The Enterprise Integration Space

Now Live!–Tutorial on Integrating BizTalk Server 2013 with Salesforce

2013-04-26T18:57:30Z

[ This blog post follows up from my other blog post Coming Soon!–Tutorial on Integrating BizTalk Server 2013 with Salesforce. ]

We have now released an update to the BizTalk Server 2013 Help to include a new tutorial that demonstrates how to integrate BizTalk Server 2013 with Salesforce using the new adapters released with the latest version of BizTalk Server. Here’s the scenario used to demonstrate the integration.

Business Scenario

Northwind uses the Salesforce online CRM system as their solution for tracking customers through the sales pipeline. Every time a sales opportunity is created in the Salesforce system, Northwind wants its on-premise systems, such as BizTalk Server, to be notified so that other down-stream systems can pick up that data and start other relevant processes. Northwind plans to implement this solution using the new adapters available with BizTalk Server 2013 and also by including some components of Windows Azure. This is how the end-to-end data flow looks like for the solution:

A sales representative creates an “opportunity” in the Salesforce system.
When the status of the opportunity is set to “Closed Won”, a notification is sent to a relay endpoint hosted on Windows Azure.
Using the new WCF-BasicHttpRelay adapter, the notification information is passed on to BizTalk Server system housed on-premise.
Using the information received as part of the notification, BizTalk Server invokes a REST endpoint in Salesforce, using the new WCF-WebHttp adapter, to get more information about the opportunity.
Finally, BizTalk Server uses the information received from Salesforce to create a purchase order entry in an in-house SQL Server database table.

These are the set of steps that you must perform to achieve the integration objective outlined in this solution. Each of these steps involves broad set of activities that we’ll look at as we proceed with creating the solution.

Here’s an illustration that describes the end-to-end integration solution:

Resources

The tutorial is available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn198272(v=bts.80).aspx.
A sample based on this tutorial is available at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Integrating-BizTalk-Server-f31e4286.

Acknowledgements

I would like to extend my thanks to Nick Hauenstein and Steef-Jan Viggers for reviewing the content and providing feedback on the tutorial. Nick Hauenstein also created a couple of hands-on labs that were very useful in shaping the scenario used in this tutorial.

BizTalk Server 2013 now available on Windows Azure IaaS

2013-04-18T22:51:29Z

This week, Windows Azure Infrastructure Services (IaaS) was made generally available to the customers. You can look at some blog posts related to this announcement here and here. As part of this, BizTalk Server 2013 (RTM) VM images were also pushed live and it becomes all the more easy to set up a BizTalk Server machine on the cloud. BizTalk Server is available on IaaS in three flavors:

Enterprise
Standard
Evaluation

You can read more about each of these SKUs at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj248689(v=bts.80).aspx. This link also provides information on how to set up a BizTalk Server VM running on Azure.

BizTalk Server 2013 - New Features Blog Series – WCF-BasicHttpRelay Adapter

2013-04-11T22:07:17Z

BizTalk Server 2013 introduces few new adapters that enable out-of-the-box connectivity with endpoints on Azure. One such adapter is WCF-BasicHttpRelay adapter, which can be used to send and receive messages from a Service Bus relay endpoint. This adapter is similar to the existing WCF-BasicHttp adapter in BizTalk. While the WCF-BasicHttp adapter used the BasicHttpBinding, WCF-BasicHttpRelay adapter uses the BasicHttpRelay binding.

This adapter enables a lot of integration scenarios between Azure and BizTalk but the most common and widely used scenario should be where a client sends a message to a relay endpoint hosted in Azure. With this new WCF-BasicHttpRelay adapter ‘listening’ to that relay endpoint, any message that gets sent there is pulled into the on-premise BizTalk Server, and then the usual orchestration or any other business process defined within BizTalk Server can kick in to process that message.

Let’s look at what’s required for configuring a WCF-BasicHttpRelay adapter.

The Binding and Messages tab for the adapter configuration are the usual. The key configuration values would need to be specified in the General and Security tabs.

General Tab

In the General tab, you specify the URI for the relay endpoint. The URI could be in HTTP or HTTPS scheme based on the kind of security you want to implement. In the screen capture above, btssalesforce is my Service Bus namespace and /notifications/opportunity is the relay endpoint. In this case, when we finish configuring the receive location and enable it, the /notifications/opportunity relay endpoint will be created under your namespace. You do not need to create it before configuring the receive location.

Security Tab

In the Security tab, from the Security mode you can specify the kind of transfer security you want to use. The options available are very clearly described at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff648863.aspx. If you use None, the URI schema will be HTTP. If you use either Transport or TransportWIthMessageCredential, the URI scheme will be HTTPS.

You can specify the client-side security from the Relay client authentication type property. If you set this to None, the relay endpoint will be accessible to any client that knows the endpoint address. If this is set to RelayAccessToken, only those clients with the key and the endpoint address can access it.

You can also control whether the service behavior is published to the Service Registry (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/dd582704.aspx) by selecting the Enable service discovery check box. If you select that option, you will also have to specify the name with which the service behavior is published in the registry and the mode of discovery.

Finally, you must specify the ACS credentials to authenticate with the Service Bus namespace. You can get these details from the Azure management portal.

I’ll be adding a demo description to this blog soon to demonstrate how BizTalk Server can consume messages sent to a relay endpoint hosted in Azure.

BizTalk Server 2013 Documentation Release Strategy

2013-04-04T17:04:31Z

With BizTalk Server 2013 we wanted to adopt a documentation strategy of having the docs mostly available over the web and not packaged as part of the product. This has various benefits but is driven mostly by the fact that users look for information mostly over the Internet using their preferred search engine. So, having the updated content uploaded online increases the probability of users finding the information when they search for it. There were two parts to this approach:

Upload the latest content for BizTalk Server 2013 to the web.
Remove all content that is packaged with the product.

As we know, BizTalk Server doesn’t release just as one single component. There are a bunch of other components (Adapter Pack, Accelerators, etc.) that come with it making BizTalk Server a suite of products. So, we had to adopt this documentation strategy across all the components of the release. You can imagine that this is a pretty big task in itself so we decided to break this down into simpler manageable tasks. In BizTalk Server 2013, we went ahead with the first part of the plan to have all new content mostly available online only. In the future releases, we’ll take up the task of removing content completely from the packaged product.

How does this affect you?

This may affect where you look for BizTalk Server information. Through this blog post I am trying to provide you with pointers on where to go and look for specific information related to BizTalk Server and other related components.

BizTalk Server Help

For the BizTalk Server core component, the experience is pretty much unchanged. So, you can access the BizTalk Server 2013 Help both offline (installed with the product) or online at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa548004(v=bts.80).aspx.

Help for Other Components Related to BizTalk Server

For other components such as Adapter Pack, Accelerators, etc. the Help for the most recent version was only updated online. The version of Help that is installed with the product was not updated for 2013. So, if you install the Help for these products on your computer, and open the Help, you will notice that it still reflects the older version. However, in case users wanted to access the Help offline, we also provided downloadable version of the 2013 Help as well. So, for these components, you could use Help in the following two ways:

Access the Help on MSDN (recommended by us and preferred by users). - http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ee317850(v=bts.10).aspx.
Download the Help from Microsoft Download Center and replace it on the computer where you installed the Help that was packaged with the product. The table below provides links to both the online version and downloadable version of the Help.

Component	MSDN Link	Link for Downloading Help
Microsoft BizTalk ESB Toolkit	http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ff699598(v=bts.80).aspx	http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38166
Microsoft BizTalk Server RFID 2013	http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/dd352559(v=bts.80).aspx	http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38167
Microsoft BizTalk Mobile RFID 2013	http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/dd351599(v=bts.80).aspx	http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38167
Microsoft BizTalk 2013 Accelerator for HL7	http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ee409374(v=bts.80).aspx	http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38169
Microsoft BizTalk Accelerator for RosettaNet	http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ff720201(v=bts.80).aspx	http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38172
Microsoft BizTalk 2013 Accelerator for SWIFT	http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ee350746(v=bts.80).aspx	http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38168
Microsoft BizTalk Server 2013 FileAct and InterAct Adapters	http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/bb669570(v=bts.80).aspx	http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38165
WCF LOB Adapter SDK	http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/bb798080(v=bts.80).aspx	http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38173
Microsoft BizTalk Adapter Pack 2013	http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/jj991825(v=bts.10).aspx	http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38170
UDDI Services	http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/cc730814(v=bts.80).aspx	http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38171
Installation Guide for BizTalk Server	http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35552	-
Installation Guides for products related to BizTalk Server	-	http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35552
Upgrade Guide for BizTalk Server	-	http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35552

Coming Soon!–Tutorial on Integrating BizTalk Server 2013 with Salesforce

2013-03-28T23:12:26Z

It’s finally about to arrive. The new WCF-BasicHttpRelay adapter in BizTalk Server 2013 makes it really easy to integrate BizTalk Server with Salesforce. The scenario that I am working on documenting involves getting an opportunity notification from Salesforce into BizTalk Server via a relay endpoint hosted on Azure Service Bus, querying Salesforce to get more details about the opportunity, and then inserting those details into an on-premise SQL Server database.

This tutorial is in the works and should be out soon. Just wanted to get the word out to the community.

Stay tuned!!

BizTalk Server 2013 - New Features Blog Series - Dependency Tracking

2013-03-28T00:00:09Z

In this blog series, I’ll try to go through the new features introduced in BizTalk Server 2013. I’ll start with Dependency Tracking.

A BizTalk Server application may contain a bunch of artifacts such as send ports, receive locations, orchestrations, schemas, transforms, etc. Moreover, sometimes these artifacts can be shared between more than one BizTalk Server application. So, it becomes very difficult for BizTalk Server admins to come up with a “dependency tree” that provides information on both the aspects of dependencies, which are:

How a given artifact “uses” other artifacts.
How a given artifact is “used by” other artifacts.

The BizTalk Server Administration console uses the same philosophy to display the dependencies. Let’s see how it works.

Let’s pick an artifact in the BizTalk Server Administration console, for example, a receive location. Right-click the artifact, and select View Dependencies.

There’s a new Dependency Statistics pane at the bottom of the page that now lists the dependencies, categorizing it as Used by (which artifacts use this receive location) and Using (which artifacts are used by this receive location). This is how the pane looks like.

The Dependency Pane shows that the ReceiveOppNotification receive location is used by one Receive Port but the receive location in turn uses two pipeline components. Notice that the numbers are links, so you can click those to see the dependent/dependent on artifacts. So, if I click on the number 1 above, the top pane will refresh to show the receive port that uses the ReceiveOppNotification receive location. Similarly, if I click on 2, the top pane refreshes to list the two pipelines that are used by the receive location.

Notice that even though you are now viewing the pipelines that are used by the receive location, the Dependency Statistics pane does not refresh to show the dependency view for the pipelines. It won’t refresh the view, until you select another artifact and click View Dependency again to view it’s dependencies. Also notice the breadcrumbs trail at the top. That shows which dependent artifacts we are looking at and enables you to go back to any level.

This feature should really be helpful for BizTalk Server Admins in tracking what other artifacts might get affected if they update a schema, for example. All this while the admins had to manually document all these dependencies but with this enhancement, hopefully it should become much simpler for them.

Other Links

What are the XPIPELINE_MESSAGETYPE and XPIPELINE_REQUESTMESSAGETYPE properties

2012-12-05T21:56:56Z

While working with Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs, both as part of the Enterprise Application Integration project as well as the TPM Portal, we come across a couple of properties that are by default promoted on any given message. These two properties are:

XPIPELINE_MESSAGETYPE
XPIPELINE_REQUESTMESSAGETYPE

XPIPELINE_REQUESTMESSAGETYPE

This property contains the message type of the message when the bridge first receives the message.

XPIPELINE_MESSAGETYPE

This property contains the message type of the message at any given point of time while the bridge processes the message. A message goes through some transformations at different stages of the bridge. For example, a message might get transformed during the Transform stage and hence it would message type would change. The XPIPELINE_MESSAGETYPE property contains this most recent message type for the message.

How are these useful?

These properties are used by the stages/activities within the bridge to take actions appropriately. The stages/activities do not need to now look into a message and figure out the message type. Instead they could simply use the value of these properties. For example, depending on the value of the XPIPELINE_REQUESTMESSAGETYPE, the Transform activity decides what transforms should be made available to the user for selection. The Transform stage shows only those transforms that the have the message type of the source message same as the value of the XPIPELINE_REQUESTMESSAGETYPE.

Also, for an end user, these properties can be used while configuring the Route action. You can read more about route actions at the following link:

BizTalk Server 2013 Beta – What’s New?

2012-11-15T06:55:48Z

In this post, I am going to list down the key new features introduced in BizTalk Server 2013 Beta and also provide some useful links that describe how to use those features. But, to start with, this is where you can download the Beta bits for BizTalk Server 2013 from - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35553.

Now the list of new features.

Integration with Windows Azure – BizTalk Server 2013 provides a bunch of new adapters to extend connectivity of BizTalk Server apps to Windows Azure. BizTalk Server includes the new SB-Messaging adapter, WCF-BasicHttpRelay adapter, and the WCF-NetTCPRelay adapter for Azure integration. Specifically, you could use the SB-Messaging adapter to send and receive messages from Service Bus Queues and Topics on Windows Azure. Here, are some links that describe how to use these adapters.

Related Links

SB-Messaging Adapter
WCF-BasicHttpRelay Adapter
WCF-NetTcpRelay Adapter
Tutorial - Creating a Hybrid Application Using BizTalk Server 2013 – This tutorial describes how to use the integration offerings from Microsoft (both BizTalk Server and Service Bus EAI/EDI Labs) to create a hybrid solution.

BizTalk Server + REST – BizTalk Server now includes an out-of-the-box support for REST. BizTalk Server 2013 includes a WCF-WebHttp adapter that you can use to both invoke a REST endpoint as well as expose BizTalk Server artifacts as RESTful resources.

Related links

WCF-WebHttp Adapter.
Tutorial – Invoking a REST Interface Using BizTalk Server – There’s an end-to-end tutorial as well that demonstrates how to use the WCF-WebHttp adapter with to invoke a REST endpoint.

Updates to SharePoint adapter – The updated SharePoint adapter lets you choose between the client-side object model and the server-side object model for connecting to a SharePoint Server.

Related Links

SharePoint Services Adapter

The new SFTP adapter – BizTalk Server 2013 includes a new SFTP adapter to send and receive messages from a secure FTP server using the SSH file transfer protocol.

Related Links

SFTP Adapter

Configuring handlers for dynamic send ports – BizTalk Server 2013 now provides the option to set a host handler instead of always using the adapter’s default host.

Related Links

Dynamic Send Port Handler is Configurable

Tracking dependencies between artifacts – BizTalk Server artifacts can be dependent on each other. An orchestration can be dependent on send ports and receive locations, the ports can be dependent on pipelines and maps, so on and so forth. If one of these artifacts has to be updated, there was no easy and obvious way to figure out which other artifacts would be impacted. BizTalk Server Administration console now includes a Dependency Tracking pane that shows these dependencies and let’s you drill down to the last artifact type in the dependency list.

Related Links

Integrated ESB Toolkit – ESB Toolkit is now included as part of the BizTalk Server core offering. The ESB Toolkit installation is now included as part of BizTalk Server installation and the configuration experience is much simpler as well.

Related Links

Installing and Configuring the Microsoft BizTalk ESB Toolkit

Changes to BAM Alerts – BAM alerts had a dependency on SQL Server Notification Services (SSNS). SSNS was deprecated in SQL Server 2008 and removed in SQL Server 2012. So, for users to configure BAM Alerts if they had SQL Server 2012 as the backend database, a new option had to be introduced. That was done in the shape of an Alert Host Service that now runs and has a dependency on the Database Mail feature of SQL Server. So, if you have SQL Server 2008, BAM Alerts would continue to use SSNS. If you have SQL Server 2012, the Alert Host Service is used in conjunction with the Database Mail feature to provide BAM related alerts.

Updates in the platform stack – BizTalk Server 2013 supports the following new versions of the software dependency stack

Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Windows Server 2012, Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.
.NET Framework 4.5
Visual Studio 2012
SQL Server 2012 and SQL Server 2008 SP1

For a complete list of software stack supported, see Hardware and Software Requirements.

What do you want to see in the official documentation for BizTalk Server 2013 Beta and Service Bus EAI/EDI Labs?

2012-11-14T21:10:42Z

I am reaching out to the BizTalk community to come up with a list a scenarios that you want to be documented as part of the official documentation from Microsoft. You can share with us scenarios that are:

Hybrid – Scenarios that involve both BizTalk Server as well as Service Bus EAI/EDI Labs. This could be a scenario where a part of the solution is hosted on the cloud while the remaining part of the solution is hosted on-premise using BizTalk Server. You could also have hybrid scenarios that involve all the processing on the cloud and then the output data is stored on on-prem LOBs.

Purely cloud – Scenarios where the entire solution is set up using cloud-based technologies, end to end.

No solution can be set up around a single technology. So, needless to say, you can suggest scenarios/solutions that involve different technologies including but not limited to Service Bus, Windows Azure SQL Database, etc.

This is your chance to have your scenarios addressed and included as guidance in the Help documentation. So, reach out and let me know and we’ll work on prioritizing and providing a solution, either in the shape of a sample, a blog post, or including that in the official Help documentation. You can provide your inputs either as comments to this blog post or drop me an e-mail.

BizTalk Server 2010 R2 – July 2012 CTP!!

2012-09-17T02:20:15Z

Exciting times !! After a gap of two years BizTalk Server is kicking back again, and it’s not just kicking, it’s roaring!! Through this blog, I attempt to put down a list of new features and updates that have been introduced in the CTP.

There are two broad categories of offerings for BizTalk Server 2010 R2 CTP. They are:

Updates to BizTalk Server
Support for running BizTalk Server on an Azure VM

Availability

The July 2012 CTP of BizTalk Server 2010 R2 is available as a managed Technology Adoption Program (TAP). If you are interested, please let me know and I should be able to connect you with the team driving the TAP engagements. To reach me you can either leave a comment on this post or tweet me at @nitin_msft.

Updates to BizTalk Server

Enabling connectivity to Azure Service Bus assets – This is the BIG new feature introduced in the CTP. BizTalk Server now boasts of out-of-the-box adapters that enable you to send and receive messages from Azure Service Bus entities like Queues, Topics, and Relays. BizTalk Server now has an SB-Messaging adapter that you could use to send and receive messages from a Service Bus Queue or a Topic. Two more adapters (WCF-BasicHttpRelay and WCF-NetTcpRelay) adapters enable you to send and receive messages using the BasicHttpRelayBinding and the NetTcpRelayBinding respectively. Here are the list of adapters that enable you to do this:

Making BizTalk RESTful – A while back I had written a whitepaper on how to send REST messages using BizTalk Server. The article talks about how to use the WCF-Custom adapter to send messages to invoke REST interfaces. With the addition of WCF-WebHttp adapter, it is now as seamless as it could be to send messages to a REST resource. Moreover, you could also use the WCF-WebHttp adapter to receive RESTful messages into BizTalk Server.

You can read more about the adapter at WCF-WebHttp Adapter.

Support for the new platform stack – BizTalk Server 2010 R2 supports the latest versions of the platform stack. For the CTP release, the supported versions of the platform stack are:

Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and Windows Server 2012 RC
.NET Framework 4.5
Visual Studio 2012 RC
SQL Server 2012 and SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1

You can read more about this at Hardware and Software Requirements.

Support for Running BizTalk Server on an Azure VM

This is another key offering in the current CTP for BizTalk Server 2010 R2. Windows Azure now offers the capability to run Windows Azure VMs. You can host these VMs on Windows Azure and install applications like Microsoft SharePoint, SQL Server, etc. With the CTP, you also have an option to setup and configure a Windows Azure VM running BizTalk Server 2010 R2. You can either configure a single-node BizTalk Server setup or a multi-node BizTalk Server setup. For more information, see Configure BizTalk Server 2010 R2 on a Windows Azure VM.