Ahmed Farrag 's Biztalk Lounge

ESB Guidance v2.0 !

2009-03-08T09:15:00Z

If you have worked or had a look on ESB Guidance v1.0, you will truly appreciate the new enhancements that are in ESBG v2.0, from enhancements in the installation process, to having a visual Itinerary designer :) , and even support for more resolvers, and much much more ..

Even if you didn't see ESB v1.0 before, i believe now is the time to start having a look on the exciting capabilities offered by the guidance on top of Biztalk Server.

You can watch here the video from the SOA Conference about the new ESB 2.0 http://soaconference2009.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!FA6FC7F5DB1C07!136.entry

Cheers,

Ahmed

News for .NET 4.0 and Dublin !

2008-10-01T23:26:00Z

Toady, Steve Martin from our CSD (Connected System Division) Product Management Team announced on his blog that upcoming CTP release of .NET 4.0 and the amazing enhancements to WCF and WF, also introduced the Windows Server Application server Roadmap , which are set of enhanced server capabilities that would extend our IIS, these technologies are currently code Named "Dublin"...

for more information check the following resources :

Steve Martin's blog : http://blogs.msdn.com/stevemar/archive/2008/10/01/the-road-to-pdc-net-framework-4-0-and-dublin.aspx#comments

Landing Page for "Dublin" : http://www.microsoft.com/net/dublin.aspx

Product Details : http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/9/B/59B74A2A-245D-4304-802E-E0A0800FACD3/Dublin__NET_4_overview.docx

As you might start wondering already, how Dublin would work with our existing Biztalk Server ? , well, if you do need the rich LOB connectivity and B2B features, you will definitely still need Biztalk server for that, however, if you don't need all these rich capabilities you would be able deploy, host and manage middle-tier applications on Dublin, the link about to the product details document contains a Q&A Section that would answer most of our questions ....

Regards,

Ahmed Farrag

New Biztalk Virtual Labs

2008-06-19T01:27:00Z

if you are looking for a fastStart on the new features on Biztalk Server 2006 R2, i believe the New Virtual Labs are the best place to start

make sure you check them here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtuallabs/aa740373.aspx

Enjoy Biztalking :)

Regards,

Ahmed Farrag

Biztalk RFID Capacity Planning

2008-05-09T15:50:00Z

i got several requests from my customers on how to design Biztalk RFID solutions with regards sizing and capacity planning, actually we have a very nicely put document on MSDN that explains all the details about the throughput and latency requirements for your RFID Solution. so if you are in that situation where you are required to plan the capacity of a Biztalk RFID solution , make sure you check this document.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb870305.aspx

Cheers

Ahmed Farrag

Best Practices Analyzer v1.1 Shipped

2008-05-09T15:15:00Z

last month, we shipped the Best Practices Analysers ..

here are some more details about it if you didn't know it before !!

Overview

The BizTalk Server Best Practices Analyzer performs configuration-level verification by reading and reporting only. The Best Practices Analyzer gathers data from different information sources, such as Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) classes, SQL Server databases, and registry entries. The Best Practices Analyzer uses the data to evaluate the deployment configuration. The Best Practices Analyzer does not modify any system settings, and is not a self-tuning tool.

What’s new:

V1.0 has 77 rules, v1.1 has 220 with 143 new rules added!

Here are some relevant rules

1. Added a warning rule for stopped orchestrations

2. a check on MaxLogSize MSDTC

3. Verify that TempDB and BizTalkMsgBoxDb data and log files are placed on separate drives

4. Check that the Max Degree of Parallelism setting is set to 0 in all other BizTalk databases

5. Verify that the MaxWorkerThreads in the SQL Server UMS configuration setting is set to XXX

6. Check that the Maximum Server Memory is set to XXX GB

7. System Time Diff between SQL and BizTalk Machines

8. Orphaned SPIDs

9. SQL Server Service Pack Installed for DB : xxxxxx

10. Ignore Duplicate Key check

11. Check Biztalk SQL Server JObs running or not

Where to Download:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DDA047E3-408E-48BA-83F9-F397226CD6D4&displaylang=en

- Ahmed Farrag

Biztalk RFID - Part 1

2008-05-05T22:55:00Z

well, let's start exploring the world of RFID support inside Biztalk Server. if you are new to the RFID technologies , there are few stuff that you need to know before you enter this world, first of all, RFID stands for "Radio Frequency Identification" (i recommend reading this article on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Frequency_Identification.) to put it in simple words, there are reader and there are the tags that pass through the readers, tags could be active, passive and semi-passive tags, the main difference is in the range of each tag and whether the tag has a power source or not. Passive tags have no power source and they have a relatively short range, they get activated by the actual radio waves when they hit the tag and that interruption of the radio wave is received back by the reader along with the data <<byte stream>> stored on the tag. definitely there is a lot more details in that !! however, we will keep it as simple as this is this stage.

so, Why Biztalk RFID ? what did people usually do before Biztalk RFID ? ,, well, typically each hardware provider has it's own drivers and hence it's own APIs to communicate with it's readers, so a developer would need to write custom code that reads/writes to the tags through the reader. so what happens if the solution uses different types of Readers ? you will have to write different pieces of code for each type of reader; the other solution is to write a custom middleware solution that can read from different readers. That's exactly where Biztalk RFID fits ! , it gives you this Abstraction layer that hides the specifics of the different hardware devices and along with the flexibility of coding against a single platform. currently we support all the major hardware providers, more hardware partners are added as we grow.

so, i guess the next question will be, why have these RFID capabilities inside Microsoft Biztalk Server ? why not a separate product that does that ? , i'll try to give my own opinions on that.

Reading Tags are in most of the cases part of a larger Business Process Management Solution (Inventory Management, Asset Tracking, Human Tracking , etc. ) accordingly , it makes perfect sense to have this feature as part of Microsoft's BPM Server (which is BizTalk)
In Enterprise Solutions you would probably need to take these tag reads and send them to an ERP Solution or enrich the tag information with other data coming from existing LOB applications. so, coupling this with BizTalk lets you leverage all the enterprise connectivity capabilities found inside Biztalk.
In environments with high volumes of tag Reads; performance in terms of latency & Throughput could be an issue, i have seen requirements that need sub millisecond responses where tag reads are used to open security gates !!!, having a enterprise class scalable middleware is definitely a must.

i guess we have now covered the What ? and the Why ?, in the next article we will start exploring the "How" and drill deeper in the architecture of the product.. don't worry no Biztalk knowledge is required at this stage :)

Cheers

Ahmed Farrag

Addiontioanl Resources

www.microsoft.com/rfid

Biztalk Operational Guide Released !!

2008-05-04T23:53:00Z

i'm very excited about this new operational guide that was released a couple of weeks ago, it's really a must read for any Biztalk developer/administrator, it covers all the topics related to deployment, management and monitoring aspects of any Biztalk implemenation.

i have seen many customers who have deployed Biztalk but for some reason has missed on having a concrete strategy for the versioning/management and monitoring parts of the solution. the operational guide sheds the light over a lot of these issues that need to be tackled on any production environment.

The guide can be downloaded from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5251f103-329d-4f8d-95b5-64f99f2f6dfc&DisplayLang=en.

Cheers
Ahmed

New Blog

2008-04-27T23:01:00Z

i have just created this new blog, i'll try to share here my day to day experiences dealing with Biztalk solution in general, i'm mostly focused these days on RFID & SOA Solutions so if you are interested in the Biztalk RFID offereing stay tuned for more interesting stuff to come

cheers :)

Ahmed