BizTalk Server Team Blog

BizTalk Server 2010 R2

BizTalk Blog — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 09:45:00 GMT

BizTalk Server is Microsoft's integration and connectivity server and is one of the most deployed integration servers in the industry. BizTalk Server 2010 was released just over a year ago. Today we are happy to share details on what customers can expect from the next release: BizTalk Server 2010 R2.

BizTalk Server 2010 R2 will focus on three primary themes:

Platform Support – Supporting new and current server and development platforms
Improved B2B – Aligning with industry standards and continuing to invest in performance improvements
Ready for the Cloud – Enabling customers to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing

BizTalk Server 2010 R2 will be delivered approximately 6 months following the release of Windows Server 8. Release timing for Windows Server 8 is yet to be announced and will be disclosed by the Windows Server team in the future.

In addition to the investments we are making in BizTalk Server 2010 R2, we will continue the tradition of providing regular cumulative updates on a quarterly basis. These include updates to comply with Line-Of-Business (LOB) systems, schema changes, accelerator certifications, and bug fixes.

We believe that with this release we continue to deliver a mature, reliable and stable integration server that honors the trust of the thousands of customers who run their mission critical business processes on BizTalk Server.

Below is the detailed view of the features we are releasing:

Platform Support

Improved B2B

Ready for the Cloud

New Platforms and Infrastructure

Windows Server 8*
SQL Server 2012*

Increased Developer and IT Productivity

Visual Studio 11* and Windows 8* to develop solutions
In-place migration from BizTalk Server 2010

Extended Platform Integration

DB2 client connectivity to SQL Server,
conversion of commands to T-SQL,
migration of packages to stored procedures
Adapter connectivity to new data sources, including IBM Informix V11 and IBM IMS/DB V11

Agile Alignment to Industry Standards

Regular updates to schemas, accelerators certifications and adapters. Highlights include:
Healthcare: HIPAA 5010 extensions: 2777CA, 999, HL7 2.5.1
Finance: SWIFT SRG 2011 support, SWIFT SRG 2012, SWIFTNet 7.0 (new messaging platform)

Improved Performance and Scalability

HL7 MLLP adapter performance improvements
Better performance with ordered send ports
Enhanced scale out configuration with multiple hosts
Expanded adapter options for faster batch processing

Extend on-premises solutions to the cloud

Easily extend your on-premises BizTalk Server solution to the cloud in a secure manner
Tighter integration of on-premises BizTalk Server applications with Windows Azure Service Bus

Improved Licensing

Adjustments to licensing that are geared towards cloud hosting, including:
Purchase from a hoster on a monthly basis (SPLA)
Register your existing license with a hoster (License Mobility)

* Release dates for these products have not been disclosed yet

For additional details on BizTalk Server and purchasing options please contact your local Microsoft Account Manager or visit our website.

The BizTalk Server Team.

HIPAA 5010 Errata support now available for BizTalk Server 2009

BizTalk Blog — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 06:24:00 GMT

BizTalk Server team is excited to announce the availability of updated schemas and runtime to support HIPAA 5010 Errata in BizTalk Server 2009. The update is available as part of BizTalk Server 2009 Cumulative Update 2 (CU2) package.

The following 6 transactions are available in the update:

Transactions affected by the 5010 Errata	Base Version ST03/GS08	Errata Version ST03/GS08
270, 271 Health Care Eligibility Benefit Inquiry and Response	005010X279	005010X279A1
834 Benefit Enrollment and Maintenance	005010X220	005010X220A1
835 Health Care Claim Payment/Advice	005010X221	005010X221A1
837 Health Care Claim: Professional	005010X222	005010X222A1
837 Health Care Claim: Institutional	005010X223	005010X223A2
837 Health Care Claim: Dental	005010X224	005010X224A2

The CU2 download is available from the support location here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2497794.

Note:

For HIPAA 5010, run the MicrosoftEdiXSDTemplatesKb973415.exe file in the hotfix package to self-extract the latest set of HIPAA 5010 compliant schemas. Save them to the following suggested directory: <Drive:>\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009\XSD_Schema\EDI. The HIPAA 5010 support can also be downloaded from here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/973415
For HIPAA 5010 Errata, run MicrosoftEdiXSDTemplatesKb2510733.exe file in the hotfix package to self-extract the latest set of HIPAA 5010 Errata compliant schemas. Save them to the following suggested directory: <Drive:>\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009\XSD_Schema\EDI

Customers are encouraged to try the update and provide feedback.

Reference:

HIPAA 5010 Technical Reports Type 3 (TR3), commonly known as Implementation Guides, are available from the Washington Publishing Company http://www.wpc-edi.com/content/view/817/1

-Karthik Bharathy

Pipeline component for enabling legacy behavior in WCF-SAP adapter.

BizTalk Blog — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 12:07:00 GMT

Some of customers who have migrated for the old Sap Adapter (BizTalk Adapter 2.0 for mySAP Business Suite) to WCF-SAP adapter (comes with BizTalk Adapter Pack), have come back saying that there are some differences in behavior of the old SAP adapter and WCF-SAP adapter, which can break their scenarios.

Following differences are the most talked about -

The old version of the adapter accepted RFC messages with date field empty. In the new version, the same call results in an error. This is because WCF-SAP adapter doesn't allow blank XML nodes.
Unlike the old version, the new version does not accept ',' (comma) as decimal separator for fields of type DECIMAL. It mandates that '.'(Period) should be used as decimal separator.
WCF-SAP adapter doesn't return back tables exposed as CHANGING parameter, if the corresponding request message doesn't contain the table. You can refer to the post - "When I Execute BAPIs, I don't get back any data". Help!" for the details.

All these three behaviors are correct from a design perspective , justification follows -

Any XML node, if present should confirm to the data-type restrictions, or should have xsi:nil="true".
w3.org XML specification mandates a period(.) should be used as decimal separator.
This is an optimization in the WCF-SAP adapter to decrease the data transfer over-head.

-----
That said, many customers who are migrating from the Old SAP adapter do face these issues.
I have written a custom pipeline component that can help resolve these three issues.
The pipeline has three configuration properties, which can be used to tailor the behavior as per requirements -

Issue	Property Name	Description	Default Value
WCF-SAP adapter doesn't allow blank XML nodes, if the min-length is more than zero. (fields like DateTime )	RemoveEmptyDataNodesInRequest (bool)	When true, all empty leaf level node will be removed from the request message.	false
WCF-SAP adapter doesn't allow ',' as decimal separator	CultureInfoForDecimal (string) Eg: en-US, es-ES	Culture code for the CultureInfo to use for parsing decimal fields. When a valid culture code is specified, it will use the given Culture Info for parsing the xs:decimal, xs:float , xs:double fields and convert it to culture-invariant string representation(expected by the WCF-SAP adapter ). Vice-versa for response.	null
WCF-SAP adapter doesn't return back tables exposed as CHANGING parameter, if the corresponding request message doesn't contain the table. On the other hand, it returns a blank table node even if there is no data in the table, if the table is present in request message.	FetchAllTables (bool)	When true, will add empty nodes for all tables which don’t exist in request message. It will also remove empty table nodes from response message to get a response similar to the old adapter.	false

The outcome -

RemoveEmptyDataNodesInRequest (true) - You don't need to worry about removing empty XML tags from the input message, for fields like DateTime.
CultureInfoForDecimal(es-ES) - If the incoming message is using ','(comma) as decimal separator, the message will be sent to the WCF-SAP adapter successfully. Also, in the response message, you will have ','(comma) as decimal separator.
FetchAllTables(true) - When this property is set to true, all the tables will be fetched in the response message, irrespective of whether a corresponding node is present in the request message.

How to set the properties on the pipeline component -

While building the pipeline from this pipeline component (inside the pipeline editor in Visual Studio ), you can specify any valid culture-code , for CultureInfoForDecimal. This will become the default value for the pipeline.
Eg- You can use 'en-US' if you want '.' as decimal separator.
'es-ES' if you want ',' as decimal separator.
Whenever you use the pipeline for any port (send/receive), the value you gave in step 1 will show as the default value.
You can customize the value for a specific send port by opening the pipeline properties and specifying the desired value there.

Same applies for the other two properties.

Steps for using the pipeline component-

Build the project, or use the pre-built SapBackCompatPipelineComponent.dll.
Drop it here: <BizTalk Server installation folder>\Pipeline Components
Create a new BizTalk project in Visual Studio.
Pipeline Designer inside Visual Studio: toolbox -> choose items -> BizTalkPipeline components -> select your component -> ok.
Drop your pipeline component in encode stage. Set the default values for pipeline properties.
Build and deploy the BizTalk project.
On the WCF-SAP send port select your pipeline.
If you click the ellipses (...) button next to the pipelines selection drop-down, you will see a window where you can edit the properties for the specific instance of the pipeline.

Note:

You don't need to GAC any of the dlls.
It's recommended that you use this pipeline component in conjunction with "XML Disassembler " pipeline component, because of the following reasons -
a> For this pipeline to behave correctly the instance xml should validate against the schema.
(It doesn't log any error if validation fails.).
b> This pipeline component doesn't populate the MessageType context property
(So, subscription evaluation based on messageType will fail)
If you use "XML Disassembler " pipeline component along with this pipeline component, then you won't face these issues.
If you are using the pipeline component for making the old adapter installation work with the WCF-SAP adapter and are facing problems (1) and (2) mentioned in this blog, you can drop this pipeline component in a stage after that component in the pipeline designer.
However, you will need to generate the schemas for the new adapter, as this pipeline expects the new schemas to be present.

The source-code of the component is atttached, so you can modify the code(if need be) to tailor it to your requirements.

Rohit Singh

Handling of authentication for LOB Activities - Part III

BizTalk Blog — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 04:26:00 GMT

In the blog posts 1 & 2, we went over how a Workflow application can pass credentials to the LOB activities. While the mechanisms suggested work when the credentials originate from the application in question, a different approach is required when the credentials originate somewhere else. Consider a WCF service that’s implemented as a Workflow and uses the LOB activities to interact with the backend LOBs. The client of this service passes the credentials to the service which then needs to relay them to the LOB activities. In this post, we will go over one approach to handle this scenario. We will limit the scenario to the credentials being flown as Username/Password.

The approach makes use of the extensibility provided by WCF to hook in a custom SecurityTokenAuthenticator. The authenticator will extract the username/password and stuff it into the OperationContext. It does so by adding a claim-set in an authorization policy. Subsequently a custom ClientCredentials endpoint behavior will be used to extract it from the OperationContext and populate the UserName that will then be used by the underlying WCF LOB adapter to authenticate with the LOB.

Here’s a more detailed explanation of the approach. Please note that the main intention of the attached code is to illustrate the approach and the emphasis is not on making the code efficient/robust.

Extracting the username/password and associating it with the OperationContext

A custom ServiceCredentials service behavior (MyServiceCredentials in the attached code) is added
The above service behavior will create a SecurityTokenManager (MySecurityTokenManager in the attached code)
The above security token manager will create a SecurityTokenAuthenticator (MySecurityTokenAuthenticator in the attached code)
When the security token authenticator is called to validate the username/password, it will
- Create a custom claim that contains the username/password
- Create a claim-set containing the above claim
- Create an authorization policy containing the above claim set
- Return a list containing the above policy

Extracting the username/password from the OperationContext and populating ClientCredentials.UserName

A custom ClientCredentials endpoint behavior (MyClientCredentials in the attached code) is added to the endpoint used by the LOB activity
When the above behavior gets instantiated, it will Look up the authorization context from the current OperationContext’s ServiceSecurityContext
- Walk the list of claim-sets associated looking for the custom claim
- When found, it will extract the username/password from that claim and populate the UserName property

Sandeep Prabhu

Changing the game: BizTalk Server 2010 and the Road Ahead

BizTalk Blog — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 17:00:24 GMT

What’s next for BizTalk? As excited as we are about the recent announcement that we shipped BizTalk Server 2010 (see blog post), we know that customers depend upon us to give them visibility into the longer-term roadmap; given the lifespan of their enterprise systems, making an investment in BizTalk Server represents a significant bet and commitment on the Microsoft platform. While we are currently working thru product planning on BizTalk VNext, we wanted to share some of the early direction to date.

At PDC’09 last year, we discussed at a high-level our strategy for BizTalk betting deeply on AppFabric architecturally so that we can benefit from the application platform-level investments we are making both across on-premises and in the cloud. This strategy has not changed, and in fact we are accelerating some of our investments; we started this journey even in BizTalk Server 2010 with built-in integration with Windows Server AppFabric for maps and LOB connectivity (a feature called AppFabric Connect).
At PDC’10 this week we released-to-web a new innovative BizTalk capability which will allow you to bridge your existing BizTalk Server investments (services, orchestrations) with the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus – this new set of simplified tooling will help accelerate hybrid on/off premises composite application scenarios which we believe are critical to enable our customers to start taking advantage of the benefits of cloud computing (see blog post on this capability).
Also this week, we disclosed an early peek into our strategy of “Integration as a Service” which begins to shed light on how we will be taking the integration workload to the cloud. This is a transition we have already made with Windows Server and SQL Server (as we have released Azure flavors of these server products); and we are committed to following this same path with integration. Link to recorded Integration session.

Our plans to deliver a true Integration service – a multi-tenant, highly scalable cloud service built on AppFabric and running on Windows Azure – will be an important and game changing step for BizTalk Server, giving customers a way to consume integration easily without having to deploy extensive infrastructure and systems integration. Due to the agile delivery model afforded by cloud services, we are able to bring early CTPs of this out to customers much more rapidly than traditional server software. We intend to offer a preview release of this Azure-based integration service during CY11, and will update on a regular cadence of roughly 6 month update cycles (similar to how Windows Azure and SQL Azure deliver updates). This will give us the opportunity to rapidly respond to customer feedback and incorporate changes quickly.

However, regardless of the innovative investments we are making in the cloud, we know our BizTalk customers will want to know that these advantages can be applied on-premises (either for existing or new applications). We are committed to delivering this new “Integration as a Service” capability on-premises on AppFabric server-based architecture. This will be available in the 2 year cadence that is consistent with previous major releases of BizTalk Server and other Microsoft enterprise server products.

Additionally, knowing well that our existing 10,000+ customers will move to a new version only at their own pace and on their own terms, we are committed to not breaking our customers’ existing applications by providing side-by-side support for the current BizTalk Server 2010 architecture. We will also continue to provide enhanced integration between BizTalk and AppFabric to enable them to compose well together as part of an end-to-end solution. This will preserve the investments you have made in building on BizTalk Server and enable easy extension into AppFabric (as we have delivered today with pre-built integration with both Windows Server AppFabric and Windows Azure AppFabric).

Another critical element is providing guidance to our customers on how best to deploy BizTalk and AppFabric together, in order to best prepare for the future. At PDC this week we delivered the first CTP of the Patterns and Practices Composite Application Guidance which provides practices and guidance for using BizTalk Server 2010, Windows Server AppFabric and Windows Azure AppFabric together as part of an overall composite application solution. We will also be delivering soon a companion offering from Microsoft Services which will provide the right expertise and strategic consulting on architecture and implementation for BizTalk Server and AppFabric. We will work closely with our Virtual-TS community & Partners to extend similar offerings. We will continue to update both the Composite Application Guidance and consulting offering as we release our next generation integration offerings, to help guide our customers as they move to newer versions of our products and take advantage of our next-generation integration platform built natively on AppFabric architecture.

We are excited to share these plans for the first time and prove our commitment to continue to innovate in the integration space. As BizTalk Server takes a bold step forward in its journey to harness the benefits of a new middleware platform, which will provide cloud and on-premises symmetry, we will make it a lot easier for our customers to build applications targeting cloud and hybrid scenarios. We look forward to delivering the first CTP of integration as a service to market next year!

Balasubramanian Sriram, General Manager, BizTalk Server & Integration

Burley Kawasaki, Director, Product Management

BizTalk Server 2010 AppFabric Connect for Services

BizTalk Blog — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 08:46:39 GMT

One of the key requirements in development of cloud based applications is to be able to leverage existing on-premise assets by exposing them as web services. However, since most of the organizations are firewall protected, the on-premise web services are typically not accessible to external clients running outside the organization’s firewall, unless these web services are explicitly hosted in DMZ. More often than not, hosting services in the DMZ is a cumbersome process. Azure AppFabric Service Bus provides the capability to extend the reach of on-premise web services to external clients (without having to host them in the DMZ) in a secure way. This blog describes how BizTalk Server 2010 and Azure AppFabric can come together to help enterprises build hybrid cloud based applications.

Feature Overview
The new ‘BizTalk Server 2010 AppFabric Connect for Services’ feature brings together the capabilities of BizTalk Server and Windows Azure AppFabric thereby enabling enterprises to extend the reach of their on-premise Line of Business (LOB) systems and BizTalk applications to cloud. This is a new BizTalk Server 2010 feature and can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=f7735a19-cdb3-4f52-8e7b-c58f04c5c86a
Business scenario
With the advent of cloud platforms and people building cloud based applications, it is still true that a lot of data for these applications resides in on-premise LOB systems. More often than not, these applications would also want to leverage existing on-premise applications. To build such hybrid applications with components residing on-premise as well as on cloud, a secure mechanism to connect an enterprise’s on-premise assets with those on cloud is the need of the hour. While this is true for any applications, it is even more true for integration applications. The following fictional scenario illustrates this better:

Woodgrove bank wants to build an online banking portal where its customers can view their bank or stock related information, and trade their stocks. The data needed for this portal resides in on-premise LOB systems. The stock trading functionality is implemented using a BizTalk Server Orchestration. The bank has also designed an ASP.Net based web portal and hosted it in Windows Azure. To enable communication between the cloud based web portal and the on-premise assets, the bank exposes the on- premise LOB data and the BizTalk solution as WCF services with endpoints in Azure AppFabric Service Bus.
Security considerations when exposing on-premise assets on cloud:

Security is an important requirement when exposing on-premise assets on cloud. Azure AppFabric Service Bus endpoints can be secured using Azure AppFabric ACS. A more detailed description of how to secure Service Bus endpoints is here. On top of this, the regular WCF security features such as transport level and message level security can be used to secure end-to-end communication between the client and the service.
How to use this feature:

This section provides a quick walkthrough of how to expose your on-premise BizTalk Orchestrations and LOB data as a WCF Service on cloud. A more detailed tutorial can be accessed from here.
- BizTalk Orchestrations:
  1. Run BizTalk WCF Service Publishing Wizard
  2. Choose BizTalk Orchestration(s) to publish
  3. Extend the reach of the BizTalk Orchestration(s) to cloud
  4. Configure Service Bus endpoints
- LOB systems:
  1. Run BizTalk WCF Adapter Service Development Wizard
  2. Choose the LOB artifact(s) to publish
  3. Extend the reach of the LOB artifact(s) to cloud
  4. Configure Service Bus endpoints
Summary

As you saw from the above scenario, AppFabric Connect feature provides tooling enhancements, which help you connect your on-premise artifacts with those on the Cloud using the AppFabric Service Bus. This will help in accelerating and building your applications on Windows Azure platform. This feature is available for download from download center (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=204701) for BizTalk Server 2010 customers. For any feedback or queries, leave a post on this blog or mail at: harsh@microsoft.com.

Harsh Shrimal
Program Manager, BizTalk Server Team

BizTalk Server 2010 released for manufacturing!!!

BizTalk Blog — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 06:13:00 GMT

BizTalk Server 2010 has been released to manufacturing and will be available for purchase starting October 1^st, 2010. The evaluation and free Developer editions are now available for download from the BizTalk Server website.

BizTalk Server 2010 is the seventh major release of Microsoft enterprise integration product for connecting systems within and across enterprises. BizTalk Server 2010 has 4 major themes – to help customers to:

· Integrate Enterprise Applications Easily

· Manage and Tune Solutions easily

· Enhance Enterprise Interoperability

Let us look at each of themes in detail.

Theme: Integrate Enterprise Applications Easily

BizTalk Server 2010 helps developers put together applications that integrate various heterogeneous systems in an enterprise easily. There are a number of new features and enhancements to the existing features that enable this easy integration.

Seamless access and mapping to Line-of-Business applications for new users and new scenarios

BizTalk Server 2010 includes out of box activities to connect and map data for AppFabric (.NET) developers. With these activities customers can now connect to LOB systems very easily and also use the award winning BizTalk Mapper and the mapping functionality within AppFabric.

With this feature BizTalk Server 2010 now enables:

· Out of box Line of Business Connectivity

· Includes message data transformation

· Delivered as WF 4.0 activities

· Utilize existing BizTalk engine and tools

· BizTalk LoB Adapters (SAP, Oracle, Siebel, Oracle DB, SQL Server)

· Transformation Engine and Mapper

· Provide LoB connectivity for scenarios that need better performance rather than reliability and control (e.g. Web)

· Enables customers to develop solutions that need higher performance without the durability and reliability constraints.

More posts with detailed information on LOB access and mapper activities in AppFabric are here, here, here, and here.

Better design experience of data transformation (maps)

The Mapper in BizTalk Server 2010 has been redesigned and enhanced to work easily with complex maps.

A few highlights of the new Mapper are:

· Reduce background “noise” using highlight propagation to show only the nodes that are relevant to the user

· Auto-scrolling and coalescing of sibling nodes to help locate the nodes of interest easily

· Search functionality to find the nodes of interest easily especially in large and complex maps

· Improve productivity with Cut/Copy/Paste/Move/Undo functionality

· Predictive match that help create maps faster

More details on the new Mapper are available here.

Built-in components for rapid development of RFID solutions

BizTalk Server 2010 helps developers build RFID solutions faster by providing out of box event handlers for duplicate elimination, TDT based filtering and dwell filtering. It also provides out of box mechanism for .NET apps to subscribe to RFID events, post events to BizTalk Server and also post EPCIS events to a Capture Service.

Theme: Manage and Tune Solutions easily

BizTalk Server 2010 helps IT Pros to easily tune their systems for performance and also manage their systems easily. With the below features in BizTalk Server 2010, it is easier and faster to just get things done.

· Easier to setup and update and migrate

· Efficient performance and tuning and setting of run-time parameters with finer setting granularity and more intuitive and accessible settings

· Better visibility and control of production environment with a new System Center Operations Management Pack

· Enhanced security with Transparent Message Data Encryption

· Compression option to speed up backup tasks

Let us look at the enhancements to settings and SCOM pack in details.

Settings Dashboard:

All the settings related to performance tuning are now consolidated in a single dashboard which is accessible from the Management Console. This settings dashboard provides:

· Dashboard view for all performance related settings consolidated in a single place

· Granular setting level options: group, host and host instance

· For example – MaxReceiveInterval which is used to tune BizTalk solutions for high performance is now available at the host level. It is also split into separate settings - MessagePollingInterval and OrchestrationPollingInterval

· Uniform access to settings through APIs

· Ability to replicate settings between deployments using scriptable Export/Import operations

System Center Operations Manager Pack:

The SCOM pack has been redesigned and remodeled to help IT Professionals to easily monitor BizTalk installations and diagnose any problems. This is enabled with the enhancements below:

· New model with separate application and deployment views

· New alerts and diagnostics

· Single representation of artifacts in a multi machine deployment

Upgrade Support:

The last two versions of BizTalk Server – BizTalk Server 2006 R2 and BizTalk Server 2009 can be upgraded to BizTalk Server 2010 seamlessly in-place.

Theme: Enhance Enterprise Interoperability

BizTalk Server 2010 increases enterprise interoperability with the new, scalable TPM (Trading Partner Management) and new and enhanced Adapters and Accelerators. Now we will look at each of these in detail.

Scalable Trading Partner Management:

The new TPM enables easy on-boarding and lifecycle management of trading partners with the following features:

· New Partner Management model that reflects typical B2B relationships.

· Better and more accessible user interface with

· Agreement templates and business profiles for rapid configuration

· New TPM operator role to manage partner management

Another post with more details on TPM is here.

New and enhanced Adapters:

· New FTPS adapter

· Enhanced FTP Adapter

· Supports files from read-only locations

· Extends atomic write to text files

· Fault tolerance and performance improvements

· Support for new versions of LOB systems

· Oracle EBS 12.1

· SAP 7

· JD Edwards 9.0

· SharePoint 2010

· SQL Server 2008 R2

· Support for new Microsoft platforms

· Windows Server 2008 R2

· SQL Server 2008 R2

· .NET Framework 4.0

· Visual Studio 2010

As we discussed in this blog today, with the focus on making developing, tuning, and managing enterprise integration solutions and managing trading partners faster, simpler and easier, we hope that BizTalk Server 2010 will make it easy for enterprises to build composite solutions that span both on-premise LOB systems and also applications deployed onto the public cloud.

Here is another post that discusses the features of BizTalk Server 2010 along with a video.

Learn BizTalk Server 2010 at your own pace here.

To learn more regarding the BizTalk Server 2010 release and download our new free developer edition, please visit BizTalk Server website. You can learn more about Microsoft’s Application Infrastructure capabilities by exploring on-demand training at www.appinfrastructure.com.

Implementing a workflow service for inbound LOB operations

BizTalk Blog — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 10:34:00 GMT

Consider the following scenario – I want to write a workflow that gets instantiated when certain changes happen in LOB (say a new row is added to a table) and then does some processing with the altered data. In the current release of Microsoft BizTalk Server, Add Adapter Service Reference (AASR) generates LOB activities only for outbound operations. For inbound operations (polling, notification, etc), AASR only generates the contract and configuration information along with a dummy service implementation. This blog explains how to create such a workflow service and host it in IIS.

I will use a Typed Polling scenario for WCF SQL adapter to illustrate the steps involved for a one-way operation.

Generate service - Create a new “WCF Workflow Service Application”. Run AASR and select the appropriate inbound operation. You can delete the dummy service implementation since that’s no longer required. Let’s assume the generated contract looks like

[System.CodeDom.Compiler.GeneratedCodeAttribute("System.ServiceModel", "4.0.0.0")]
[System.ServiceModel.ServiceContractAttribute(Namespace="http://schemas.microsoft.com/Sql/2008/05/", ConfigurationName="TypedPolling_Foo")]
public interface TypedPolling_Foo {
        [System.ServiceModel.OperationContractAttribute(IsOneWay=true, Action="TypedPolling")]
        void TypedPolling(TypedPolling request);
}

Configure the activities - Since this operation is one-way, we will delete the “SendResponse” activity and also remove the co-relation handle from the “Receive” activity (in the properties for the “Receive” activity, select CorrelationInitializers and delete the handle) and optionally from the “Variables” as well. Apply the following configuration to the activity (obtained from the above contract)

OperationName – TypedPolling
ServiceContractName – {http://schemas.microsoft.com/Sql/2008/05/}TypedPolling_Foo
Action – TypedPolling
Check CanCreateInstance

Content – Select “Message"
- Message data – create a variable of type TypedPolling and specify that
- Message type – TypedPolling

If the operation is two-way, i.e. needs to return a response, SAP RFC call for example, there are some differences. You shouldn’t remove the “SendResponse” activity and the correlation handle. The configuration of the “Receive” part stays the same as described above. For the “SendResponse” part, apply the following configuration.

Action – Set this to the ReplyAction in the OperationContractAttribute.
Content – Select “Message” and set the “Message type” to the return type and “Message data” to a variable of that type

Process the input - The workflow can now use the variable (Message data) to get the contents of the poll and do whatever processing it needs to do with that data

Update the config - Modify the “service” name in the configuration file to the name of the service, as specified in the xamlx file.

    <system.serviceModel>
     …
      <services>
        <service name="Service1">
          <endpoint address="mssql://localhost//mytestdb?InboundId=Foo" …

Deploy the service - At this point the service is ready to be hosted. You can use VS 2010 to deploy it to IIS. From the project properties --> Web, select the “Use Local IIS Web Server”, specify a URL, create a virtual directory and then build the project. However, since the service endpoint is using a custom binding which IIS does not understand, we will need to “Auto-Start” it. This is a new feature in IIS 7.5 and is explained here. While the blog explains it in the context of Service Bus Endpoints, it applies to this scenario as well.

Sandeep Prabhu,
BizTalk Server Team

Improved Productivity with BizTalk Server 2010 Mapper

BizTalk Blog — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 10:52:00 GMT

The current mapper was an award winning tool when it was released. But lately we have been hearing from our customers that although mapper is great for simple maps, they are finding it increasingly difficult to develop and maintain maps with the BizTalk Mapper. The problem is that when mapper was developed schemas used to be small and mappings used to be simple. With the increasing complexity of integration challenges being solved using BizTalk, the size of the messages/schemas and the complexity of maps has been increasing rapidly.

The above map is an example of a complex map where user faces many challenges. Both source and target schemas have hundreds of nodes making it difficult for users to identify nodes to map. Even after mapping user faces challenges in trying to follow the relationships end to end as the huge number of links in the map reduces it to a jumble of black lines. Understanding and updating this map becomes a time consuming process.

Improving usability of the mapper was a key focus area to enhance developer productivity for BizTalk Server 2010. For solving the challenge of making maps easier to understand while maintaining the immense flexibility provided by BizTalk Mapper, we collaborated with Microsoft Research and worked with highly respected researchers like George Robertson and Phil Bernstein. Our focus was to bring simplicity in both creation and maintenance of maps.

One of the problems in big maps was the amount of background noise that distracted user from task at hand. BizTalk Mapper solves the problem by first hiding and/or dimming out the links that are not relevant to the page area of the map you are currently viewing. The links where both ends are not currently in view are now hidden. Even the links where only one end is currently in view are dimmed out by using a thinner dashed line types. When you select any schema node, link or a functoid in the map, BizTalk Mapper now activates highlight propagation. In highlight propagation Mapper brings selected item in prominence along with all the relationships associated with it. This in turn allows you to focus on the selected object and its relationships while reducing all the background noise. If the relationships are not in the current view, Mapper automatically scrolls the mapping grid surface to bring the selected relationship in view. This drastically reduces the amount of scrolling you had to do previously, to view end-to-end relationships. Apart from this, during design time you can now document the mapping logic by providing comments for the functoids. This can be used later for understanding the usage of a functoid by hovering over the functoid shape on the grid surface. The picture below illustrates how you can quickly understand the end to end relationship by using commenting functionality along with highlight propagation described above.

For the initial map creation, we targeted on making it easier for you to identify elements to map. When you have big schemas and are looking to have direct links from the source schema to the destination schema, one of the biggest issues is to find the relevant nodes in the schemas. Now in BizTalk Mapper if you select any element in the source or destination schema and invoke "Indicative Matching" mapper, it will suggest you the possible matches in the other schema. These matches are generated based on a complex algorithm, which was developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research. This algorithm looks at various parameters like how words are shortened by dropping alphabets, relative position in the schema tree, etc. to generate possible matches. We have also made it easier to discover AutoLink functionality. Now when you link two records, we display a context menu where you can choose the type of link you require. Mapper also provides messages on the status bar when an attempt is made to create invalid link.

For a multipage map, it is tough to figure out where a certain schema node is being used. Mapper already indicates that a particular schema node is linked in another page by showing a link icon in the schema tree. But if you have same schema node linked in multiple pages, it is difficult to find all the pages in which the node is being used. To solve this problem mapper will now also show indication on the page tabs below mapper grid surface to indicate that the selected schema node is linked.

The map development experience has also been greatly enhanced by consolidating all the functoid configuration activities into a single dialog. This dialog will provide tabs for various configuration tasks like input configuration, script configuration, table looping configuration etc. The input configuration also has been enhanced to make inputs easier to configure and understand. The mapper will give you error indication about the inputs in the configuration dialog and a visual cue (just like IntelliSense) with error information on the mapper grid. For scripting functoid, you can set your favorite scripting language as default and all the new scripting functoid will be automatically offer you that as the first choice. You can also import scripts from existing files on disk.

The new incremental search will help you find the relevant object quickly. You can not only search through the schema nodes, but also through functoids. You can also select schemas and which properties of functoids you would like to search using the search options dropdown. Mapper displays the number of search matches and their distribution in the status bar. All the matches in the schema trees are highlighted. The matching functoids in the current view are highlighted. If there are matching functoids that are hidden, mapper will indicate that by showing a glowing directional arrows at the edges towards which you need to scroll towards to uncover the results. If there are results on other pages, mapper will indicate that by highlighting those page tabs.

Another feature which makes it easy to understand a map quickly is "Relevance View". As a map developer you might be interested only in nodes that are actually part of the map, hiding the other nodes makes it easier for you to understand the full map better. You can turn on this feature on either the source or destination schema using toolbar buttons. This makes it easier for you to focus on only the relevant schema nodes when looking at the map without getting distracted with unused nodes. When the unused nodes are hidden, they are still easily accessible through tooltips. You can also expand a collapsed node to override the default collapsing of all non-relevant nodes.

Making design time experience much better is the support for cut/copy /paste within and across maps. This should help you reuse repeated logic or segments common across maps. Undo and redo adds to the goodness by making development by trial and error easier. Apart from these zooming and panning in the map is much easier, making moving around the map a breeze.

These are only some of the enhancements in the BizTalk Mapper. Our usability tests have shown that these enhancements in the BizTalk Mapper have increased developer productivity in creating and maintaining complex maps. We now want to hear from you! How much productivity improvements have you observed while using BizTalk Server 2010's Mapper.

Deepak Jain

Program Manager, BizTalk Server Team

Invoking BAPI Transactions from a Workflow

BizTalk Blog — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 06:15:00 GMT

When working with BAPI(s) in WCF SAP adapter, the transaction handling requires that the BAPI_TRANSACTION_COMMIT/BAPI_TRANSACTION_ROLLBACK call be issued on the same SAP connection that was used to execute the BAPI. The Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0 does not have a notion of “session” scope that can be used to club multiple LOB activities to use the same underlying WCF channel. Because of this limitation, the BAPI transaction scenario breaks if you use the LOB Activities. To get this scenario to work, you need to create a custom activity that will use the generated proxy class to make the BAPI call and then invoke the commit/rollback on the same proxy class instance. This ensures that the calls go over the same underlying WCF channel and thus the same SAP connection.

Here’s a code snippet that illustrates the use of custom Code Activity to execute BAPI_MATERIAL_SAVEDATA

public sealed class BapiMaterialSaveDataActivity : CodeActivity<BAPIRET2>

{

// TODO: Expose any properties for setting the arguments

protected override void Execute(CodeActivityContext context)

{

BapiBUS1001006Client client = new BapiBUS1001006Client();

// TODO: Intialize the parameters

BAPIPAREX[] EXTENSIONIN = new BAPIPAREX[0];

BAPIPAREXX[] EXTENSIONINX = new BAPIPAREXX[0];

BAPI_MEAN[] INTERNATIONALARTNOS = new BAPI_MEAN[0];

BAPI_MAKT[] MATERIALDESCRIPTION = new BAPI_MAKT[1];

BAPI_MLTX[] MATERIALLONGTEXT = new BAPI_MLTX[0];

BAPI_MFHM[] PRTDATA = new BAPI_MFHM[0];

BAPI_MFHMX[] PRTDATAX = new BAPI_MFHMX[0];

BAPI_MATRETURN2[] RETURNMESSAGES = new BAPI_MATRETURN2[0];

BAPI_MLAN[] TAXCLASSIFICATIONS = new BAPI_MLAN[0];

BAPI_MARM[] UNITSOFMEASURE = new BAPI_MARM[1];

BAPI_MARD STORAGELOCATIONDATA = new BAPI_MARD();

BAPI_MARDX STORAGELOCATIONDATAX = new BAPI_MARDX();

BAPI_MARMX[] UNITSOFMEASUREX = new BAPI_MARMX[1];

BAPIMATHEAD HEADDATA = new BAPIMATHEAD();

BAPI_MARC PLANTDATA = new BAPI_MARC();

BAPI_MARCX PLANTDATAX = new BAPI_MARCX();

BAPI_MARA CLIENTDATA = new BAPI_MARA();

BAPI_MARAX CLIENTDATAX = new BAPI_MARAX();

// Execute the BAPI

BAPIRET2 result = client.SAVEDATA(CLIENTDATA, CLIENTDATAX, null,

null, null, null, HEADDATA, null,

null, null, null, PLANTDATA,

PLANTDATAX, null, null,

STORAGELOCATIONDATA, STORAGELOCATIONDATAX,

null, null, null, null, null,

null, ref EXTENSIONIN, ref EXTENSIONINX,

ref INTERNATIONALARTNOS,

ref MATERIALDESCRIPTION,

ref MATERIALLONGTEXT, ref PRTDATA,

ref PRTDATAX, ref RETURNMESSAGES,

ref TAXCLASSIFICATIONS, ref UNITSOFMEASURE,

ref UNITSOFMEASUREX);

// Commit the BAPI

client.BAPI_TRANSACTION_COMMIT("X");

return result;

}

}

Sandeep Prabhu,

BizTalk Server Team

Handling of authentication for LOB Activities - Part II

BizTalk Blog — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 05:57:00 GMT

In the previous blog post, we went over how to pass authentication information for WCF SQL, WCF Oracle DB, WCF SAP and WCF Siebel adapters. WCF Oracle E-Business adapter poses some additional challenges since in some case two sets of credentials – one for the Oracle DB and one for the Oracle E-Business server – may be required. Below are few options that can be used to authenticate in such scenarios.

Using custom endpoint behavior

The approach is exactly the same as defined in the previous blog post. In addition to retrieving the Oracle DB credentials and populating the ClientCredentials behavior, we will additionally retrieve the Oracle E-Business credentials and populate the relevant binding properties with that information.

        public void
            ApplyClientBehavior(
                ServiceEndpoint endpoint,
                ClientRuntime clientRuntime
            )
        {
            ClientCredentials clientCredentials = endpoint.Behaviors.Find<ClientCredentials>();
            Debug.Assert(clientCredentials != null, "ClientCredentials behavior not present");

            // TODO: Add your code to retrieve the credentials from a secure
            //       store. For illustration purpose, the values are hard-coded
            clientCredentials.UserName.UserName = "Foo";
            clientCredentials.UserName.Password = "Bar";

// We expect the adapter binding element to be part of a custom

// binding. Locate the Oracle EBS binding element in that

CustomBinding customBinding = endpoint.Binding as CustomBinding;

Debug.Assert(customBinding != null, "Binding is not a CustomBinding!");

OracleEBSAdapter adapterBinding = customBinding.Elements.Find<OracleEBSAdapter>();

Debug.Assert(adapterBinding != null, "Adapter binding element not present");

// TODO: Add your code to retrieve the credentials from a secure

// store. For illustration purpose, the values are hard-coded

adapterBinding.OracleUserName = "FooApps";

adapterBinding.OraclePassword = "BarApps";

}

Putting the credentials in the configuration file

The Oracle E-Business credentials can be specified by setting the binding properties – oracleUserName and oraclePassword – in the configuration file. Note that this poses a security risk since the credentials are now stored in clear text in the config file. You need to ACL that file properly.

The Oracle DB credentials can be specified using any of the mechanisms specified in the previous blog post.

Sandeep Prabhu,
BizTalk Server Team

Handling of authentication for LOB Activities

BizTalk Blog — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 05:58:00 GMT

The LOB Activities need to authenticate with the LOB before they can perform any operations. The Send activity in Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0, which is how a workflow can invoke a WCF service operation, presently does not support authentication. Since the LOB activities are built on top of Send activity, they also have this limitation. Below are a few options that can be used to authenticate with the LOB. The WCF Oracle Apps adapter is covered separately in a different blog. This blog addresses the other adapters, i.e. WCF SQL, WCF SAP, WCF Oracle DB and WCF Siebel.

Using Windows credentials

If the WCF LOB Adapter supports windows integrated authentication, that mechanism can be used and the windows credentials of the logged in account will be used to authenticate. This can be used for WCF SQL and WCF OracleDB adapters.

Using mapped credentials

If the WCF LOB Adapter supports a mechanism to map windows credentials to LOB credentials, that approach can be used. This can be used for WCF SAP adapter that supports Secure Network Communications.

Using custom endpoint behavior

A custom endpoint behavior can be written up which will pull the credentials from a secure store and then populate the ClientCredentials behavior with that information. This is a flexible approach that can be used with SQL, Oracle DB, SAP and Siebel adapters. The below set of steps explain how to go about it.

       class MyEndpointBehavior : BehaviorExtensionElement, IEndpointBehavior
    {
        public override Type BehaviorType
        {
            get { return typeof(MyEndpointBehavior); }
        }

        protected override object CreateBehavior()
        {
            return new MyEndpointBehavior();
        }

        public void
            AddBindingParameters(
                ServiceEndpoint endpoint,
                BindingParameterCollection bindingParameters
            )
        {
        }

        public void
            ApplyClientBehavior(
                ServiceEndpoint endpoint,
                ClientRuntime clientRuntime
            )
        {
            ClientCredentials clientCredentials = endpoint.Behaviors.Find<ClientCredentials>();
            Debug.Assert(clientCredentials != null, "ClientCredentials behavior not present");

            // TODO: Add your code to retrieve the credentials from a secure
            //       store. For illustration purpose, the values are hard-coded
            clientCredentials.UserName.UserName = "Foo";
            clientCredentials.UserName.Password = "Bar";
        }

        public void
            ApplyDispatchBehavior(
                ServiceEndpoint endpoint,
                EndpointDispatcher endpointDispatcher
            )
        {
        }

        public void Validate(ServiceEndpoint endpoint)
        {
        }
    }

Make changes to the configuration file to add this endpoint behavior to the endpoints used by the relevant LOB Activities. Note the “type” in behavior extension should be set to typeof(MyEndpointBehavior).AssemblyQualifiedName.

<system.serviceModel>
    <behaviors>
      <endpointBehaviors>
        <behavior name="lobActivityBehavior">
          <lobActivityEndpointBehavior />
          <myCredentialsBehavior />
        </behavior>
      </endpointBehaviors>
    </behaviors>
    <bindings>
      <sqlBinding>
        <binding name="SqlAdapterBinding" … />
      </sqlBinding>
    </bindings>
    <client>
      <endpoint address="mssql://localhost//mytestdb?" … />
    </client>
    <extensions>
      <behaviorExtensions>
        <add name="myCredentialsBehavior"
             type="WorkflowConsoleApplication3.MyEndpointBehavior, WorkflowConsoleApplication3, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null"/>
      </behaviorExtensions>
    </extensions>
</system.serviceModel>

Passing the authentication information as part of the URI

The SQL, Oracle DB, SAP and Siebel adapters, all support passing of username/password in the URI. The binding property “AcceptCredentialsInUri” needs to be set to true to enable this support. Note that this poses a security risk since the credentials are now stored in clear text in the config file. You need to ACL that file properly.

Sandeep Prabhu,
BizTalk Server Team

Learn BizTalk Server 2010 at your own pace

OferAsh — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 22:57:09 GMT

Our training partner Quicklearn is announcing the availability of new online training on BizTalk Server 2010.

This is a series of self-paced online training courses that include hand-on lab experience and instructor support. It really allows you to take control of your learning experience and choose the pace and time to do it without having to travel.

Starting next month, Quicklearn will be offering diverse online training courses ranging from BizTalk Developer Fundamentals to specific experts topics such as Business Rule Engine (BRE) and Business To Business with EDI.

You can test drive these online training session with the free sample available today: Updating Your Skill to BizTalk Server 2010.

Enjoy the new learning experience!

Ofer

BizTalk AppFabric Connect: An Introduction

Sudhirh — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 03:20:00 GMT

[Update 21/10/2010: Made changes to the article to reflect the changes in branding and features post RTM]

In the recently released BizTalk Server 2010, we introduced a new feature of BizTalk called "AppFabric Connect”, which allows users to easily develop simple integration applications. With this feature, users can:

Develop Windows Workflow applications that require connectivity to backend Line of Business (LOB) systems like SAP, Oracle DB, Oracle E-Business Suite, Seibel, and SQL Server without writing custom code for LOB connectivity.
Develop XML-based data transformation using the easy-to-use and rich user interface of BizTalk Mapper that can be launched and used right within a .NET/WF project

In this blog, I will provide an overview of this feature. A more elaborate whitepaper with a tutorial can be found here.

With this feature, Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) activities are provided to the end user to programmatically access BizTalk’s LOB connectivity and data transformation capabilities. This enables users to easily create new composite applications using the WF model, which can be deployed, hosted, managed in Windows Server AppFabric. This also enables web-based applications to access LOB data. This can help a class of scenarios (such as Web-based queries) that are best effort, short running and don’t require the durability/persistence provided by traditional BizTalk Server. A typical application architecture may look like below:

Figure 1 A workflow service hosted in AppFabric/IIS connecting to a Line-of-Business system

Connecting to a Line of Business System

BizTalk provides a set of WCF based adapters that provide easy connectivity to Line of Business (LoB) systems. To use this, you need to install the WCF LoB Adapter SDK and the BizTalk Adapter Pack, which are available as part of BizTalk Server 2010 release.

To use this feature from a WF project in Visual Studio, click the “Add Adapter Service Reference…” menu item.

This brings up a dialog box (like the one below) which you can use to connect to the LoB system. The dialog box allows you to browse through the artifacts supported by the LoB system and choose the operations you want to use. For example, in the screenshot below, we use the “Select” operation on the SQL Database table “CustomerInfo”.

When you click OK, the plugin will generate WF activities for the operations you have selected. You must build your project to see the activities on the Visual Studio Toolbox (See below). Once that is done, you can simple drag-and-drop the activities to use them in your workflow.

Transforming Data using the BizTalk Mapper

BizTalk provides a rich GUI-based tool for performing data transformations for XML data. We can now use this capability to map .NET types from a WF application through the Mapper activity. You will see this activity on the Toolbox under the “BizTalk” category after you install BizTalk Server (Developer Tools) and the WCF LOB Adapter SDK.

To use this mapper activity, you need to specify the InputDataContractType and the OutputDataContractType. As the name suggests, these are .NET types for the input data and the output data for the activity. You can then create a new map or select an existing map based on these types. If you are creating a new map, the activity will generate the XML schemas for the selected input and output DataContract types and a new BizTalk map (.btm) file.

You can then open and edit the BizTalk map file in the BizTalk Mapper GUI from within the WF project itself. When the map file is saved, it will automatically be compiled and built along with the project.

The mapper activity has an input argument that takes the data to be transformed and an output argument where the transformed data is stored. You can create workflow variables to pass the input and store the output from the activity. At runtime, the input data will first be serialized into XML. It will then be transformed using XSLT generated from the map file and finally de-serialized back into an object of the output type.

Summary

With these features, developing web applications which require access to LoB data will be a lot easier. The ability to use the BizTalk Mapper for data transformation means that different data in different LoB systems can be transformed using an interactive and intuitive GUI-based tool. Windows Server AppFabric provides a hosting service to deploy and manage these applications.

We would be happy to see you try out these features in your workflow applications, and receive your feedback. You can either write to me directly (sameerch @ microsoft . com) or leave a feedback here on this blog.

Sameer Chabungbam
Program Manager, BizTalk Server Team

What’s new in TPM for BizTalk Server 2010!!

Sudhirh — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 20:49:38 GMT

We are very excited to welcome the public Beta release of BizTalk Server 2010. We have some very interesting enhancements in B2B space in this release. I want to share a brief around the Trading Partner Management feature.

Trading Partner Management(TPM) is increasingly challenging in the exploding global trading economy. A huge heterogeneous mixture of business players are coming in with cost effective options to trade with.

Previous releases of BizTalk provided a functional party management offering that enabled customers to build solutions that needed party management data, but it did come with a few challenges around usability and scalability. To address the growing demand for a scalable TPM, we interviewed a number of customers from different market and sizes and incorporated their valuable feedback. With the new release of BizTalk Server 2010, we have rebuilt the TPM model ground up to meet the tactical and long term needs of the B2B players.

I want to lay out some of the key aspects that are new in TPM for BTS 2010. Detailed blogs would be based on your interest in the specific areas

Functional/Operational

ü Party Model enhanced ground up that would be Business user friendly:

a. Party, Business, Agreement, Protocol Settings: More intuitive model to reflect trading partners, their various businesses, partnerships and agreements between partners. Default Protocol settings to reflect the expectations and abilities of either party getting into an trading partner agreement

b. Inbound, Outbound Settings: Reflective of how business handles inbound messages and sends outbound messages

c. Directional Agreements: Agreements are made two part, one part each for the direction of messages

ü Centralized Business Identities: Identities that are used by the business are centralized without making them protocol-specific. This enhances the productivity as well, as business identities can be set/updated in one place and one time and not repeated across protocol settings

ü Message Type Inclusion/Exclusion: A configurable list of accepted Transaction/Message Types that the business wants to support. Greatly reduces noise of unsupported message types being exchanged and dropped.

ü Productivity around Agreement onboarding:

a. Ability to create protocol settings that are by default expected by a business and reusing them automatically in all agreements created with the business. Ability to override and specific setting as needed in the agreement

b. Ability to save agreements as ‘Agreement Templates’ and applying the same across all similar agreements by a click of a button

ü TransactionSet/Payload validation by Message type: No more validation settings at interchange level; now you set validation (‘leading trailing spaces, ‘extended EDI validation etc) for each message type differently

ü Enhanced Global/FallBack Settings: All the settings possible for an onboarded party can now be set in Fallback settings too(earlier releases didn’t support all settings in Global settings and for some users were forced to use pipeline settings)

Access

ü B2B Operator Role: A new BizTalk role that reduces the onus on the Admins to perform all Party management operations which was also sometimes security risk. The new role allows windows users associated with the role to perform all party management operations.

Upgrade Customers

ü Migration Tool: With all these changes comes a Party Migration tool that helps upgrade customers to easily move from the old PAM based model to the new enhanced TPM of BTS 2010 without having to redo the onboarding of hundreds of parties/agreements

These are the highlights that I wanted to call out and have you all try them out. Any feedback on the feature would be greatly appreciated.

Hoping that the feature excites you as much as it excites me, and looking forward to a great success!!

Until next time

Ravi

*TechEd Alert*

I will be presenting a session at TechEd 2010 North America on this TPM feature with a demo. If you want to see how it really works and hear the story of how this feature got build, do visit the session at TechEd on 9^th June (ASI 304: Building Large B2B Integration Solutions on Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010). See you folks there!!!

Videos & Feedback on the new features of BizTalk Server 2010

OferAsh — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 18:40:35 GMT

It’s been about 10 days since we have launched the Beta version of BizTalk Server 2010 together with the Windows Server AppFabric RC. The virtual launch site includes a 4 new videos of recorded demos that you can get access to only if you pick the BizTalk technology stands and bring the videos play list. to make sure you discover them here are the direct links to these videos:

The release of BizTalk 2010 Beta version has promoted BizTalk MVPs and technical Microsoft experts to blog about their feedback and experience with it. Some of them have been test driving BizTalk CTP for a few weeks now.

They have provided quick reviews of their most favorite these features. You may want to take a look at these blog entries:

Using the New BizTalk Mapper Shape in a Windows Workflow Service (Richard Seroter)
BizTalk Server 2010 Beta: Enhanced Mapper (Thiago Almeida)
BizTalk Server 2010 Beta: Settings Dashboard and Latency control per host (Thiago Almeida)
BizTalk 2010 Beta Notes and Details - Initial Thoughts / Experience (Ben Cline)
Mapping in BizTalk 2010: My favorite new features (overview) (Randal van Splunteren)
Orchestration Expression Window Sizeable in BizTalk 2010 (Randal van Splunteren)
Placement of functoids on the mapper grid (Jan Eliasen)
BizTalk Server 2010 Public Beta and Windows Server AppFabric RC now available (Brian Loesgen)

If you have not done so it is not too late to start evaluating BizTalk Server 2010 Beta.

Join the party Today!

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The BizTalk Server 2010 Beta is here!

OferAsh — Thu, 20 May 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Today we’re excited to announce the availability of the BizTalk Server 2010 Beta, which will RTM in the third quarter of calendar year 2010. BizTalk Server 2010 aligns with the latest Microsoft platform releases, including SQL Server 2008 R2, Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010, and will integrate with Windows Server AppFabric. This alignment, along with the availability of a wide array of platform adapters, allows customers to stitch together more flexible and manageable composite applications.

Updates include enhanced trading partner management, a new BizTalk mapper and simplified management through a single dashboard that enables customers to backup and restore BizTalk configurations. Also included in this release are new Business to Business integration capabilities such as rapidly on-board and easy management of trading partners and secure FTP adapter (FTPS) .
Download the beta today and tell us what you think at www.microsoft.com/biztalk.

Today we’re also officially launching Windows Server AppFabric, with the immediate availability of the Windows Server AppFabric Release Candidate (RC) at http://msdn.microsoft.com/appfabric; the final release of the product will be available in June.

Together with the already available Windows Azure AppFabric, Windows Server AppFabric and BizTalk Server 2010 form Microsoft’s application infrastructure technologies. These offerings benefit you by delivering cloud-like elasticity, seamless connectivity, and simplified composition for the most demanding, enterprise applications.

To learn more about Microsoft’s application infrastructure technologies, visit the Microsoft Application Infrastructure virtual launch event at www.appinfrastructure.com!

BizTalk Server 2010 Beta Availability and Virtual Launch

OferAsh — Wed, 19 May 2010 20:12:00 GMT

We will be announcing the public Beta of BizTalk Server 2010 at the Application Infrastructure Virtual Launch tomorrow (Thursday, May 20^th, 2010 at 8:30 AM PST) with planned RTM in Q3 of 2010.

BizTalk Server 2010 aligns with the latest Microsoft platform releases, including SQL Server 2008 R2, Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010, and will integrate with Windows Server AppFabric and with .NET 4.

At this virtual launch event we will disclose details on new features and capabilities in BizTalk Server 2010 though presentations, whitepapers, videos and recorded demos.

Please join us tomorrow for an exciting launch!

The BizTalk Team

Hotfix for BizTalk Server 2009 Developer Tools

BizTalk Blog — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 10:24:00 GMT

Some of our customers have experienced problems while developing BizTalk projects that references other BizTalk projects. This problem occurs because the project reference is lost intermittently when developing a BizTalk project in Visual Studio. We have released a hotfix for this problem in December. This hotfix resolves the issue that sometimes manifests in following ways –

Orchestrations in the referenced BizTalk project may show compiler warnings
Changes that are made to the referenced BizTalk project are not propagated to the referencing project
XLANG errors are thrown on editing the orchestrations of the referenced project. These errors may disappear after the orchestrations are saved and recompiled
Local copies of the referenced project’s binaries are deleted on deploying the referencing project
Various errors or warnings occur in Orchestration Designer on deploying the referencing project

We highly recommend that our customers apply this hotfix. If you still see any such issue in BizTalk Developer Tools after applying this hotfix, please let us know the issue through customer support.

Deepak Jain

Program Manager

BizTalk Developer Tools

“Route Failed Messages” routes the wrong message – really?

BizTalk Blog — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:21:00 GMT

Consider the following scenario:

There is an adapter on a Receive Location, which submits a message in Format A into BizTalk.
The Pipeline configured on this Receive Location converts the message into Format B.
Assume that there is no map configured on the Receive Port.
The “Route Failed Messages” option is enabled on the Receive Port.
There is an orchestration (or Send Port) set up which subscribes to the Error Reports (i.e., the failed messages which are routed due to the “Route Failed Messages” feature) generated by this Receive Port 1.

Problem: When a message is received on this Receive Location, and there are no subscribers for it, the expectation is that the message in Format B will be received by the error-handling orchestration (or Send Port). However, in some scenarios (depending on the pipeline, pipeline configuration, etc), the message received by the error-handling orchestration (or Send Port) is in Format A. How come?

Here’s what is most probably happening:

Adapter submits a message in Format A.
The pipeline executes, and the message is converted to Format B.
The Messaging Engine attempts to publish the message, but finds that there are no subscribers for this message. It thus returns an error back to the Adapter.
The Adapter attempts to suspend the message. NOTE – here, it attempts to suspend the message which it knows about (which it received from the back-end) – this message is in Format A.
The Messaging Engine sees this:
1. someone (the adapter in this case) is suspending a message (message in Format A, in this case)
2. “Route Failed Messages” is enabled on the port
The Messaging Engine, instead of suspending, decides to “route” an Error Report corresponding to the message being suspended. This is the message in Format A, in this case.
The error-handling orchestration (or send port) thus ended up receiving the message in Format A.

Question: How do you ensure that the message received by the error-handling orchestration (or send port) is in Format B?

Answer: The output message from the pipeline must have the context property “SuspendMessageOnRoutingFailure” present, with a value of true (boolean).

How does that work? Well, it changes the sequence above to be as follows:

Adapter submits a message in Format A.
The pipeline executes, and the message is converted to Format B.
The Messaging Engine attempts to publish the message, but finds that there are no subscribers for this message.
The Messaging Engine sees the “SuspendMessageOnRoutingFailure” message context property is set to true, and instead of returning an error back to the Adapter, attempts to suspend the message. NOTE that this message is in Format B.
At the same time, the Messaging Engine also sees this:
1. someone (the Messaging Engine itself, in this case) is suspending a message (message in Format B)
2. “Route Failed Messages” is enabled on the port
The Messaging Engine, instead of suspending, decides to “route” an Error Report corresponding to the message being suspended. This is the message in Format B.
The error-handling orchestration (or send port) now receives the message in Format B.

The out-of-box XML Disassembler component, has an option named “Recoverable Interchange”. When this option is set to true, the XML Disassembler internally translates this to mean “SuspendMessageOnRoutingFailure”=true, and sets this context property to the message.

Consolidating BizTalk blogs

BizTalk Blog — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 04:50:00 GMT

In the past, the product team has been blogging about BizTalk in multiple blogs:

BizTalk Engine	http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalk_core_engine/
Adapters	http://blogs.msdn.com/adapters/
B2B/EDI	http://blogs.msdn.com/BizTalkB2B/
RFID	http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalkrfid/

Over time, some of these have become silent and others are updated from time to time. We’ve also heard that it is confusing to look for related information in multiple places. To solve this, we’re going to consolidate all BizTalk product team blogging into this blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalk_server_team_blog/

We’ll try to make our blogging more interactive – we’ll respond to comments on articles and ask for your input on features you use and topics you want to hear. We’ll periodically post articles, so keep in touch.

Ciao

BizTalk Server Team

Host Integration Server 2006 Service Pack 1 has been released

OferAsh — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 08:55:02 GMT

Microsoft Host Integration Server 2006 Service Pack 1 has been released and is available for download here

This Service Pack includes hotfixes based on customer request and other fixes initiated by the product team. It improves the quality, reliability and supportability of Host Integration Server 2006 and BizTalk Adapters for Host Systems.

The following KB articles regarding this Service Pack will be available soon on Microsoft support site:

· KB 979238 – A list of the bugs that are fixed in Host Integration Server 2006 Service Pack 1 – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/979238

Regards,

Ofer

MSDN Webcast: Improving Business Agility with Enterprise Service Bus

OferAsh — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:21:35 GMT

If you have been wondering so far whether an ESB implementation is the right solution for your integration problems, let us help you make the right decision.

On Feb 11th, Peter Kelcey (Technical Sales Professional from Microsoft Canada) and I, will be co-presenting an MSDN Webcast. Peter has extensive experience helping customers with ESB implementation using the BizTalk ESB Toolkit. We will articulate the business values that an ESB brings to integration solutions, specifically how it can promote flexibility and reuse. Being able to adapt rapidly to new business or technical requirements while minimizing development efforts, costs and risks is crucial in the current tough economic climate.

This is going to be a demo intensive session to illustrate with a series of live short demos the advantages and use cases of the BizTalk ESB Toolkit.
More details are included below as is the link to register. Hope to see you there.

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032440359&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

Language(s):
English.
Audience(s):
Pro Dev/Programmers. (would be also useful for Enterprise/Solution Architects)
Duration:
60 Minutes
Start Date:
Thursday, February 11, 2010 1:00 PM Pacific Time (US & Canada)

Event Overview
Businesses across the globe are trying to cope with a faster rate of change. The need to adapt rapidly to new internal and external requirements is pushing organizations to look for more flexible solutions to build and connect their applications. At the same time, IT departments are also pressured to reduce costs and reuse software assets and services. Enterprise Service Bus has emerged as an architectural pattern that can help achieve these goals. In this webcast, we introduce the Microsoft BizTalk Enterprise Service Bus Toolkit 2.0 and explain how it accelerates the implementation of a very dynamic and reusable messaging and integration infrastructure on top of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 and the Microsoft .NET Windows Communication Framework.

We hope this session will convince you to stop procrastinating and “dive into the ESB pool” …

Cheers,

Ofer

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 SP1 Now Available!!!

Sudhirh — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 21:13:59 GMT

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is now available. This service pack is an update for BizTalk Server 2006 R2 and includes a roll-up of hot fixes from the BizTalk Server 2006 and 2006 R2 releases, some hot fixes from the BizTalk Server 2009 release, as well as some additional enhancements.

Important Links:

Location: Download Location
Detailed Article: KB Article
BizTalk Server Roadmap: http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/roadmap.aspx

Additional Details

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is an update for BizTalk Server 2006 R2. The SP1 installation program offers a unified installation experience: It will automatically detect and update all of the BizTalk Server components that are currently installed. It will also detect all BizTalk Server hotfixes currently installed, and will distinguish between hotfixes that predate this service pack, and those which were issued after this service pack was released.

SP1 includes a roll-up of hotfixes from the BizTalk Server 2006 and 2006 R2 releases, some hotfixes from the BizTalk Server 2009 release, as well as some additional enhancements. Some of the key fixes and enhancements in this service pack are the following:

New Features

For WCF-Custom and WCF-CustomIsolated Adapters, the ability to look up custom bindings from locations other than machine.config.
Support for using multiple certificates to sign outgoing AS2 messages

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.

Improved support

X12 and EDIFACT updates.
Increased footprint of supported FTP servers and locale.
XMLDocument message types in orchestrations.
Configurable timeout for Basic HTTP.
WCF adaptor now suspends messages instead of terminating when the host instance is stopped.
Configurable transaction timeout for WCF Adaptors.
Mapping of inline schema for SQL Adaptor now allows for using $ characters as part of the updategram.
The SQL Adaptor now supports calling from a BizTalk Server dynamic send port. The following properties can be set on the call to the dynamic port:
      Connection string (all the SQL connection properties)
      Document Target Namespace
      Response Document Root Element
Ability to disable generation of Routing Failure Report.
Fixes to some issues that used to cause high CPU usage by BizTalk Server hosts due to certain .NET updates.
Ability to use multiple certificates for signing outbound messages.
Message Pack 2009.
Message property tracking with BAM for all messages in the interchange, irrespective of the usage of pipeline or mapping.

Integrated tracing to help in debugging EDI specific issues. This improvement is aimed at reducing the time taken for diagnosing and isolating an EDI problem.

BizTalk Server Performance Benchmark Wizard

OferAsh — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 06:55:35 GMT

In case you have missed it, about two weeks ago a few members of the BizTalk Server and the SQL Server Customer Advisory Teams (CAT) have released to Codeplex, a vey useful BizTalk performance benchmarking tool.

The BizTalk Benchmark Wizard checks the performance of your BizTalk Server installation using pre-existing scenarios and validates it against some known results. Essentially it provides an answer to the question:” Are you getting the most throughput performance out of of your BizTalk Server installation?”
If the answer is no – you better follow the BizTalk Server 2009 Performance Optimization Guide.

The idea for the tool was conceived by BizTalk MVP Mikael Hakansson and the actual project involved a few Microsoft employees: Ewan Fairweather from the BizTalk Server CAT and other members from the SQL Server CAT.

For a full description of the project check out these blog posts:

For more information:
Benchmark your BizTalk Server (Part 1)

How to install:
Benchmark your BizTalk Server (Part 2)

Drill Down on the Wizard:
Benchmark your BizTalk Server (Part 3)

The Wizard is very simple to install and use.

So start using the it and make sure you get the most out of your BizTalk Server!

Ofer

BizTalk Server Team Blog

BizTalk Server 2010 R2

HIPAA 5010 Errata support now available for BizTalk Server 2009

Pipeline component for enabling legacy behavior in WCF-SAP adapter.

Handling of authentication for LOB Activities - Part III

Changing the game: BizTalk Server 2010 and the Road Ahead

BizTalk Server 2010 AppFabric Connect for Services

BizTalk Server 2010 released for manufacturing!!!

Theme: Integrate Enterprise Applications Easily

Implementing a workflow service for inbound LOB operations

Improved Productivity with BizTalk Server 2010 Mapper

Invoking BAPI Transactions from a Workflow

Handling of authentication for LOB Activities - Part II

Handling of authentication for LOB Activities

Learn BizTalk Server 2010 at your own pace

BizTalk AppFabric Connect: An Introduction

Connecting to a Line of Business System

Transforming Data using the BizTalk Mapper

Summary

What’s new in TPM for BizTalk Server 2010!!

Videos & Feedback on the new features of BizTalk Server 2010

Using the New BizTalk Mapper Shape in a Windows Workflow Service (Richard Seroter)

BizTalk Server 2010 Beta: Enhanced Mapper (Thiago Almeida)

BizTalk Server 2010 Beta: Settings Dashboard and Latency control per host (Thiago Almeida)

BizTalk 2010 Beta Notes and Details - Initial Thoughts / Experience (Ben Cline)

Mapping in BizTalk 2010: My favorite new features (overview) (Randal van Splunteren)

Orchestration Expression Window Sizeable in BizTalk 2010 (Randal van Splunteren)

Placement of functoids on the mapper grid (Jan Eliasen)

BizTalk Server 2010 Public Beta and Windows Server AppFabric RC now available (Brian Loesgen)

If you have not done so it is not too late to start evaluating BizTalk Server 2010 Beta.

The BizTalk Server 2010 Beta is here!

BizTalk Server 2010 Beta Availability and Virtual Launch

Hotfix for BizTalk Server 2009 Developer Tools

“Route Failed Messages” routes the wrong message – really?

Consolidating BizTalk blogs

Host Integration Server 2006 Service Pack 1 has been released

MSDN Webcast: Improving Business Agility with Enterprise Service Bus

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 SP1 Now Available!!!

Additional Details

BizTalk Server Performance Benchmark Wizard