Connected Systems in the Great White North

Change in Role, BizTalk Roadshow and BizTalk 2010 Certification

Peter Kelcey — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 18:26:28 GMT

So after 5 great years being a technology specialist for connected systems, I've decided to take on a new challenge at Microsoft Canada. I’ve slowly been winding down my BizTalk specific activities for the last month now and as one of my final actions, I wanted to let people know about the upcoming BizTalk 2010 Canadian roadshow and the new BizTalk 2010 Certification.

BizTalk Canadian Roadshow

1. The BizTalk team is hosting a roadshow this year in Toronto and Montreal. We will have Rahul Garg (Senior Product Manager from Redmond) at both events to speak about the BizTalk and connected systems platform roadmaps. We will also have partners and clients speaking at the event. So this should be a very interesting and useful event for you to attend.

The Toronto Event Details

Date: April 14^th

Location: 1950 Meadowvale Blvd, Mississauga, On, L5N 8L9

Time: 8:30 Registration, 1:00 Finish

Registration Link: https://microsoft.crgevents.com/BusinessIntegration2011/Content/Home.aspx

The Montreal Event Details

Date: April 12^th

Location: 2000, Av. McGill College, Bureau 450

Time: 9:00 Registration, 1:30 Finish

Registration Link: https://microsoft.crgevents.com/BusinessIntegration2011/Content/Home.aspx

BizTalk Exam

2. After skipping BizTalk 2009, we now have a new BizTalk certification exam specifically for 2010. 2010 You can find details at http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?ID=70-595

Cheers and stay connected people

Peter

CRM 2011 Integration How to Video #1: BizTalk On-Premise to CRM 2011

Peter Kelcey — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 06:28:00 GMT

I recently participated with our MCS Canada team on a large BizTalk 2009 and CRM 4.0 integration project. I gained a ton of experience about CRM integration from that project and I thought I’d speak about it at our semi-annual TechReady internal conference. Not long before TechReady though, we release CRM 2011 and I realized that speaking about BizTalk 2009 and CRM 4.0 was about as relevant as speaking about Windows 98 and Trumpet Winsock implementations (I was reading a Slashdot article this week about the Trumpet Winsock creator… so that’s where the reference came from…). I hastily decided to refocus the presentation on CRM 2011 and BizTalk 2010. That meant that I had to quickly figure out exactly what the integration story was between these two products. After a bunch of trial and error and some helpful conversations with folks from the CRM 2011 team, I figure out the options. It turns out that you have TWO options for integrating BizTalk 2010 and CRM 2011. Yes indeed, you have two different methods to choose from when integrating these two products! I ended up having a fairly relevant and well received presentation to deliver. From that internal session, I’ve repurposed my content into a publicly ready format and created a shorter walk through video that explains the two options that you have. Instead of trying to write a lengthy blog post about how to do that, I’ve just filmed a walkthrough of the process. (I found that these video walkthroughs were highly successful when I did them for the BizTalk ESB, so I thought I’d do them again here for CRM) Also, I’ve included the source code project that I use in the video so that you can get a jumpstart on your process.

All in all, I found the process to be a very simple one once I figure out a few basic concepts. Hopefully, this blog post will help you figure out those concepts more quickly than I did. Once you’ve got a grip on those, then I believe you’ll find this integration process to be a very easy one. As with most of these blog videos that I do, I created this after midnight when the house was quite so if you find some issues or bloopers, let me know and I’ll correct them.

Below is an overview of the components, tools and services at play in to the process. In the video, I’ll walk you through this diagram in more depth before showing you the actual project I built. In this diagram, you can see that there is data flowing from BizTalk out to the CRM 2011 cloud service as well as data flowing from CRM 2011 Online back through the firewall to BizTalk on-premise. In this first video, I focus on the BizTalk to CRM 2011 Online option. In a day or two, I’ll post a second video that shows the CRM 2011 Online event notification being sent back to an BizTalk on-premise installation. (it’s a cool one…)

This is quite a long video (>45 minutes) so I had to split it into a multipart zip file in order to get it to fit into my SkyDrive folder.

You can get:

Part one at http://cid-04bc12b1f7b2979a.office.live.com/self.aspx/BlogVideos/CRMBTS%5E_Video%5E_Multi.zip
Part two at http://cid-04bc12b1f7b2979a.office.live.com/self.aspx/BlogVideos/CRMBTS%5E_Video%5E_Multi.z01
The source project and test file here http://cid-04bc12b1f7b2979a.office.live.com/self.aspx/BlogVideos/BizTalkToCRMOnline.zip

You’ll need to download both parts of the zip file and then use WinZip to extract them.

Cheers and stay connected people

Peter

Local Case Study for BizTalk 2010 and B2B

Peter Kelcey — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 15:22:00 GMT

When selecting a new technology platform, everyone loves to know the platform has already been proven out in production in some other organizations. (Let them find all the bugs and issues! Not us!). With that in mind, I wanted to call out the new case study that we have published for one of our location Canadian BizTalk partners and BizTalk 2010. QLogitek (http://www.qlogitek.com) is a cloud based provider of B2B services and Trading Partner Management. They have been operating for years on a platform that they built mostly in house. With the release of BizTalk 2010 and its enhanced EDI and TPM capabilities, QLogitek decided that it was time to migrate off their custom legacy code and onto the Microsoft platform. They join out Technology Adopter Program (TAP) and started to build out a SOA based verison of the EDI/TPM platform using the BizTalk 2010 beta. I’ll let the case study (at http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Microsoft-SQL-Server-2008-R2-Enterprise/QLogitek/Supply-Chain-Integrator-Relies-on-Microsoft-Platform-to-Facilitate-20-Billion-in-Business/4000008714) speak for itself, but I did want to call out a couple of quotes:

With its flexible solution based on the Microsoft platform, QLogitek can provide real-time access to transactional data and quickly launch new offerings. The company can also deploy B2B platforms for new enterprise customers up to 75 percent faster.
“With Intelligent Mapper, we can look at a purchase order with 100,000 line items and visually create complex mappings 30 to 40 percent faster than we could in the past.
“We can add a single trading partner to an established B2B platform 90 percent faster, and we expect to reduce the time and cost of adding new enterprise customers by 75 percent.”

Also, I wanted to send my congrats to the Qlogitek team for a great job done while working with the beta.

Cheers and stay connected:

Peter

BizTalk 2010 has been released

Peter Kelcey — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 18:32:36 GMT

Many of you have been waiting for this, and BizTalk 2010 has just been released to manufacturing. It 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.

Cheers

Peter

Using StreamInsight to Monitor SQL Profile data for Events in SQL Server

Peter Kelcey — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 23:59:28 GMT

Nice project put together by one of our MVPs. He’s used the StreamInsight CEP tool to monitor data from SQL Profiler.

http://www.sqlis.com/sqlis/post/Streaming-Profiler-Data-Through-StreamInsight.aspx

Cheers

Peter

Welcoming a new citizen to the blogosphere and thinking about “Back-room” programmers

Peter Kelcey — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 16:54:00 GMT

During my years in the IT world I’ve been fortunate enough to meet ton of really intelligent and brilliant people. Many of them have been a joy to speak with and work along side of. However a number of them have been incredibly painful to interact with. I’m sure most of you who have worked in along side “techies” and programmers know what I’m talking about. I’ve always referred to these people as “back-room” programmers. There are the people who you want to be creating your software and IT systems, but you also want to keep them shut up in the back-room so that they don’t interact with you clients, direct reports, partners or business users. There are many reasons why we don’t want them to emerge from their back-room solitude. Some are quick to anger, some are quick to belittle or diminish others, others can’t communicate well. Some of these folks have trouble interacting with others, some are extremely shy while others simply can’t pull themselves out of the technical world long enough to be able to effectively interact with others. For all of these reasons, we often see these folks left along in a back-room to continue churning out great code/solutions on their own.

Now as brilliant as a back-room programmer may be, they are often limited in their career. Being brilliant isn’t enough to have success in a professional field. We need those soft skills and people skills in order to grow beyond a simple programmer and into an effective IT consultant or team leader. Over the years, I’ve seen many back-room programmers passed over for promotions, public recognition and general career advancement.

Of course, when people are routinely passed over for advance and feel that they are missing out on the success that others are achieving, resentment sets in. They come up with any number of reasons why they are left behind while others advance. “Some manager doesn’t like them”, “Some manager is stupid and can’t see how brilliant they are”, “so and so over on that team played politics to get their new job”, “so and so over their boast about their accomplishments and therefore got a role they didn’t deserve”. There are any number of reasons why they haven’t achieved the career success that they hoped for, but the sad thing is, they often fail to look at themselves and assess whether or not they are the reason. We need more than simple technical brilliance to achieve in a professional career. We do need all of those great soft skills and people skills. However, above and beyond all of these soft skills, we really need to have a modicum of self awareness. If we aren’t aware of our own needs, wants, limitations, fears, hang-ups, strengths and limitations then we simply can’t expect that we are going to being able to connect well with other people. To achieve career success (and life success really), we really need to be aware of why we think the way we think, why we act the way that we act and why we think what we do about others. Once we’ve mastered that (although you never really master this), then we can go out and have great personal and working relationships with others. When you combine this with a strong technical expertise and natural talent, then you have the formula for tremendous success. I often look at new graduates from university and wonder which ones will bring this complete package and which ones will only bring strong technical skills. Its sad really, to see brilliant people trapped in a back-room wasting their talent due to a self imposed lack of self awareness.

Now that I’ve said my piece about that, I also wanted to welcome my wife to the blogosphere. (http://susyfonseca.wordpress.com) There is a connection between my rant today and my welcome message to her. My wife has recently left the IT field (she lead a product development team at a large Telco here) to purse a new career as an art therapist (www.susyfonseca.ca). She’s focused on helping children and adults connect with themselves so that they can realize why they think the way they do and why they act the way they do. I knew nothing about Art Therapy before I met her, but over the years I’ve found it to be a very fascinating discipline. Human minds are conditioned with all kinds of inhibitions and filters which keep our words in check. We often think things that we will never verbally admit. However, the neat thing is, these filters are pretty much only setup to filter verbal communication. When an individual creates art, their true feelings, wants desires, hates and fears will often slip past these filters. When combined with an ongoing discussion with an Art Therapist, this unfiltered art can become a powerful tool for self discovery. It can be used to help an individual discover a ton of great stuff about themselves. This then leads into an ability to interact with others in a healthier and more open way. This is certainly a program that many of the people I have worked with over the years would have benefited from! (and yes, that includes me… :)) Hopefully, this new career will help many many people achieve better success (in the IT field and everywhere else in life).

To wrap up, today’s blog entry certainly wasn’t technically focused, but hey! I have a blog tag for “personal” entries that I have never used. I figured it was time. I’ve been ending my recent blogs with the tagline “stay connected”. Today I’ll expand that a little bit and end with

“Stay Connected (with yourself first!)”

Application Infrastructure Virtual Launch Event

Peter Kelcey — Mon, 10 May 2010 10:08:57 GMT

Our Connected Systems platform encompasses a number of technologies including BizTalk Server, Windows Server AppFabric, Azure, Windows Azure AppFabric, WCF, etc… If you are interested in any or all of those products, then you should check out our upcoming virtual launch event. It’s going to be held on May 20th 2010 (8:30AM Pacific Time). Details are below, the event site is http://www.appinfrastructure.com and details on the event are included below

Application Infrastructure: Cloud Benefits Delivered

http://www.appinfrastructure.com

Want to bring the benefits of the cloud to your current IT environment? Cloud computing offers a range of benefits, including elastic scale and never-before-seen applications. While you ponder your long-term investment in the cloud, you can harness a number of cloud benefits in your current IT environment now.

Join us on May 20 at 8:30 A.M. Pacific Time to learn how your current IT assets can harness some of the benefits of the cloud on-premises—and can readily connect to new applications and data running in the cloud. As part of the Virtual Launch Event, Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst Yefim Natis will discuss the latest trends and biggest questions facing the Application Infrastructure space. He will also speak about the role Application Infrastructure will play in helping businesses benefit from the cloud. Plus, you’ll hear some exciting product announcements and a keynote from Abhay Parasnis, GM of Application Server Group at Microsoft. Parasnis will discuss the latest Microsoft investments in the Application Infrastructure space aimed at delivering on-demand scalability, highly available applications, a new level of connectivity, and more. Save the date!

Cheers and stay connected folks…

Peter

Error during configuration of the ESB toolkit 2.0

Peter Kelcey — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 01:41:57 GMT

I recently helped a client debug an exception they were getting when they tried to run the ESB configuration tool. They kept receiving a rather puzzle error messages which stated:

“The type initializer for ‘EsbConfigurationTool.Helper’ threw an exception. You must have Microsoft ESB Guidance installed in order to run the tool.”

Now this is certainly an odd error message since the ESB Toolkit no longer goes by the name ESB Guidance. Also the client most certainly had the toolkit installed. To dig a little deeper into this, I asked for the log file from that the configuration tool creates. This is created in the same directory as the configuration tool and is called “EsbConfigurationTool.log”. After looking in this, I saw a number of error messages which resembled the following:

ESBConfigurationTool.exe Error: 0 : An error has occurred:

Unknown error (0x80005000)

Stack Trace:

at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Bind(Boolean throwIfFail)

at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Bind()

at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.RefreshCache()

at EsbConfigurationTool.Helper.GetWebSites()

ESBConfigurationTool.exe Error: 0 : An error has occurred:

IIS Install Registry Key is missing.

I could see from this that the issue was actually with IIS and not with a missing copy of the ESB guidance. From this we were able to determine that the IIS 6.0 extensions were not installed on the Windows 2008 system. Once the client installed those, the configuration ran properly. This is certainly an error message that needs updating, hopefully you won’t be caught by it.

Cheers

Handling Issues with the ESB Toolkit 2.0 Samples on 64 Bit Systems

Peter Kelcey — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 18:29:59 GMT

If you’re trying to install the ESB Toolkit 2.0 samples on a 64 bit environment, then you have likely seen an error similar to the following.

Build succeeded.
0 Warning(s)
0 Error(s)

Time Elapsed 00:00:07.87
New-Object : Exception calling ".ctor" with "0" argument(s): "Explorer OM is no
t supported in a 64bit process."
At C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Source\Install\Scripts\ESBFunctions.ps1:
656 char:19
+     $exp = New-Object <<<< Microsoft.BizTalk.ExplorerOM.BtsCatalogExplorer
Property 'ConnectionString' cannot be found on this object; make sure it exists
and is settable.
At C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Source\Install\Scripts\ESBFunctions.ps1:
657 char:7
+     $exp.C <<<< onnectionString = $btsConnectionString
Cannot index into a null array.
At C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Source\Install\Scripts\ESBFunctions.ps1:
658 char:27
+     $app = $exp.Applications[$ <<<< appName]
Application Microsoft.Practices.ESB not found
New-Object : Exception calling ".ctor" with "0" argument(s): "Explorer OM is no
t supported in a 64bit process."
At C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Source\Install\Scripts\ESBFunctions.ps1:
656 char:19
+     $exp = New-Object <<<< Microsoft.BizTalk.ExplorerOM.BtsCatalogExplorer
Property 'ConnectionString' cannot be found on this object; make sure it exists
and is settable.
At C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Source\Install\Scripts\ESBFunctions.ps1:
657 char:7
+     $exp.C <<<< onnectionString = $btsConnectionString
Cannot index into a null array.
At C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Source\Install\Scripts\ESBFunctions.ps1:
658 char:27
+     $app = $exp.Applications[$ <<<< appName]
Application GlobalBank.ESB not found
Stopping BizTalk Services
New-Object : Exception calling ".ctor" with "0" argument(s): "Explorer OM is no
t supported in a 64bit process."
At C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Source\Install\Scripts\ESBFunctions.ps1:
718 char:19
+     $exp = New-Object <<<< Microsoft.BizTalk.ExplorerOM.BtsCatalogExplorer
Property 'ConnectionString' cannot be found on this object; make sure it exists
and is settable.
At C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Source\Install\Scripts\ESBFunctions.ps1:
719 char:7
+     $exp.C <<<< onnectionString = $btsConnectionString
Cannot index into a null array.
At C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Source\Install\Scripts\ESBFunctions.ps1:
720 char:27
+     $app = $exp.Applications[$ <<<< appName]
Cannot index into a null array.
At C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Source\Install\Scripts\ESBFunctions.ps1:
721 char:36
+     $referenceApp = $exp.Applications[$ <<<< referencedAppName]
Application GlobalBank.ESB or Microsoft.Practices.ESB not found
Microsoft (R) BizTalk Application Deployment Utility Version 3.8.368.0

This is caused by the fact that the install scripts are leveraging BizTalk’s BTSCatalogExplorer Object Model which is only available in 32 bit mode. Don’t worry, you can still install the samples. What you have to do is to manually launch a 32 bit version of the powershell console and then run the powershell script from there. This will allow the script to access the BTSCatalogExplorer OM without problem.

Cheers and keep on BizTalking…

Peter

Videos www.Cloudcast.net

Peter Kelcey — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 03:24:02 GMT

Hey, my ESB Toolkit videos have found a new home. They’ve made their way over to www.cloudcasts.net It’s a great community site dedicated to hosting webcasts concerning Microsoft technologies. Run by the very prolific webcaster Alan Smith, this site has a ton of great webcasts concerning a number of different technologies. Check it out if you haven’t seen it yet.

Cheers

Peter

ESB Toolkit Webcast – On Demand Links

Peter Kelcey — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:21:29 GMT

The webcast that Ofer and I ran last week “Improving Business Agility with the Enterprise Service Bus” went quite well (at least that’s the feedback we heard from those of you who attended.)

For those of you who couldn’t attend and those of you who just want to view this at a later date, the On-Demand version of the webcast can be found at

https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mseventsbmo/view?id=1032440359&role=attend&pw=656F8D09

Cheers and keep on BizTalking…

Peter

Host Integration Server 2006 – Service Pack 1: Now Available

Peter Kelcey — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 02:53:54 GMT

Wow, it must be the week for Service Pack announcements. First we see the BizTalk 2006-R1 SP and now HIS 2006 gets its very own SP. Details from about the release are below. Please note, that the Knowledge Base articles listed below might not be active for a couple of days. So if you try and them and they don’t work, give it a day before you hammer me on posting dead links.

>>>>

Host Integration Server 2006 Service Pack 1 is now available for download at the following location:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c0cc5e8d-fc47-41ac-bcad-67832249eb41

Host Integration Server 2006 Service Pack 1 provides the latest updates for Microsoft Host Integration Server 2006 and Microsoft BizTalk Adapters for Host Systems. It delivers customer requested hotfixes that improve the quality, reliability and supportability of Host Integration Server 2006 and BizTalk Adapters for Host Systems. The following two Knowledge Base articles will be available soon to describe the list of fixes and how to download the service pack:

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

KB 979497 – How to obtain the latest Host Integration Server 2006 service pack – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/979497

Congratulations to the HIS Product Team, BPD Engineering Services team and CSS engineers who made this happen. Having this service pack available for our customers now allows us to efficiently support customers and focus on future releases of Host Integration Server.

>>>>

Cheers and keep on BizTalking…

Peter

BizTalk 2006-R2 SP1 Now Available

Peter Kelcey — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 23:04:04 GMT

Folks… I admit that I’ve blatantly copied this from the BizTalk Server Team Blog. Just trying to spread to the word :)

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.

</Plagiarism>

Cheers and keep on BizTalking…

Peter

I’m Co-Presenting an MSDN Webcast on Business Agility with the ESB

Peter Kelcey — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:04:31 GMT

On Feb 11th, I’ll be co-presenting an MSDN Webcast with Ofer Ashkenazi (Senior Technical Product Manager). We will be focusing on how the ESB can accelerate the implementation of a dynamic and highly reusable messaging and integration framework. 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/Programmer.

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.

Cheers and keep on BizTalking…

ESB Toolkit How to Video #8: Routing to Azure Based Services

Peter Kelcey — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:01:00 GMT

Welcome to #8 in my series of ESB Toolkit How To Videos. If you haven’t already seen the previous videos, I encourage you to do so. The previous ones can be found here

In the past we have spoken about the concept of an Internet Service Bus (ISB) which extends the capabilities of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) out into the cloud. With the arrival of Windows Azure AppFabric, we are beginning to see the realization of this ISB vision. More and more organizations are using cloud based services to solve integration problems across organizational boundaries, firewalls, DMZs etc. I do believe we are rapidly approaching a world with an onsite ESB will power SOA connectivity within an organizations firewall while an ISB will extend this same functionality out onto the web and into other organizations ESBs.

Now, a number of other bloggers have already written some great posts about how to connect BizTalk up to Azure based services. If you haven’t already seen them, I strongly recommend you check out Richard’s blog and Brian’s recent blog to see how to setup this integration. Those of you who have seen the blog before know that I like to focus on the ESB Toolkit. Therefore, I’m not just going to replicate Richard’s and Brian’s work, instead I’m going to show you how to create an itinerary and resolver that can dynamically route a message to a service hosted in the Azure AppFabric using the services in the ESB Toolkit. In Richard and Brian’s blogs, they show you how to use static ports in BizTalk to achieve this. With the ESB toolkit, we really like to take advantage of dynamic ports to create reusable Off-Ramps. So what I’ll show you today is how to configure an ESB itinerary to use the reusable Off-Ramp instead of a static BizTalk port.

Amazingly, all it takes to route a message from the ESB to an Azure service is to proper configure your resolver. You don’t need to create a new type of On-Ramp or configure any new component. The ESB is ready to integrate with Azure based services right out of the box as long as you can provide the proper configuration information in your resolver. In the video, I show you which properties to configure in the resolver and how to find out what data to use in these properties.

Click here for the video

Cheers and keep on BizTalk…

Peter

Webcast – Building a Demand Driven Supply Chain

Peter Kelcey — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:53:42 GMT

Update Dec 3, This event is now available “On-Demand” at On Demand URL:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/InviteOnly.aspx?EventID=56-1E-60-91-4F-33-94-40-BA-3B-76-70-1E-6C-6A-88&Culture=en-CA

As part of the “BizTalk In Your Industry” webcast series that Microsoft Canada is running, we are hosting a session tomorrow focused on the retail and manufacturing industries. I am very pleased to have supply chain experts “QLogitek” joining us to speak about how organizations can enable a demand driven supply chain. The full session abstract and registration link is below. If you can’t join us live, don’t worry. We will be recording this session and it will be available on-demand. However, if you can make it, we’d love to have you join.

December 1st at 2:00 PM EST, Register now for the Webcast

A great way to connect your business systems and partners.

The top two business challenges facing retail supply chain executives in this economy are increased lead times for the delivery of merchandise to stores and low inventory turns, according to Aberdeen’s Retail research.

These business challenges can cause higher supply chain costs and lead to lower than average attainment of gross margin return on inventory (GMROI), fill rate, cash conversion cycle, and forecast accuracy.

Optimized Demand Management activities help lower operating costs. Organizations can achieve best-in-class status by automating and integrating Forecasting, Sourcing & Replenishment activities with their suppliers and customers.

Learn how a Demand-driven Supply Chain Network (DDSN) helps the extended retail enterprise integrate its suppliers & customers to its core Demand Management processes.

Register for this webcast co-presented by Microsoft and QLOGITEK. This webcast will feature an Enterprise Retail Organization using a DDSN framework and leveraging a Microsoft-based platform to help build a best-in-class retail operation.

Cheers and keep on BizTalking…

Peter

My ESB Toolkit How-to Videos are now on MSDN

Peter Kelcey — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 16:15:44 GMT

Hi all. I’ve always used Skydrive and this blog to host my ESB Toolkit how-to videos but I have had a number of people ask me to find a better place for them to live. Well, I am now pleased to say that we are moving them to the ESB Toolkit page on MSDN. If you browse over to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-ca/biztalk/dd876606.aspx and check out the video section, you will see the first three videos from my series. In order to post these to MSDN, I had to re-film them use a better resolution and screen capture rate. I also had to sanitize some of the sample data that I used. Therefore, only three are currently available since I haven’t found the time to redo all of them yet. I hope to migrate the remaining ones to the MSDN required format soon. Also, I plan to do at least one more in the series which shows how to create new messaging level services that can snap into the ESB environment.

So in short, if you’ve come here to download any of the videos, I encourage you to try the MSDN site first.

Cheers and keep on BizTalking…

Peter

Webcast - Integration Concerns for Healthcare Organizations

Peter Kelcey — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:37:34 GMT

Update Nov 31, 2009 : This webcast is now available on demand at http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032432973&EventCategory=5&IO=NPepxX6Uez%2fMP%2bozhR4p8Q%3d%3d&culture=en-CA&CountryCode=CA

In the next few weeks, Microsoft Canada will be hosting a number of webcasts focused on integration solutions for specific industries. On November 26th, we will be focusing on solutions for Healthcare organizations. I will stress that these events are being run by the Canadian team with a focus on Canadian organizations. If you can’t make it to this event, we will be recording it, so you can watch it on demand. The registration link and session abstract is below.

November 26^th 2:00 PM EST, Register now for the Webcast

A better way to connect your distributed systems.

Today’s healthcare organizations face many challenges in implementing, managing and maintaining HL7 integration solutions. Integration solutions must be able to support mission-critical healthcare systems, and meet the requirements of the current regional and provincial initiatives while at the same time ensuring future EHR initiatives can be accommodated within the solution’s framework.
This event will focus on tools, methodologies and best practices to help simplify and accelerate Healthcare Integration solutions. Attend and learn from real-world success stories on how Microsoft-based technologies were applied to deliver healthcare solutions.

EHR and HealthVault
HL7 v2 and v3
Regional Integration
Patient & Provider Portals

Paperless Clinical Operation
Medical Device Integration
Reporting & Analytics
Performance Management

Register now for this webcast co-presented by Microsoft and Dapasoft.
Dapasoft is a technology partner which specializes in Healthcare solutions. They will introduce Corolar, a new Healthcare solution based on Microsoft® BizTalk® Server, that helps simplify and accelerate HL7 Integration solutions.

Cheers and keep on BizTalking…

Peter

Technology Updates from PDC 2009 and BizTalk 2009-R2

Peter Kelcey — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:37:36 GMT

So PDC is over and boy did we get a lot of announcements with regards to our Connected System’s Technologies. We learned that the upcoming “Dublin” application server for WCF and WF components will formally be named Windows AppFabric. We also learned that Azure.NET Server has been renamed to Azure AppFabric. We also learned about the roadmap for BizTalk. You can expect BizTalk 2009-R2 will be arriving sometime at the end of next year. It will deliver enhancements in the follow areas:

Platform Alignment – We will be supporting the latest servers and tools

VS 2010
Windows Server 2008-R2
SQL Server 2008-R2

Productivity Improvements

A new dashboard to apply and manage performance parameters (today, tuning a BizTalk server is tricky to do as you have to be aware of a number of registry keys, database based parameters etc)
PowerShell based capabilities for management tasks
Updated SCOM object model to better reflect BizTalk artifacts

New Mapper enhancements to make it easier to work with and understand complex maps
An FTPS adapter will be provided right out of the box.

RFID

Support for event filtering right out of the box

During the session, the team demo’d the new Mapper enhancements and got a great reaction from the crowd. For any of you who have ever struggled to keep your sanity when working with a large map, you’ll likely love these simple enhancements.

Now, at the PDC session (which you can view online http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/SVR15. ) they did more than just speak about 2009-R2. They also demoed some very-very early bits from v.NEXT+1 (i.e. the one after 2009-R2). There are a number of key features that will be shipping in that version, the first and foremost being Windows Workflow (WF) integration into BizTalk. With this integration, you will be able to choose whether or not to use classic BizTalk orchestrations or WF based workflows. By integrating these two technologies, you can now do things like use the BizTalk mapper from within WF. I encourage you to check out the recording of the session to see the full roadmap and product demos.

Cheers and keep on BizTalking…

Peter

PDC & Source Code for ESB Toolkit How To Videos

Peter Kelcey — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:18:00 GMT

Since I started releasing the ESB Toolkit how-to videos, I’ve had several people ask me for the source code for all of the components I demo’d. Well, it took me way to long to get them packaged up, but here they are finally. I’ve packaged up everything that I used during the demos and it should be fairly straight forward for you to install it. There is an installation guide (Word 2007 format) contained in the attached ZIP archive that walks you through the install process.

The reason that I finally got around to getting this done is that my examples are now going to be used for the hands-on-labs at PDC 2009. If you want to get some hands on experience with the ESB Toolkit, drop by the Hands-On-Labs area of PDC and you will be able to work through the same projects that I have demo’d in the ESB Toolkit How-To series.

Cheers and keep on BizTalking…

Peter

SCOM Management Pack for BizTalk 2009 is Available.

Peter Kelcey — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 17:24:42 GMT

To all you folks who have been waiting for the new Management Pack for BizTalk 2009 to be released, it is finally here. You can download it at

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=389FCB89-F4CF-46D7-BC6E-57830D234F91&displaylang=en&displaylang=en

Cheers and keep on BizTalking…

Peter

“Pro BizTalk 2009” Book is Finally Available

Peter Kelcey — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:04:39 GMT

Yeah! Pro BizTalk 2009 is now published and available. It was an interesting project to be involved with (even in just a small way). You can find it on Amazon now at http://www.amazon.ca/Pro-BizTalk-2009-George-Dunphy/dp/1430219815/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251208723&sr=8-2

I wanted to thank Richard Seroter who acted as the technical reviewer for my chapter. I also wanted to point out his great book “SOA Patterns with BizTalk 2009” (in case anyone hasn’t already seen it).

Cheers and keep on BizTalking…

Peter

ESB Toolkit How To Video #7: A SharePoint Adapter Provider

Peter Kelcey — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 18:39:31 GMT

Welcome to #7 in my series of ESB Toolkit How To Videos. If you have not seen the previous videos, I encourage you to do so. The previous ones can be found here

1) Basic Itinerary Routing and UDDI Integration

2) Composite Itinerary and Dynamic Mapping

3) Itinerary Resolution in the Bus

4) Dynamic Itinerary Resolution in the Bus

5) Including Custom Orchestrations in the Itinerary Designer

6) Performance Metrics using Built in BAM

One very common thing that people will want the ESB to do is to route message to SharePoint where they can potentially kick off human based workflow. However, the base ESB Toolkit does not have an adapter provider for Windows SharePoint Services. BizTalk does have an "Adapter" for WSS, however the ESB toolkit does not have an "Adapter provider" for WSS. The Adapter Providers in the ESBT bridge between the new ESBT code and the traditional BizTalk components.

Now fortunately, the ESBT can be extended very quickly and we can add in our own adapter providers without the need for very much code at all. This past week, I was working with the guys over at QuickLearn to build out a WSS adapter provider that they planned to use in an upcoming BizTalk/ESBT demo. In this video, I'll show you how we created the adapter provider (using only a few lines of code) and how we registered it so that the design time tools and the runtime engine could use it. Now, while creating the adapter doesn't require much effort, I will admit that I had a hell of a time trying to get it registered properly and all of the associated configuration files aligned correctly. The ESBT relies heavily on reflection to load components at runtime, so if you don't name your component properly or register it correctly in the config files, then the ESBT engine won't be able to load the provider properly and you'll have a fun time trying to debug just exactly what you did wrong.

In order to make it easier for you, I've included my code and configuration files for download so that you don't have to rebuild everything that I show in the video.

I need to credit Nick Hauenstein over at QuickLearn (http://www.quicklearn.com/) for doing most of the initial leg work on building this out.

You can access the video here

You can download the project here

Cheers and keep on BizTalking

Peter

ESBT Toolkit How To Video #6: Performance Metrics using Built in BAM

Peter Kelcey — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 04:32:00 GMT

Welcome to #6 in my series of ESB Toolkit How To Videos. If you have not seen the previous videos, I encourage you to do so. The previous ones can be found here

1) Basic Itinerary Routing and UDDI Integration

2) Composite Itinerary and Dynamic Mapping

3) Itinerary Resolution in the Bus

4) Dynamic Itinerary Resolution in the Bus

5) Including Custom Orchestrations in the Itinerary Designer

There is a great (but sadly under appreciated and under discussed) feature in the ESB Toolkit that I want to focus on today. Back at last years SOA conference, I spent some time talking with Dmitri Ossipov (who lead the development of the ESBT) and he showed me some of the new features he was adding into the toolkit. The one that caught my eye immediately was the built in BAM tracking. The ESB Toolkit has the built in ability to automatically log tracking and performance information for your itineraries as they are processed by the ESB components. If you have enabled "Tracking" in your itineraries, then the ESBT automatically logs information to a BAM table in SQL Server every time any of the itineraries services execute. This data includes data about which service executed, which itinerary and version it was part of, what time it executed, what specific instance it was part of as well as the status of the overall itinerary. This data is a gold mine for those of you looking to track the overall performance of your ESB and related services. It can be used to view all kinds of invaluable information about which itineraries are being used, how well they are performing, which ones are too slow, which ones are failing, which individual services are under performing etc.

Now while the ESBT will automatically capture all of this information you, it doesn't come with any kind of user friendly mechanism for viewing, analyzing or interacting with this data. In this video, I'll show you how to easily setup a number of BAM Views that will allow you to quickly assess performance stats about your itineraries. I build these views out in Excel and that allows me to use standard pivot tables and charts to view the data and I slice it up. I have also created views that allow me to tracking the performance of specific itineraries across different versions and across time. This is great info to have if you want to understand if recent changes to an itinerary have resulted in better or worse performance than you previously had.

The following image shows one of the views that I setup to show me what the average, worst and best performance times were for my itineraries. This is pretty useful information to have as I can quickly identify performance issues in my itineraries. You can easily see that the "ComposedDemo" takes quite slow when compared to the "DemoService" itinerary. I can even drill down in the specifics of a single itinerary and find out if a specific ESB service is causing the overall poor performance.

Now, unlike my previous videos, where I just showed you how to build out a specific solution, I'm going to actually provide you with the components I've built. I've attached the Excel file that contains my BAM Views and you should be able to easily deploy these into your system and access the charts and tables that I show in the video. You will just need to have the ESBT installed as well as the BizTalk BAM components installed and configured.

In order to avoid make an hour long video, I do not go very deep into what BAM is or how you work it. If you are not familiar with BizTalk's BAM feature, there may be some elements of this video that are not 100% clear. However, if you have a basic understanding of what BAM is, then I hope this video will offer some great value.

The video can be accessed here:

The BAM Excel Project can be accessed here:

Cheers and keep on BizTalking

Peter

ESB Toolkit How To Video #5: Including Custom Orchestrations in Itineraries

Peter Kelcey — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 22:35:05 GMT

Update: Sorry folks, the first link I posted for the video was incorrect. I have updated it now:

Welcome to #5 in my series of ESB Toolkit How To Videos. If you have not seen the previous videos, I encourage you to do so. The previous ones can be found here

1) Basic Itinerary Routing and UDDI Integration

2) Composite Itinerary and Dynamic Mapping

3) Itinerary Resolution in the Bus

4) Dynamic Itinerary Resolution in the Bus

One of the great things about the ESB Toolkit is that it can be extended in a large number of ways. One of the common ways that developers will want to extend it, is to create custom BizTalk orchestrations that can be included within an ESB itinerary. With the default install of the Toolkit, you have access to two orchestration. The generic routing orch and the generic mapping orch. In this video, I'll show you how to create a new orchestration and then register it with the ESB so that you can access it from the itinerary designer and create an itinerary that will route messages to it.

The video can be accessed here

Cheers and keep on BizTalking...

Peter