Benjamin Guinebertière : BizTalk Server 2004

Sample Behavior of BizTalk Server 2004 SP1 with .NET Framework 2.0 installed

benjguin — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 10:05:30 GMT

On a test environment, we had this exception on one of the two BizTalk Server 2004 SP1 nodes:

Ticks must be between DateTime.MinValue.Ticks and DateTime.MaxValue.Ticks. Parameter name: ticks

This was a BizTalk Server 2004 event in Application event log

On the other node, they were .NET Framework 2.0 and BizTalk events (meaning that some code was not correctly written from a multithreading perspective).

In fact, what happened was that BizTalk Server 2004 was running on top of .NET Framework 2.0 on one node and on top of .NET Framework 1.1 on the other node. So, an orchestration dehydrating on none node and rehydrating on the other node was just serialized with a Framework and deserialized with another Framework.

Here are two KB articles related to that:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/907262/en-us (FIX: You receive an error message when you try to transfer data between an application that runs on the .NET Framework 2.0 and an application that runs on the .NET Framework 1.1)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/841405/en-us (BizTalk Server 2004 requires the .NET Framework 1.1)

Excerpt from KB841405:

To run BizTalk Server 2004 on a computer that also has the .NET Framework 2.0 installed, upgrade the computer that is running BizTalk Server 2004 to BizTalk Server 2004 SP2. BizTalk Server 2004 is only supported on a computer that has the .NET Framework 2.0 installed if BizTalk Server 2004 SP2 is also installed.

BizTalk explained in 2 slides

benjguin — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 17:01:00 GMT

Different services inside a company work with their own applications. They need to exchange information several times a day. For instance, sales people send orders to production once a day. All this correspond to non formal business processes.
Services applications must continue to be able to live their lives independently. For instance, marketing application will be upgraded to Version 2.3 next month while other applications won't move for at least 6 months.
For these reasons, no integration between applications is done and the business processes are remain implemented at human and e-mail level.

BizTalk Server enables implementing business processes at application level. In fact, applications send and receive messages (which can be seen as machine readable e-mails). When changing or upgrading one of the applications from v2.2 to v2.3, in order to keep automated business processes working, v2.3 must just be able to send and receive messages meaning the same thing as previous version v2.2 did (format can change) to and from BizTalk Server.
People in each service just have to work with their application; they do not need to send e-mails to other services anymore. Sales people enter orders in sales application which will send a message to BizTalk. BizTalk will send the message to all applications which subscribed to new order messages. Production application is one of them.

SAP .NET Connector must be installed for all users

benjguin — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 23:47:00 GMT

BizTalk Server 2004 and BizTalk Server 2006 SAP Adapter requires and uses the SAP .NET Connector which is distributed by SAP.

For BizTalk Server 2006, you need SAP .NET Connecter 1.0.3 Runtime.

It looks like only the user who installed the SAP .NET Connecter 1.0.3 Runtime can use it, and thus use SAP Adapter.

If user X installs SAP .NET Connector (thru setupruntime.msi) and user Y tries to generate a schema from Visual Studio 2005, Y gets an error:

Add Adapter Wizard
------------------------------------------------------
Unable to display adapter user interface.
SAP .Net connector is not installed
------------------------------------------------------
OK

In order to solve the problem, you have to install the SAP .NET Connector for all users. As option doesn’t show up in the GUI, you can do it that way :

msiexec /i SetupRuntime.msi ALLUSERS=1

UpdateActivity check points are case sensitive

benjguin — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 21:11:00 GMT

While using BAM API (with BizTalk Server 2006, but I think it would be the same with BizTalk Server 2004), we received an exception like this:

Failed to execute event.

Exception type: BAMTraceException

Source: Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.EventObservation

Target Site: Boolean PersistNoBatches(System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection, Int32)

The following is a stack trace that identifies the location where the exception occured

at Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.EventObservation.DirectEventStream.PersistNoBatches(SqlConnection connection, Int32 timeoutValue)

at Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.EventObservation.DirectEventStream.Flush()

at (...)

Additional error information:

Parameter is not valid.

Exception type: BAMRuntimeException

Source: Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.EventObservation

Target Site: Void GetSqlScriptForActivity(System.IO.TextWriter, System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection, System.Data.SqlClient.SqlTransaction)

The following is a stack trace that identifies the location where the exception occured

at Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.EventObservation.BAMTraceFragment.GetSqlScriptForActivity(TextWriter scriptWriter, SqlConnection connection, SqlTransaction transaction)

at Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.EventObservation.BAMTraceFragment.PersistQueryable(SqlConnection connection, SqlTransaction transaction, Int32 timeoutValue)

at Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.EventObservation.DirectEventStream.PersistNoBatches(SqlConnection connection, Int32 timeoutValue)

This came from the fact that we called UpdateActivity with a checkpoint name having a invalid case.

Ex: we called

es.UpdateActivity("myActivity", activityID, "myCheckpoint", myCheckPointValue)

while the name of the checkpoint was myCheckPoint (with an upper case P), not myCheckpoint (lower case p).

Changing to

es.UpdateActivity("myActivity", activityID, "myCheckPoint", myCheckPointValue)

solved the problem.

Online BizTalk Server 2004 training

benjguin — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 17:09:00 GMT

Here are some available online BizTalk Server 2004 training available

Course 2158: Managing E-Business Solutions Using Microsoft® BizTalk® Server
2004

https://www.microsoftelearning.com/eLearning/offerDetail.aspx?offerPriceId=61763

Summary: This course will provide students with the knowledge and skills to
efficiently and effectively deploy and manage the BizTalk infrastructure
that integrates systems, employees, and trading partners through
orchestration in a highly flexible and highly automated manner.
Audience: ITPro
Available Offline: Yes
Price: $99, 90-day subscription

Course 2434: Introduction to Development with Microsoft® BizTalk® Server
2004

https://www.microsoftelearning.com/eLearning/offerDetail.aspx?offerPriceId=61768

Summary: This course will teach developers how to create and deploy basic
BizTalk applications. Developers will learn how to efficiently and
effectively integrate systems, employees, and trading partners through
orchestration in a highly flexible and highly automated manner.
Audience: Developer
Available Offline: Yes
Price: $99, 90-day subscription

Course 2435: Managing Business Processes with Microsoft® BizTalk® Server
2004

https://www.microsoftelearning.com/eLearning/offerDetail.aspx?offerPriceId=61769

Summary: This course will teach developers how to create BizTalk business
orchestrations. Developers will learn how to effectively integrate systems,
employees, and trading partners through orchestration in a highly flexible
and highly automated manner.
Audience: Developer
Available Offline: Yes
Price: $99, 90-day subscription

Course 2436: Using Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2004 Tools and Web Services

https://www.microsoftelearning.com/eLearning/offerDetail.aspx?offerPriceId=61770

Summary: This course will teach developers how to use BizTalk tools and Web
services. Developers will learn how to effectively integrate systems,
employees, and trading partners through orchestration in a highly flexible
and highly automated manner.
Audience: Developer
Available Offline: Yes
Price: $99, 90-day subscription

Unifying XML namespaces and .NET namespaces

benjguin — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 08:46:00 GMT

I just want to share how I usually create XML Namespaces.

Let's say I work for a contoso company which has a site at http://www.contoso.com and I'm defining an XML schema in a BizTalk Server 2004. BizTalk Server 2004 will create a .NET Class out of this XSD schema that would live inside my BizTalk Server 2004 project (of course, this can be used in many other cases that just BizTalk Server 2004).
This project could have a namespace of Contoso.Eai.SomeProject then I would use the following XML Namespace for the schema:

urn:www-contoso-com:Contoso.Eai.SomeProject.MySchema

URN syntax is defined at http://www.apps.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2141.html. Here are some interesting excerpts:

<URN> ::= "urn:" <NID> ":" <NSS>
where <NID> is the Namespace Identifier, and <NSS> is the Namespace Specific String

The idea is that NID designs who can understand NSS. As NID can only have letters, numbers and -, I use this type of equivalence:

www-contoso-com for www.contoso.com
someone-at-contoso-com for someone@contoso.com. ex.: urn:someone-at-contoso-com:SomeoneCanUnderstandThisPart

Also note that NID is 1 to 31 only character long.

In theory, the NID should be registered, but for a custom development, this type of URN notation can be sufficient. We could consider I use what is described at http://www.w3.org/TR/uri-clarification/#private-unregistered-uri-schemes

I found this way of defining XML namespaces easier than the http://www.contoso.com/Whatever that introduces some confusion between the namespace (which is just ment to be an identifier) and a URL (which is a location).

:-)