Softwaremaker - BizTalk

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 SP1 is now available !!!

William Tay — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:18:59 GMT

Via here: BizTalk Server 2006 R2 SP1 is now available !!!

These 2 factors are great improvements, or rather - fixes:

Better reliability, performance, and scale for the following key features

Throttling and dehydration of orchestrations.
Archiving and purging operations.
BAM alerts and archiving.
HIPAA.
Reduced memory consumption in scenarios using scripting functoids.
Improvement in the bts_FindSubscription stored proc, resulting in faster execution and lower CPU utilization.

Better management and deployment experiences

Performance and user experience improvements of key scenarios.
WCF configuration management.
Significant improvement in deployment time for send ports using a map.

While still some time away, I am very looking forward to BizTalk v.Next where there will be some very interesting innovations to push the low latency envelope (every bit of pun intended).

Does BizTalk Server WCF Custom Adapters support Identity Federation ?

William Tay — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:10:17 GMT

Q: Does BizTalk Server WCF Custom Adapters support Identity Federation ?

A: Yes, it does. The WCF adapter supports the ws2007FederationHttpBinding. BizTalk MVP Yossi Dahan blogs about it extensively here.

BizTalk 2006: BizTalk Server Operations Guide is available live

William Tay — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 22:25:50 GMT

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 Server operations. We collected and organized this information to create the guide.
Key portions of this guide are new; however, a considerable portion consists of documentation taken from BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Help, white papers, Knowledge Base articles, and other sources. It has been carefully reviewed and vetted by experts from the community of BizTalk Server IT professionals and members of the product development team, whom we gratefully acknowledge at the end of this topic. We believe that the information presented here will help BizTalk Server users solve, and above all, avoid many of the common problems that can occur while deploying and maintaining a BizTalk Server installation.

Enjoy.

The BizTalk Server Operations guide is now available for download in DOCX, CHM, and PDF file formats.

BizTalk 2006: Business Activity Monitoring Portal Enabled But Not Configurable

William Tay — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 23:07:47 GMT

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:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\Tracking
Type: bm.exe get-config -FileName:BAMConfig.xml

It specifies BAMVRoot so it appears someone configured BAMPortal before. Deleted this line:

<GlobalProperty Name="BAMVRoot">http://FOOBAR:80/BAM</GlobalProperty>

Saved the file and updated the BAM configuration:

Open a command window
Go to C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\Tracking
Type: bm.exe update-config -FileName:NewBAMConfig.xml

The options will no longer grayed out. You will probably get an error that the "BAMAppPool already exists". That is fine. Delete it, restarted IIS and it will be configured successfully.

As far as I can tell - this is not documentated very widely and this has helped me so I hope it helps someone out there as well.

Differences between the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Line-Of-Business (LOB) Adapter Pack and the BizTalk Adapter Framework

William Tay — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 14:04:07 GMT

With the impending release of the Microsoft BizTalk Server Adapter Pack (Beta 2 available here), there are some confusions as to the differences between the BizTalk Adapter Pack, Microsoft's WCF Line of Business (LOB) Adapter SDK, and of course, the (older) BizTalk Adapter Framework.

In a nutshell, the BizTalk Adapter Pack is written and developed on top of the WCF LOB Adapter SDK (which is free and freely downloadable). The value-add is that the LOBs that it can integrate with ootb are SAP (mySAP Business Suite), ORACLE (Oracle Database) and SIEBEL (Siebel eBusiness Applications). Of course, a lot of grunt work is taken away from you, as explained here.

One of the confusing part is the play of the words "BizTalk" in the product name. As I have explained above, built on the WCF LOB Adapter SDK, these adapters are host agnostic i.e. they are not tied to a specific product like BizTalk. You can use it with BizTalk 2006 R2 specifically (The WCF LOB adapters cannot be used in BizTalk Server versions prior to BizTalk Server 2006 R2) but you can use it outside of BizTalk as well (some configuration work required, such as the Add Adapter Reference plug-in, etc) but this also means you do not have to buy BizTalk for it, if you dont have to.

This SDK is based on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF, previously - Indigo), and it surfaces an adapter to an LOB system as a WCF binding. For an adapter consumer, the adapter can be accessed like a typical WCF service; the consumer does not have to learn a new programming model. The same adapter developed can be reused in multiple .NET applications including custom .NET applications, Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2006 R2, Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 SP1, and Microsoft SQL Server™ Integration Services (SSIS) through adapter development provided. In addition, the adapter provides metadata browse, search, and retrieval functionality for the adapter consumer to selectively generate WCF contracts that reflect live type modeling of the LOB system.

Confusions from customers and partners alike usually stem from the the primary differences between WCF LOB Adapter SDK and the BizTalk Adapter Framework. I will hereby summarized it in the following table:

Feature	WCF LOB Adapter SDK	BizTalk Server Adapter Framework
API	.NET 3.0 Assembly, provides help classes for metadata processing, connection management, and messaging	COM, provides basic support for adapter operations.
Adapter exposure	Exposed as WCF binding; available to any application that can consume a WCF binding including BizTalk Server 2006 R2 (using the WCF adapter)	Exposed only to BizTalk Server; not reusable by other applications.
Tools	Adapter Code Generation Wizard, metadata browser for Visual Studio 2005	n/a
Extensibility	Yes (as WCF channel extension)	No

If you are knee-deep into writing, shipping and selling adapters for BizTalk, I strongly urge you to visit the Adapters' Team Blog here.

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 and WCF Integration

William Tay — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 07:34:21 GMT

These are just some of the tabs that can be found if you expose a Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 process via a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF, previously - Indigo) Service.

The interesting part of the Messaging Tab of BizTalk 2006 R2 is that you are able to dictate the source of the inbound message body that you would like BizTalk to handle.

You can specify it to be the entire <soap:Envelope> or just the <soap:Body>, which essentially strips out the <soap:Header> element from the entire envelope. The flexibility comes in when you can dictate and customize the message content via an XPath expression that you would like BizTalk to process such as: /bookstore/book[0] ...

Will be mucking around with BizTalk more...

William Tay — Wed, 16 Feb 2005 00:01:52 GMT

I know this BizTalk tip will come in handy one day.