BizTalk Tips & Things

BizTalk 2013 cu 1 currently available

2013-04-11T13:12:00Z

Important new in this release of updates is that for the first time, the cu will be available through Microsoft Update.

Fixes that are part of this update

FIX: User cannot perform certain database-related operations in BizTalk Server 2013

FIX: BAM tools cannot be configured in a multi-node BizTalk Server 2013 environment

FIX: The vertical scroll bar on the target schema does not work correctly when you use Visual Studio to design a BizTalk Server 2013 map

To install it go to Windows Update in the server, check for updates and it will be listed as pending.

Hiding sensitive data in BizTalk 2013 tracking database

2013-04-11T11:22:00Z

You can secure the sensitive data ensuring
that it does not appear in corresponding schemas property window and therefore
becomes unavailable for tracking.

To do this, open the schema definition you want to secure and apply the isSensitive attribute
to any sensitive properties in a property schema, so that it is no longer
visible in the Message Property tracking configuration selections.

Cumulative update package 4 for BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Service Pack 1

2013-04-09T10:56:58Z

This cumulative update for Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) contains hotfixes for the Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 issues that were fixed after the release of BizTalk Server 2006 R2 SP1．http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2682056/en-us

Creating an standalone BizTalk Server 2013 Beta Windows Azure VM

2013-02-08T11:58:00Z

Prerequisites

Have a Windows azure account

Request Access to Virtual Machines Preview

Go to Windows Azure Management Portal https://manage.windowsazure.com/#Workspace/VirtualMachineExtension/vms

If you have requested Access to Virtial Machines Preview a screen like this onw should be shown:

Click in create Virtual Machine Name

Choose from Gallery

Select Microsoft BizTalkServer 2013 Beta

Virtual Machine Name

Enter the name of the virtual machine. Naming the virtual machine is similar to naming a physical computer. It’s best to be specific and name it for the intended purpose, like BTS2010R2Testy.

New User Name

Administrator: Creating the Administrator account.

New Password

Enter the Administrator password.

Confirm Password

Re-enter the Administrator password.

Size

Select Medium or higher. The minimum BizTalk Server 2013 memory requirement is 2 GB. Hardware and Software Requirements lists the requirements.

In VM Mode, enter the following:

Standalone virtual machine

Click Standalone virtual machine. A Standalone VM is not associated with any other Windows Azure service.

An Existing VM looks for existing services in your subscription. Existing VM is typically used for load balanced endpoints, like web services. The Existing VM option has no impact in BizTalk.

DNS Name

The DNS Name refers to your virtual machine over cloudapp.net. You can enter any name. For example, you can enter YourVMname.cloudapp.net or ProcessingServer.cloudapp.net.

Region/Affinity Group/Virtual Network

Optional.

A Virtual Network is your private network inside Windows Azure. If you use an IP range and subnets, a Virtual Network can be the appropriate choice. Go to Create a Virtual Network in Windows Azure to create a Virtual Network. A Network Administrator creates the Virtual Network. If a Virtual Network is not created, it is grayed out.

Important

If you plan to add this virtual machine to your domain, a Virtual Network is required.

An Affinity Group is a grouping in a single datacenter. All your Windows Azure services are associated with this grouping and are located in the same datacenter. An Affinity Group is created when creating a new Windows Azure service. Go to How to Create an Affinity Group in Windows Azure to create an Affinity Group. Create the Affinity Group before creating the BizTalk virtual machine.

In VM Options, you can enable Create availability set. When a virtual machine is part of an Availability Set, the virtual machine is deployed to different fault domains as other virtual machines in the set. Multiple virtual machines in an Availability Set ensure that your application is available during network failures, hardware failures, and any planned downtime.
To create an availability set, click Create availability set and enter a name.

The virtual machine is now listed in Virtual Machines with a Provisioning status. Provisioning can take several minutes to complete. When complete, the Status is updated to Running.

Once provisioned, you have a computer with the following software installed:

Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1)
BizTalk Server 2013
Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate (RC)
SQL Server 2012

Congratulations! you have created your FIRST BizTalk 2013 vm in Windows Azure!

Enjoy!

Windows Azure Virtual Labs!!!

2012-11-21T15:09:31Z

Test drive Windows Azure solutions in a virtual lab and see how you can quickly and easily develop applications running in the cloud by using your existing skills with the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment and the Microsoft .NET Framework. Virtual labs are simple, with no complex setup or installation required.

Azure CDN Demonstration

2012-11-08T08:40:54Z

http://haishicdn.cloudapp.net/

Interesting demonstration that shows the benefits of using CDN.

Two source images, The one on the left is using Windows Azure CDN to load the image and the other on the right with out it. As you choose a diferent position of the image, by clicking at the following,

the small image will change location. Once the image is loaded into CDN cache you will notice the picture to the left loads much faster this time, because the image is delivered directly from CDN instead of getting re-generated from the server in the cloud.

Thanks Haishi!

BizTalk 2013 Beta s Here!

2012-11-08T08:24:05Z

BizTalk Server 2013 Beta offers significant enhancements to the already rich integration capabilities by including the following feature additions:

• Integration with Cloud Services – BizTalk Server 2013 Beta includes new out-of-the box adapters to send and receive messages from Windows Azure Service Bus. It also provides capabilities to transfer messages using different relay endpoints hosted on Azure.
• RESTful services – BizTalk Server 2013 Beta provides adapters to invoke REST endpoints as well as expose BizTalk Server artifacts as a RESTful service.
• Enhanced SharePoint adapter – Integrating with SharePoint using BizTalk Server 2013 Beta is now as simple as integrating with a file share. We have removed the need for dependency on SharePoint farms, while still providing backward compatibility.
• SFTP adapter – BizTalk Server 2013 Beta enables sending and receiving messages from an SFTP server.
• ESB Toolkit integration – With BizTalk Server 2013 Beta, ESB Toolkit is now fully integrated with BizTalk Server. Also, the ESB Toolkit configuration experience is vastly simplified to enable a quick setup.
• Dependency tracking - The dependencies between artifacts can now be viewed and navigated in Admin console.
• Improvements in dynamic send ports – BizTalk Server 2013 Beta provides the ability to set host handler per adapter, instead of always using the default send handler of the adapters.

You can download the Beta from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35553

Cumulative update package 4 for BizTalk Server 2009

2011-11-21T12:33:45Z

Cumulative update 4 for BizTalk server 2009 currently available!

Check it out –> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/26043217

Extended Visual Basic Script to deal with BizTalk Suspended Messages

2011-11-14T13:07:00Z

Background of suspended messages.

BizTalk Server stores messages associated with suspended pipelines in the MessageBox database. If a failure occurs in the pipeline, BizTalk Server suspends the instance of a message. There are two types of suspended service instances:

Suspended instances that you can resume.
Suspended instances that you cannot resume. For example, if an instance is corrupt.

Depending on the cause of the suspension, you may be able to resume services that BizTalk Server suspends -- for example, if an orchestration hits a Suspend shape, or if a transport was unable to deliver a message, BizTalk Server does not automatically remove suspended instances that you cannot resume from the MessageBox database. You can choose to save a service instance to disk before removing it from the suspended queue.

Impact of Suspended Messages

Each suspended message is going to be stored into the suspended queue for that host (See Host queue tables post in this blog) This implies:

Spool table will have references for that messages
Each internal stored procedure that the BizTalk engine runs have to “filter” and execute even more records than usual which in a 100.000 execution will have a negative impact (even more in a low latency scenario in which the MaxReceiveInterval (BizTalk 2006) or Pooling Intervals (BizTalk 2010) settings are aggressively reduced)
Throttling due to message count in database threshold will be affected since suspended messages are included in the Message count in database calculation (because of the Spool size), throttling of message publishing can occur even if the BizTalk server is experiencing low or no load.

Why this script?

This script is intended to be as a tool to deal with BizTalk suspended messages, specially if the environment is suffering with massive suspended messages.

Important supportability information

This script may not be supported by Microsoft as is going to be coded by you, Microsoft has not tested it.

With this script you will be able to:

Terminate or resume a set of suspended messages that match:
- A suspended error code (mandatory)
- BizTalk host name (optional, if missing will terminate or resume all messages with that error code across the whole BizTalk group)
- if resume or terminate actions are selected, the script will save those messages before performing any actions (if required)
Save suspended messages to a folder location

In the code you can have a look at the usage section to learn how to use it.

Requirements:

The account running the script must:

Have vbs scripting execution rights
WMI rights
Membership to BizTalk Administrator group

How to execute it

Variables must be set within the code. No parameters
needed. The script must be executed in a cscript context:

Cscript NameOfTheScript.vbs

Demonstration:

In this example the tools is saving all suspended messages with error code 0xc0c01680. Since HostNameToCompare is empty, messages
across the whole group (all hosts) will be saved.

After the execution, the folder c:\SavedBizTalkMessages\new will look like:

*Note
the existence of two kinds of messages:

*.out contains the content of the message.
*.xml contains de context of the message.

Here is the code:

' THIS CODE AND INFORMATION ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY
' KIND, WHETHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE
' IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND/OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
' PURPOSE.
'--------------------------------------------------------------------------
'USAGE
'    Variable Assignements:
'    HostNameToCompare = "HostName"   'if empty, will delete all suspended messages with error code sErrorCode across the whole BizTalk Group.
'    sErrorCode = "0xC0C01B4e"        'this is the error code to use as filtering when terminating/resuming suspended message instances
'    intAction = 1                    'Will Terminate the message
'    intAction = 2                    'will Resume the message
'    intAction = 3                     'will JUST save the message WITHOUT terminate or resume it
'    SaveToFileFolder =               'if a folder is set, the process will try to save every message before performing an action. IF THERE IS AN ERROR WHILE SAVING THE MESSAGE IT WILL NOT BE RESUMED/TERMINATED
'    the Script will act as intAction with every message that matches HostNameToCompare and sErrorCode.
'    intDeleteAllExistingFiles        'IF 1, will delete all the files on SaveToFileFolder path before saving the messages.
'--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Option Explicit

TerminateSuspendedMessages

Sub TerminateSuspendedMessages()
    Dim HostNameToCompare
    Dim sQuery, intSet, Inst, HostName, intCounter, SaveToFileFolder , MessageSet, InstMessageSet, fso

    Dim intAction, sErrorCode, strInstanceFullPath, sCustomText, intProcessedMessageCount, intTotalMessageCount
    Dim ThereIsAnError
    Dim intDeleteAllExistingFiles

intDeleteAllExistingFiles = 0

'PROPERTIES------------------------------------------------------------
        HostNameToCompare = "BizTalkServerApplication"
        HostNameToCompare =""
        sErrorCode = "0xc0c01680"
        intAction = 3
        SaveToFileFolder = "C:\SavedBizTalkMessages\new"   '*** Never add the last "\" to the folder path, will fail
        ThereIsAnError = 0
        intTotalMessageCount = 0
        intDeleteAllExistingFiles = 1
    '----------------------------------------------------------------------
    On Error Resume Next

    wscript.echo "************ CURRENT SCRIPT PARAMETERS ************* "
    wscript.echo "    HostNameToCompare: " & HostNameToCompare
    wscript.echo "    sErrorCode:        " & sErrorCode
    wscript.echo "    intAction:         " & intAction
    wscript.echo "    SaveToFileFolder: " & SaveToFileFolder
    wscript.echo "**************************************************** "
    wscript.echo ""

    if sErrorCode ="" Then
        wscript.echo "The Variable sErrorCode must be set... exiting."
        quit 'this will raise an exception and will exit the script :-)

end if

    if intAction = 1 Then
        sCustomText = "Terminated"
    Else
        if intAction = 2 Then
            sCustomText = "Resumed"
        Else
            sCustomText = "Saved To Disk"
        end if
    End if

intProcessedMessageCount = 0

    sQuery = "select * from MSBTS_serviceinstance where ServiceStatus=4 and ErrorId ='" & sErrorCode & "'"
    Set intSet = GetObject("Winmgmts:!root\MicrosoftBizTalkServer").ExecQuery(sQuery)
    If Err <> 0 Then
        PrintWMIErrorthenExit Err.Description, Err.Number
    Else
        intTotalMessageCount = intSet.Count
        wscript.echo "Query succsesfully executed, " & intTotalMessageCount & " Suspended instances found with the current parameters."

If intTotalMessageCount > 0 Then

intCounter = 1

            if intDeleteAllExistingFiles   = 1 then 'if existing previous files must be deleted...
                Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
                fso.DeleteFile(SaveToFileFolder & "\*.*")
                set fso = nothing

end if

            For Each Inst In intSet

                HostName = Inst.HostName

                if HostNameToCompare ="" Then
                   'if HostNameToCompare is empty assuming all instances must be suspended/terminated, So we assing the var HostNameToCompare with Inst.HostName value. The next if will be processed all the times.
                    HostNameToCompare = Inst.HostName
                end if

wscript.echo "Attempting to operate with instance " & intCounter & "/" & intSet.Count & " on host " & HostName

                if HostToCompare = HostName Then

                    if SaveToFile <> "" Then

                        strInstanceFullPath = "select * from MSBTS_MessageInstance where ServiceInstanceID ='"    & Inst.InstanceId & "'"

                        'wscript.echo "full path " & strInstanceFullPath
                        Set MessageSet = GetObject("Winmgmts:!root\MicrosoftBizTalkServer").ExecQuery(strInstanceFullPath)

                      for each InstMessageSet in MessageSet
                          'Should have just 1 message plus the context, which means two physical files per message.
                            On Error Resume Next

InstMessageSet.SaveToFile SaveToFileFolder
ThereIsAnError = Err

End if

                    if ThereIsAnError = 0 then

                        On error resume next
                       'if intAction = 3, just saving action will done
                        if intAction = 1 Then
                            Inst.Terminate

                        Else
                            if intAction = 2 then
                                Inst.Resume
                           end if

                      End if

                        If Err <> 0 Then
                            PrintWMIErrorThenExit Err.Description , Err.Number
                        Else
                            wscript.echo "Message instance succsesfully " & sCustomText
                            intProcessedMessageCount = intProcessedMessageCount + 1
                        end if
                    else

                        wscript.echo "The Message has not been " & sCustomText & " due to an error saving the message."
                    end if
               End If
                intCounter = intCounter + 1
            Next
        Else
            wscript.echo "No Suspended instances found with error code: " & sErrorCode & "... Exiting"
        End If

        wscript.echo "The Script has " & sCustomText & " " & intProcessedMessageCount & " instance(s) of " & intTotalMessageCount
    end if

End Sub

Sub    PrintWMIErrorThenExit(strErrDesc, ErrNum)
   On Error Resume    Next
    Dim    WMIError : Set WMIError = CreateObject("WbemScripting.SwbemLastError")

    If ( TypeName(WMIError) = "Empty" ) Then
        wscript.echo strErrDesc & " (HRESULT: "    & Hex(ErrNum) & ")."
    Else
        wscript.echo WMIError.Description & "(HRESULT: " & Hex(ErrNum) & ")."
        Set WMIError = nothing
End    If

    'bail out
    wscript.quit 0
End Sub

Enjoy

Service Pack and Cumulative Update list for BizTalk Server

2011-10-27T11:48:59Z

“This article lists the version information of the service packs and the cumulative updates for Microsoft BizTalk Server and for Microsoft BizTalk Adapter Pack. We recommend that you to install the latest cumulative update for the version of BizTalk Server that you are using.”

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2555976