opinion, but it works. Well, to say it simply, this has always left a bad taste in my mouth for BizTalk.  We have had issues with the server configurations, keeping the Health & Activity Tracker working, heck even SQL Server fai......

10 of 197 | Truncating the BizTalk 2006 Tracking Database - In Truncating the BizTalkDTADb Database I discussed how to truncate the tracking database in BizTalk 2004. Over on the BizTalk Gurus forums, user nbusy wanted to do the same thing for BizTalk Server 2006 - he’s kindly allowed me to repost his instructions...(read more)...

11 of 197 | Failed Message Routing - One of the things Microsoft introduced with BizTalk 2006 is failed message routing.  Prior to this, developers had to come up with custom solutions to remove failed messages from the messagebox to prevent them from accumulating.  Now all one has to do is enable routing for failed messages on the receive ports and create an orchestration to consume these failed messages.  When a message comes into the messagebox, BizTalk tries to find a matching subscription based on the context properties of the message.  If no matching subscriptions are found, the message is suspended.  To demonstrate this we can create a receive location and drop in a XML file.  Checking in the Group Hub we find the follo......

12 of 197 | XmlAssembler TargetCharset Property Error in BizTalk 2006 & 2006 R2 - While researching a post about message encoding in BizTalk, I can across this Microsoft Knowledge Base article regarding the TargetCharset property on the XmlAssembler component - it would appear that if the property is set through the Admin Console,...(read more)...

13 of 197 | BizTalk 2006 Message Archiving Component - More Efficient Stream Handling - I’ve re-worked the BizTalk 2006 Message Archiving Component as a true streaming pipeline component - utilising a forward only eventing stream - to more efficiently use process resources when archiving large files, as suggested by Mikael Håkansson...(read more)...

14 of 197 | Announcing a new BizTalk 2006 Message Archiving Component - A couple of days ago I uploaded a revised version of my BizTalk 2006 Message Archiving Component onto CodePlex - version 0.2 can be downloaded from the CodePlex website at http://www.codeplex.com/btsmsgarchcomp. The component works with BizTalk 2006 &...(read more)...

15 of 197 | Depurando información en la DTA en BizTalk 2004 - El proceso de depuración de la base de datos de tracking "DTA" en BizTalk 2004 o BizTalk 2004 SP1 puede tardar horas o tal vez días, depende de la cantidad de información en la BD, debido a la lógica del procedimiento dtasp_PruneTrackingdatabase().  Este inconveniente no sucede en BizTalk 2006 y BizTalk 2004 SP2 por que se hicieron unas correcciones a estos procesos de depuración de las bases de datos.  Sin embargo, parte del proceso de instalación de BizTalk 2004 SP2 es limpiar la BD de tracking por lo tanto si esta tiene mucha información dicho proceso podra tardarse mas horas de lo previsto ya que utiliza este procedimiento. Para ......

16 of 197 | A bug with multiple hosts... - Wayyyy back in November of 2006, I wrote about a bug in BizTalk 2006: This bug is encountered when you attempt to start a BizTalk 2006 application definition with orchestrations that have been bound to different hosts.  (Say, OrchA in HostA, and OrchB in HostB.)  After the application has been deployed, the first time the application is started (and 'orchestration start/enlist' is included in the start options) you will receive an error that looks something like this: Microsoft.BizTalk.ExplorerOM.BtsException: Could not enlist orchestration 'BizTalkSample.Orchestrations.Echo,BizTalkSample.Orchestrations, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=05a4a......

17 of 197 | A bug with multiple hosts... - Wayyyy back in November of 2006, I wrote about a bug in BizTalk 2006: This bug is encountered when you attempt to start a BizTalk 2006 application definition with orchestrations that have been bound to different hosts. (Say, OrchA in HostA, and OrchB...(read more)...

18 of 197 | BizTalk 2006: BizTalk Server Operations Guide is available live - If you make your living installing, deploying, managing and operating Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006. I guarantee that you will be excited and be thankful for the availability of the BizTalk Server Operations Guide. So, what's in it ?  Guidance based on real-world experience. The idea for the guide originated with Microsoft field representatives, partner organizations, and customers who plan, deploy, and maintain BizTalk Server installations. This group of IT professionals has accumulated extensive hands-on experience with a diverse range of BizTalk solutions. As they gained experience they created checklists, best practices, and presentations to guide future BizTalk Serv......

19 of 197 | BizTalk 2006: Business Activity Monitoring Portal Enabled But Not Configurable - Problem: If you are in the configuration screen of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 and you are configuring Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) Portal, you checked 'Enable BAM Portal" and you noticed that the Account and Windows Group options are still grayed out. Cause: I suspect that if you have configured BAM Portal once from any server in the BizTalk Server group, the user account fields are disabled on the rest of the servers even though Enable BAM Portal option is still available. Resolution: Reset BAMVRoot in the BAM config file: BAMConfig.xml and then run BM update-config Used bm.exe to get the BAM configuration XML: Open a command window Go to C:......

20 of 197 | Using BTAHL7 pipelines in multiple applications - A question was recently posted on the forums on how you can use the default pipelines in multiple applications. I actually was stumped when I started testing the beta of BizTalk 2006 also. The steps are pretty easy: In your new application, right click...(read more)...

21 of 197 | Finally, Templates and BizTalk 2006 - I have a certain aproach on how to solve common integration scenarios. It involves Process Services, Business Services, Receiving Interation services and Sending Integration Services. It's a clean way to set up an integration. Although it is a flexible way of setting up a project, it initially requires some extra work. I have looked at this excellent post from Charles Young. It looked so sweet, but I couldn't get it to work for BizTalk 2006. Then I had a very seriuous look at the BizTalk...(read more)...

22 of 197 | BizTalk Books - Some great BizTalk Books Foundations of BizTalk Server 2006 (Foundations)ISBN: 1590597753ISBN-13: 9781590597750 Pro EDI in BizTalk Server 2006 R2: Electronic Document Interchange Solutions (Pro)ISBN: 1590599357ISBN-13: 9781590599358 Pro BizTalk 2006 (Pro)ISBN: 1590596994ISBN-13: 9781590596999 Professional BizTalk Server 2006ISBN: 0470046422ISBN-13: 9780470046425 ...

23 of 197 | BizTalk 2006 Book Rating - Students frequently ask my opinion on which BizTalk Books will be most helpful. I have reviewed several books, and will recommend a few of them here. I haven’t really seen any terrible BizTalk 2006 books (and believe me, I have seen some terrible...(read more)...

24 of 197 | Importing ESB BAM definitions without Excel - I was working on a PC on which I wanted to install the BAM definitions that come with the ESB guidance for exception handling. So I browsed to the <installpath>\ESB Exception Handling Install\Install\BAM folder to execute "deploy_exception_tracking.cmd". Unfortunately I was unable to run it because it requires Excel to be present to process the Excel file containing the definitions and that wasn't installed on that machine. On the other hand I wasn't allowed to install Excel so I had to convert the XLS to XML which also can be used to import the definitions. On my external drive I found an VPC with Biztalk 2006 and Excel installed and used that to let Excel ge......

25 of 197 | Further BizTalk & MSDTC Issues - I encountered yet another MSDTC issue when talking to a remote SQL Server database following a BizTalk 2006 development environment upgrade from Windows Server 2003 Ent. Ed. to Service Pack 1. The usual ‘Mutual authentication required’ / ‘No...(read more)...

26 of 197 | Generating Microsoft Word Documents Natively using BizTalk 2006 - In this post I’ll discuss how to generate Word 2007 documents natively from BizTalk 2006 using the Office Open Xml System.IO.Packaging API recently released by the Microsoft Office Team under .Net 3.0. Background Unless you’ve lived under...(read more)...

27 of 197 | A loosely coupled Scatter-and-Gather implementation In BizTalk 2006 - Why loose coupling? There was a question in Microsoft BizTalk forums the other day about how one could implement a Scatter and Gather pattern in a more loosely coupled fashion. Most examples on the implementation of this pattern in BizTalk use the Call...(read more)...

28 of 197 | Posters (thanks to Team Individualism) - Windows Server 2008 Component Posters http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c2b9e44e-0bbd-47cb-bc09-b3d48be7f867&DisplayLang=en Exchange Server 2007 Component Architecture http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=FDCDF6E5-DE47-4B58-8086-282101BCDDE9&displaylang=en Windows Server 2008 and Active Directory http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c2b9e44e-0bbd-47cb-bc09-b3d48be7f867&displaylang=en (x2 posters) Windows Server 2003 Active Directory http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=E2D441B6-C0B6-4C96-BB0C-4F1C8F3FF807&displaylang=en Exchange 2007  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?F......

29 of 197 | December Area User Group Meetings - Here's the line up of topics at area Microsoft related user groups for December: New Jersey NJ MS Developers Group - Thursday, December 6th -  BizTalk 2006 - Brian Mallon, Microsoft   Northern NJ User Group (N3UG) – Tuesday, December 11th - WPF: The Beauty of the Beast - Josh Smith  Central NJ .NET User Group – Thursday, December 13th - WPF (check user group site for updates) NJ SQL Server User Group – Tuesday, December 18th – TBD (check user group site for updates) New York NY Enterprise Windows User Group –  Saturday, December 8th – Special Event: MVP Vista TechDay - Corey Hynes, HynesITe, Inc.  Long Island .NET User Group - Thursday, December 6th – Pair ......

30 of 197 | BizTalk 2006 Documenter MsBuild Task -   I have eventually got around to wiring up the BizTalk Documenter to our build process today. I did have an issue which is already logged on the codeplex site for the Documenter about problems when tracking is enabled on ports. I have worked around this problem by getting the source code for the documenter and building a local version of it with a fix until the next release where hopefully this will have been resolved. If you want more info about this please refer to:   http://www.codeplex.com/BizTalkDocumenter/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=2784   Anyway back to the main part. So I wanted to hook in the Documenter which you can do from the command line, but while I had been looking at......

31 of 197 | A pattern for Ordered Delivery using orchestrations - Ordered Delivery is a great feature of BizTalk 2006. The problem is however that as soon as one introduce a orchestration in the process it doesn’t work. The Ordered Delivery option on ports in BizTalk 2006 ensures two things today: Messages...(read more)...

32 of 197 | Handling of Record Tag Identifiers by BizTalk 2006 Flat File Schema Wizard - Those, who work with BizTalk 2006 Flat File Schema Wizard, probably noticed that record tag identifiers are handled differently for delimited and positional records. Let’s use a simple text file Person.txt for this example. After opening Flat File...(read more)...

33 of 197 | How to prepare for the BizTalk 2006 Exam. (70-235) - Well at first I started with the Testking exam. After completing the Real exam I can tell that it was a real waste of money. The questions were completely different and in the testking exams BAM is only touched where in the real exam there where quite some questions about BAM. Ok now ... how to prepare for this exam. Create a nice BizTalk solution Make sure you use party resolution in this solution Make sure you use correlation in it. Send a message to a webservice that require authentication. Use...(read more)...

34 of 197 | Yes, I'm a Biztalk 2006 Technical Specialist! - Yesterday I finally did the 70-235 exam, "Developing Business Process and Integration Solutions Using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006" and I passed it! Now I'm officially a MCTS for Biztalk Server 2006! :-) In the days before the exam I read some blogs from other people who did the exam and they are right about the content. About 50% of the questions are about the BRE and BAM, so if you're planning to take the exam make sure your knowledge is up-to-date about these two subjects. As always they ask some code related questions and I saw some new type of questions in which you have to select actions and put them in the&n......

35 of 197 | Je suis MCSD et MCTS BizTalk 2006! - J'ai obtenu hier ma certification MCSD.NET en passant l'examen 70-235. Ce dernier ajoute le titre de MCTS BizTalk 2006. Je compte faire un upgrade vers les versions 2.0 des certifications au courant de la prochaine année. Parlons un peu de l'examen BizTalk. Il est effectivement assez difficile compte tenu qu'il couvre presque la totalité des sujets BizTalk. Évidemment, les orchestrations, messaging, achitecture et BAM sont des sujets couverts par l'examen. Pour le BAM, je ne me considère pas du tout comme un spécialiste et j'ai réussi les questions. Je recommande le labo virtuel sur microsoft.com. C'est pour la version 2004, mais il n'y a pas eu tant de changements que cela dans la versio......

36 of 197 | Using Send Port Maps with Untyped Messages - I’ve spent the last few days working on a proof of concept for a generic (web-service) message bus application based on BizTalk 2006. The message bus is an orchestration exposed as a web service and accepts any message, consumes a remote web service...(read more)...

37 of 197 | SQL Server Compatibility Mode for BaseEDI and HIPAA accelerator - After we upgraded to BizTalk 2006 (along with the HIPAA accelerator 3.3) our DBAs complained that they could not include the BizTalkHIPAA_EDIDb into the backup plan because the compatibility mode is set to SQL Server 7 mode. By looking at it further,...(read more)...

38 of 197 | Error while using the UK SDC Documenter as a Post build event - We were contacted by Brent Anderson from RBA Consulting. He ran into some errors while using the UK SDC BizTalk 2006 Documenter as a post build event.Error initialising documentation publisherBrent found out that using the documenter in a post build event works fine, as long as you just use the /def[ault] parameter.When we tried to use the /o[utput] parameter (to set another output directory), we were confronted with an 'Error initialising documentation publisher'. We also tried other parameters, but that resulted in the same error.SolutionAfter some research we found out that when you want to use other parameters, than the /def[ault] parameter, you must supply the /p:chm parameter to make ......

39 of 197 | UK SDC BizTalk 2006 Documenter: '192' is not a valid value for Microsoft.Sdc.BizTalkOM.TrackingType - As stated by other BizTalk developers as well, I think the UK SDC BizTalk 2006 Documenter is a great tool! It creates a good looking .CHM file which documents your entire BizTalk installation.Unfortunately I found another error, or actually Brent Anderson did. He found out that when you have either or both Track Message Properties enabled on a Send port, the Documenter does not generate the documentation.fig. 1 – Send Port PropertiesThe Documenter shows the following popup:fig. 2 – Error popupUnder the hoods (with DebugView), the UK SDC Documenter gives more information:TraceErr : Microsoft.Sdc.BiztalkDocumenter.Documenter.GenerateDocumentation: System.InvalidOperationException:There was an......

40 of 197 | Consuming webservices from within BizTalk - BizTalk 2006 allows some really good interacting with webservices. If it is a simple webservice, we can very well consume it by adding a reference to it and then consuming it using the orchestrations. Here are some interesting scenarios that I encountered when dealing with webservices.   Can I consume the service? Although Biztalk offers fairly good support for consuming webservices, there are some considerations that might affect the way these interactions are developed.  For instance, the Add Web Reference feature in BizTalk does not understand the import element in the WSDL. Multi dimensional arrays are not supported from within BizTalk & so on.&nbs......

41 of 197 | Latest BizTalk 2006 Documentation, PDF vs CHM, which is better? -     Everybody these days seems to be pretty excited about the new PDF version of BizTalk 2006 documentation (Btw, a latest .CHM version is out as well, but there is no hoopla around that). So thought I'll  download the PDF version and check it out as I have been using only the .CHM version extensively. But I was not very impressed with what I saw. To start with, the PDF version is really huge file 114 MB (whereas the .CHM version is only 44MB, the contents are the same), there is no way my PDA mobile device will load that kind of thing even with external memory card. The links in the PDF version are not active (not clickable), so you cannot navigate through the docume......

42 of 197 | Latest BizTalk 2006 Documentation, PDF vs CHM, which is better? - Everybody these days seems to be pretty excited about the new PDF version of BizTalk 2006 documentation (Btw, a latest .CHM version is out as well, but there is no hoopla around that). So thought I'll download the PDF version and check it out as I have...(read more)...

43 of 197 | New version of BizTalk 2006 documentation PDF - Microsoft released a new version of the core documentation PDF. It comes as one self extracting zip from 55MB.Although this results in giant one PDF file from 117MB containing almost 20000 pages, I like the fact that it is only one PDF.Download the documentation here. ...

44 of 197 | New BizTalk Book Out - Big congrats to Darren Jefford for finishing Professional BizTalk 2006. Darren throws out a quick summary of each chapter here. Given how few books existed for those struggling to learn BizTalk Server 2004, it’s a welcome change to see so many top - of - the - line books available for BizTalk Server 2006. Technorati Tags: BizTalk ...

45 of 197 | Books on BizTalk Server 2006 - Here is a handy list of books available on BizTalk Server 2006. Note that some of them are not published as of this writing:1. BizTalk 2006 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach by Mark Beckner, Ben Goeltz, Brandon Gross, and Brennan O'Reilly (Paperback - Sep 13, 2006)2. Pro BizTalk 2006 (Pro) by George Dunphy and Ahmed Metwally (Paperback - Oct 23, 2006)3. Foundations of BizTalk Server 2006 (Foundations) by Daniel Woolston (Paperback - Jan 8, 2007)Not yet published4. Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 Unleashed by Stephen Mohr and Scott Woodgate (Paperback)5. Professional BizTalk Server 2006 by Darren Jefford and Kevin T. Smith (Paperback)-- RegardsBenny MathewSeamless Integration SolutionsBizTa......

46 of 197 | Building a Complete Certificate Scenario With BizTalk Server 2006 - I’m working on a BizTalk project where we’re testing the use of security certificates, and I’ve just had a bear of a time finding thorough walkthroughs of setting this up. It’s barely mentioned in the available BizTalk books, and while the BizTalk 2004 whitepaper (which has now been added to the BizTalk 2006 documentation) has some very nice coverage, it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. So, after much toil (and threats of lighting myself on fire), I present a step-by-step for building a certificate scenario using test certificates. I’ve used the .NET Framework tool makecert to build local test certificates. The hardest part for me was getting the correct series of command line parameters......

47 of 197 | Documentation tool for BizTalk 2006 - Although this tool is not new, I blog about it because it is a must-have for every BizTalk developer:The tool is called UK SDC BizTalk 2006 Documenter (you can download it here) and builds documentation of your BizTalk application(s). It uses reflection to find all information, therefore the BizTalk application(s) you want to document need(s) to be deployed.One cool feature is the ability to create JPG's for orchestrations....

48 of 197 | BIA meeting - 7 February - Last Wednesday the BIA group came together again. We welcomed a new member, David, to our team. David worked for years with Usoft and now he is joining our team because at his project they start a BizTalk trial in which he participates. Main goal of his work will be to migrate from a BizTalk 2002 environment to the new BizTalk 2006 Server.We discussed the possibility to become Microsoft ESB partner as we have an opportunity to use the ESB Guidance kit in a customer’s project. As a group we believe in the possibilities that the ESB Guidance package offers and we hope that we can join the 0.8 “beta” program.One of the things that will be possible with the ESB Guidance is to implement UDDI ins......

49 of 197 | BizTalk 2006 Recipes – A problem-solution approach - I would like to mention that there is a great book available about BizTalk 2006. It is called “BizTalk 2006 Recipes”, published by Apress and written by Mark Beckner, Ben Goeltz, Brandon Gross, Brennan O’Reilly, Stephen Roger, Mark Smith and Alexander West. (ISBN 1-59059-711-7)In the book you will find a comprehensive guidance on working through complex deployment challenges, including tested, reusable code snippets for use in production, enabling faster deployment and minimal post-implementation engineering support.I already did a quick read in the book during my BizTalk 70-235 study, the book gives a detailed step by step overview of solutions (with lots of images) on how to work with Bi......

50 of 197 | Biztalk Host Manager 2004 - Since Isaac is publishing post after post I thought it is time for me to also post something.I developed a useful tool, called the Biztalk Host Manager (BTSHostManager), which we use in our development team to be able to quickly stop, start and especially restart BTS host instances.Because all our developers found it a helpful tool we thought we would make it available for download.Some features:- It monitors background service state change of host instances (not by default, use options to enable) .- It works for Biztalk 2004 and 2006.- A seperate Biztalk 2006 version (compiled against 2.0 framework) will be available soon.- This is not the final release version. We are still testing it, so......