Benjamin Guinebertière : BizTalk Server 2006

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.

BizTalk Server 2006 Documenter URL

benjguin — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 00:36:00 GMT

UK SDC BizTalk 2006 Documenter tool used to be on gotdotnet.

It is now, as many gotdotnet projects on codeplex.

Here is the updated URL:

http://www.codeplex.com/BizTalkDocumenter

The name became simpler too: BizTalk Server 2006 Documenter

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.

MQSeries Adapter (Client Based)

benjguin — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 08:50:00 GMT

Need a BizTalk adapter for MQSeries that does not require a Windows MQSeries server (for instance, you might have only a mainframe MQSeries server) ?

Host Integration Server 2006 provides the MQSC (MQSeries Adapter (Client Based)).

Apply for beta thru http://connect.microsoft.com (choose Available Programs) or visit http://www.microsoft.com/his for further information.

BizTalk Server 2006 Lifecycle short video demos with description(no sound)

benjguin — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 19:53:00 GMT

HTML Source EditorWord wrap BizTalk Server 2006 LifeCycle Demos description V1.0 Introduction Sample ConfirmationApp application High Availability Execution Platform Demos Deploy application with MSI (InstallConfirmApp_3min21.wmv) Application's bindings...(read more)

BizTalk Server 2006 - Host instance wouldn't start because of bad configuration

benjguin — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 01:57:00 GMT

I've searched some time before finding this one. So let's share the knowledge.

You may have this kind of event when a host instance starts

Event Type: Error
Event Source: BizTalk Server 2006
Event Category: BizTalk Server 2006
Event ID: 5410
Date: ...
Time: ...
User: N/A
Computer: ...
Description:
Failed while executing a Windows service request.
Service request: Start

BizTalk host name: BizTalkServerApplication
Windows service name: BTSSvc$BizTalkServerApplication

Additional error information:
Error code: c0c0153a
Error source: BizTalk Server 2006
Error description: A BizTalk subservice has failed while executing a service request.
Subservice: Tracking
Service request: Start

Additional error information:
Error code: 80131534
Error source: Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.EventBus
Error description: The type initializer for 'System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection' threw an exception.

This happens when config file is changed. The host instance config file is typically at C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\btsntsvc.exe.config

Note that this config file can have a problem in encoding or because of a bad character. Try copying it as an xml file (eg.: copy of btsntsvc.exe.config.xml) and opening it with IE.

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).

:-)