BizTalk Architecture, High Availability and MSMQ Adapters : Announcements

The BizTalk product team is looking for your feedback!

EldarM — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 22:36:00 GMT

Here is a little announcement that Nancy asked me to post for your attention:

The BizTalk product team is looking for your feedback! We are conducting baseline usability studies of BizTalk Server 2006 over the next several months (Feb – May) and are looking for BizTalk 2004 hands-on users (IT Pro/Developer/Business) to give feedback and help direct the vision for future versions of BizTalk! Your input and participation as we develop our products is extremely valuable to us and helps us ensure that our products address your needs. You will receive a free piece of Microsoft software (or choice of an MSPress book) for your time and feedback.

If you are in the Seattle/Redmond area and would like to participate, please contact nancyp@microsoft.com as soon as possible to get on the schedule!

Leaving BizTalk...

EldarM — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 18:47:00 GMT

After more than four years, I am leaving BizTalk and moving to the Windows Server to work on some new cool things. It will be a while before I'll get back to blogging here, so thank you all for your attention this time and coming here to read my notes, I really enjoyed that.

Best regards,
Eldar

BizTalk 2006 Beta1 is available...

EldarM — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 17:24:00 GMT

... from https://beta.microsoft.com

If you are not registered there, you'll have to pass through sign-off approval process first, because that's the generic place where Microsoft products betas are available.

Notice that once you logged in with your Passport ID, you need to use (on the second screen) GuestID BizTalkBetaTeam to get straight to BizTalk 2006 Beta 1 form. If you use the Guest ID published on the passport login screen of the Beta place, it will take much more steps to get there. More complete instructions were posted in the Beta newsgroup.

MSMQ Adapter if available now (alternative to MSMQT Adapter)

EldarM — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 20:18:00 GMT

BTW, MSMQ adapter for BizTalk 2004, that I referred to before, is now available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=cba87d07-7f50-4d7b-a888-388d123f736e&DisplayLang=en

That's the same adapter, I previously referred to as "MSMQ/C". This is a pretty good alternative to MSMQT adapter shipped in-box. Here are just few thinmgs that differs between MSMQ/T and MSMQ Adapters:

If you want to...	MSMQ/T Adapter (in-box)	MSMQ Adapter (new)
Run other applications that use MSMQ API (or simply use MSMQ API at all.)	Only if you install Windows message queuing (MSMQ) side by side with MSMQT.	Automatically granted, in fact, MSMQ Adapter itself is using Windows MSMQ API.

Deliver messages reliably and in order to the BizTalk application (orchestration). Example, when you may need it: financial applications, where customer orders must be executed in the same order as they are received.	That's what MSMQ/T is for. In fact, that's the only way to reliably do that in BizTalk 2004, short of implementing your own application level protocol.	No, you cannot use MSMQ Adapter for that in BizTalk 2004.

Reliably push as many messages onto the BizTalk machine as possible (but not yet into BizTalk per se). Example, when you need it: sending messages from an unreliable machine that may go down for a significant period of time.	Tough, MSMQ/T submits messages directly into BizTalk, hence it gets messages from the network only as fast as BizTalk can consume them.	Perfect. Messages are accumulated on the local disk of BizTalk machine in MSMQ queue with usual MSMQ throughput (huge one). Then BizTalk picks it up from the local queue at its own pace.

Pass huge messages (see BizTalk docs for the exact numbers)	Good. MSMQ/T has everything streamed, so for large messages there is no single moment in time when the whole message must be in memory. As a result, MSMQ/T messages by design should be only limited by the size of your database. Keep in mind, however, that it is only supported to a certain limit stated in the documentation. Also, if your database has 2Gb of a disk space, it may be not quite a bright idea to fill it with 1Gb blobs.	You still can pass pretty large messages, however, MQRTLARGE.DLL that is utilized by MSMQ Adapter, accumulates the whole message in memory, effectively limiting the size of a message you can pass through.

Adapter Migration Toolkit is released on 01/21

EldarM — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 17:46:00 GMT

This little piece is designed to help migrating your BizTalk 2002 components (AICs, custom preprocessors) to BizTalk 2004 by providing shims. It's downloadable at the MS download center.

Also, please, notice the whitepaper on BizTalk 2002 to BizTalk 2004 migration in the same download location -- see the link on the right in "Related resources. It's a self-extracting zip file.

One more blog on BizTalk

EldarM — Wed, 21 Jul 2004 14:22:00 GMT

Ok, so here is one more blog on BizTalk. Is there anything different about it? I hope to make it so. Let see, what we have now from the people from Microsoft.

First, we have an excellent weblog from Scott Woodgate. That’s a blog #1 for everybody interested in BizTalk covering news, hints, little insider info, developer’s competitions, not to mention some New Zealand stuff. :-)

Then we have blogs from Lee and Kevin. These blogs will talk about the core messaging engine. If your questions are about life of the message before it gets to the database – Kevin is the best man to answer it. What happens to the message once it got into the database (and there is a lot happening there) – Lee is the man. And when Lee hands the message over from the database, guess who takes care of it? Kevin. Actually, there is a thin layer between, which they both know very well.

I worked with Kevin and Lee on the core messaging engine for BizTalk 2004 in Redmond. Actually, I am still in Redmond and I still work on Messaging Engine with Lee (and few other very smart guys, who are just too humble to start their own blogs). As to Kevin, alas! – he’s gone to the better world, well, I mean Europe. He is now Microsoft Consulting Service consultant working on BizTalk projects in the United Kingdom. Which means that we can expect pretty interesting posts from him based on his experience.

Just to brag a little, before BizTalk I worked on MSXML, including MSXML 5 in Office XP, MSXML 4 used in a lot of places (including BizTalk), and MSXML 3 sitting in every Windows box in the world. Before Microsoft I spent about 20 years as a developer in various places, companies and roles – if you need to know, here are the details.

In this weblog I plan to talk about more architectural level things around BizTalk. Topics that I think of now are like “stateless” server, making BizTalk scale, fault-tolerance, sins of synchronous communications architecture to name few. I don’t plan to do it often, may be twice a month.

So, here we are,
Eldar Musayev