Andy's Blog on Biztalk and .NET

Microbenchmarking tool MeasureIt

andyshen — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:48:00 GMT

Pretty nice microbenchmarking tool for the CLR that I found out recently. The tool comes with full source code so you can add your own custom functions that you want to benchmark.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc507639.aspx

It's been a while ...

andyshen — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 22:48:00 GMT

It's been a long time since I've posted - a number of things have happened in the last two years.

We shipped the latest version of Biztalk - Biztalk Server 2009 so now our customers can use Biztalk with the latest Microsoft offerings - Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008.

I have also moved on to work on other projects, specifically tracking/monitoring related features in .NET 4.0 WF/WCF and Dublin (Microsoft's new app server offering).

Working on BAM in Biztalk has been a lot of fun. I want to give a shout out to Jesus Rodriguez who has written an excellent technical article on BAM (87 pages!). I'm six months late since the article was first published but if you are interested in learning about BAM in depth, please do take a look.

I do hope to keep updating this blog with whatever interesting tidbits I come across (no promises though).

Useful Links

andyshen — Wed, 23 May 2007 01:58:00 GMT

.NET Programming and Practices

.NET Performance

.NET related Tools

SQL Server 2005

Biztalk R2 Discussion Forum

andyshen — Tue, 08 May 2007 20:09:00 GMT

If you have any questions on the new BAM interceptors in R2 or on Biztalk R2 in general, you can post your questions on the MSDN forums:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/default.aspx?ForumGroupID=398&SiteID=1

Introduction to the BAM Interceptor for WF

andyshen — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 04:20:00 GMT

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Beta 2 is finally public!

You can download it from: http://connect.microsoft.com/

In this post, I will showcase an entire sample interceptor configuration file for the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) interceptor. In working with

the new BAM WF/WCF interceptors, the interceptor configuration file answers the following questions related to interception:

When to extract data from the application?
Where to extract data from the application?
What data to extract from the application?

In addition, the interceptor configuration file describes how to map the extracted data into what I am loosely calling “BAM events”:

BeginActivity(activityName, activityInstance) [BA]
UpdateActivity(activityName, activityInstance, params object[] data) [UA]
EndActivity(activityName, activityInstance) [EA]
EnableContinuation(activityName, activityInstance, continuationToken) [EC]
AddReference(activityName, activityID, referenceType, referenceName, referenceData, longReferenceData) [AR]

These BAM events (BA, UA, EA, EC, AR) are the methods invoked on the EventStream class for sending tracking data to the BAM infrastructure. If you are not familiar with BAM and EventStream, please refer to the following link on EventStream documentation:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/sdkmref_bts/html/T_Microsoft_BizTalk_Bam_EventObservation_EventStream.asp

Previous BAM instrumentation required making these method calls manually in your application code but now the BAM interceptors perform that functionality for you provided you create the appropriate interceptor configuration file.

At this point, I’m assuming that the reader is familiar with BAM concepts such as activities and continuations.

In the remainder of this post, I’m going to display a sample workflow application built using Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and a sample interceptor configuration file that extracts various data from the workflow and sends that data to BAM. In this post, I won’t explain the entire interceptor configuration in detail but instead try to provide an overview by showing you the interceptor configuration in its entirety.

Suppose I have the following workflow for a fulfillment process.

Now suppose I want to track various data in this workflow inside BAM. I might create the following interceptor configuration file. (Note: This is just a contrived example. Don’t worry about all the details of the interceptor configuration for now.)

<ic:InterceptorConfiguration xmlns:ic="http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalkServer/2004/10/BAM/InterceptorConfiguration" xmlns:wf="http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalkServer/2004/10/BAM/WorkflowInterceptorConfiguration">

<ic:EventSource Name="Workflow1" Technology="WF" Manifest="FulfillmentWorkflow.Workflow1, Fulfillment, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null"/>

<ic:BamActivity Name="FulfillmentActivity">

<ic:OnEvent Name="FulfillmentEvent" Source="Workflow1" IsBegin="true" IsEnd="true">

<ic:Filter>

<ic:Expression>

<wf:Operation Name="GetActivityName" />

<ic:Operation Name="Constant">

<ic:Argument>Fulfillment</ic:Argument>

</ic:Operation>

<ic:Operation Name="Equals" />

<wf:Operation Name="GetActivityEvent" />

<ic:Operation Name="Constant">

<ic:Argument>Closed</ic:Argument>

</ic:Operation>

<ic:Operation Name="Equals" />

<ic:Operation Name="And" />

</ic:Expression>

</ic:Filter>

<ic:CorrelationID>

<ic:Expression>

<wf:Operation Name="GetContextProperty">

<wf:Argument>InstanceId</wf:Argument>

</wf:Operation>

</ic:Expression>

</ic:CorrelationID>

<ic:Update DataItemName="City" Type="NVARCHAR">

<ic:Expression>

<wf:Operation Name="GetWorkflowProperty">

<wf:Argument>City</wf:Argument>

</wf:Operation>

</ic:Expression>

</ic:Update>

<ic:Update DataItemName="Amount" Type="FLOAT">

<ic:Expression>

<wf:Operation Name="GetWorkflowProperty">

<wf:Argument>Amount</wf:Argument>

</wf:Operation>

</ic:Expression>

</ic:Update>

</ic:OnEvent>

</ic:BamActivity>

</ic:InterceptorConfiguration>

Although I don’t want to go into detail on the entire interceptor configuration, I do want to highlight a few different portions starting from the top down.

First I have defined an EventSource called “Workflow1” that maps to my fulfillment workflow in my application using the .NET qualified assembly name in the Manifest attribute.

Next I have a BamActivity called “FufillmentActivity” with the checkpoints “City” and “Amount”. Whenever any of the interception events (OnEvent) are fired for the event source “Workflow1”, tracking data will be written to this BAM activity called “FufillmentActivity”. The exact way that the tracking data is written is described by the BAM events BA, EA, UA, EC, and AR.

BA – IsBegin attribute on the OnEvent
EA – IsEnd attribute on the OnEvent
UA – Update element inside the OnEvent
EC – ContinuationToken element inside the OnEvent
AR – Reference element inside the OnEvent
Note: CorrelationID element inside the OnEvent defines the activityInstance (must be unique)

The sample configuration above contains a single interception event – when the filter evaluates to true, the interception event is fired which cause the following steps:

New BAM activity instance for “FufillmentActivity” with activityInstance equal to the workflow instance ID
Update activity on checkpoint “City” with the tracking data from the workflow
Update activity on checkpoint “Amount” with the tracking data from the workflow
BAM activity instance is ended

For those who have worked with BAM before, these steps are exactly the same steps that would be performed during manual instrumentation of an application for BAM tracking.

The new BAM Manager [bm.exe] can be used to deploy the created interceptor configuration to the BAM PrimaryImport Database.

Example: bm.exe deploy-interceptor –FileName:Fulfillment_IC.xml

Now to add the WF interceptor to your workflow application, you can register the BAM Tracking Service through the application configuration (or programmatically through code as well). The following is a sample application configuration.

</configSections>

<add type="Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.Interceptors.Workflow.BamTrackingService, Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.Interceptors, Version=3.0.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"

ConnectionString="Data Source=localhost;Integrated Security=true;Initial Catalog=BAMPrimaryImport"

InterceptorConfigurationPollingInterval="300"

</Services>

</WorkflowServiceContainer>

</configuration>

Once the workflow application is restarted with the updated application configuration, tracking data is now available inside BAM!

Although I haven’t explained everything inside the interceptor configuration (like filter, expression, different operations, etc. ) and other security considerations, I hope that by seeing a sample interceptor configuration in its entirety, this post has given you more insight into how the BAM interceptors work.

Biztalk BAM Blogging Introduction

andyshen — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 20:53:00 GMT

Biztalk Server 2006 R2 (scheduled to ship in early 2007) will include a number of new features such as better EDI support, adapter framework and new WCF adapter, RFID capabilities, and BAM interceptors for WF/WCF. Over the next couple of posts, I will delve into more detail on the last of these features - the new BAM interceptors and how they can be used to provide real-time tracking capabilities to your existing WF/WCF applications through the BAM infrastructure.

For those of you new to Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), BAM provides real-time visibility into your business processes. Please refer to the following link for an introduction to BAM.

What is BAM?

Usually BAM is used with Biztalk Server to monitor orchestrations in real-time. A Biztalk user would use the Tracking Profile Editor (TPE) to map items in the orchestration to the BAM activity. Customers that want BAM tracking for their custom applications can also use the BAM APIs (EventStream class) to send tracking data to the BAM infrastructure. Please refer to the following link for EventStream documentation.

EventStream Class

For "BAM enabling" custom applications before, customers needed to do quite a bit of work since they need to write additional code to manually send tracking data to BAM. With the new BAM interceptors for WF/WCF introduced in Biztalk Server 2006 R2, customers who already have existing applications developed using the new WF/WCF technologies will be able to utilize the BAM interceptors to have BAM tracking for free! No additional coding is necesary!

In the next couple posts, I will go more into detail on how to actually use these interceptors so ... stay tuned. :)