Gilles' WebLog

WF 4.0 Tracking on .NET Endpoint

2009-06-12T04:05:00Z

Vikram has a very nice acticle on tracking in WF 4.0. Worth reading it at: http://blogs.msdn.com/endpoint/archive/2009/06/11/introduction-to-workflow-tracking-in-net-framework-4-0-beta1.aspx ....(read more)

The J-POP saga continues: SweetS - Love Like Candy Floss

2007-11-16T07:47:00Z

In the past, I have outlined some of the most famous J-POP artists: EXILE or DREAM . Today, let me introduce the (now defunct) Japanese band SweetS ( official web site in Japanese). Formed in 2003, the group experienced minor success before disbanding in 2006. Avex Track, a famous production company in Japan held auditions and selected five girls out of their pool of potential talents. After about a year of training, SweetS was born. Sadly, they failed to meet the success they expected. One of their...(read more)

Hosting a WCF service in Windows Sharepoint Services v3.0

2007-09-18T02:46:00Z

With ASP.NET AJAX Extensions being baked into the .NET Framework 3.5 and the improvements to WCF to support JSON, it seems tempting to write WCF services and host the in Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 Unfortunately, if you create a WCF service and drop it under a WSS controlled vroot like _layouts or _vti_bin, your service will fail to activate with the following message in the event log: WebHost failed to process a request. Exception: System.ArgumentException: virtualPath at System.ServiceModel.AsyncResult.End[TAsyncResult](IAsyncResult...(read more)

BizTalk Decompiler for Reflector 5 on CodePlex

2007-06-28T01:44:00Z

My BizTalk Decompiler only works with Reflector 4. The updated version for Reflector 5 has been available for a while on CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/reflectoraddins...(read more)

Date/Time tracked with BAM must be expressed in Universal Coordinated Time (UTC)

2006-07-19T02:12:00Z

All date/time tracked by BAM must be expressed in UTC. BAM depends on this to provide accurate durations, among many other things. This is clearly explained here . It was also the case for BizTalk 2004 even if the documentation gave subtle hints instead of describing it : es.UpdateActivity("PurchaseOrder", poid, "POShipped", DateTime.UtcNow ); This rule is unfortunately easy to forget. For instance, let's assume you have a message with a date/time field you want to track with BAM. You start the tracking...(read more)

BAM Portal Activity Search: "This action cannot be performed because one or more database(s) appears corrupted"

2006-07-13T00:16:00Z

When using the BAM Portal Activity Search feature, you may be directed to an error page with the above error message. This error message means that there are instances with duplicate ID in the activity you were searching. If you look at the "Application" event log on the computer which runs the BAM Web Services, you will find one entry from "BAM Web Service" comparable to the following: EXCEPTION: System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: There are instances with duplicate ID 'PO_COMPLETED_100'...(read more)

BAM is not supported when SQL Server is set to Mixed Authentication Mode

2006-06-20T19:53:00Z

Tiho has a good entry on why it is that way and how to fix it. He also explains how to diagnose the problem....(read more)

BizTalk Addin for Reflector

2006-06-09T19:17:00Z

This is an addin for Reflector that allows you to list all BizTalk artifacts contained in an assembly and extract them. Installation Donwload the attached file and extract Reflector.BizTalkDecompiler.dll into the same directory as Reflector (otherwise it won't work). Go to View|Add-Ins in Reflector, and Add Reflector.BizTalkDecompiler.dll . Usage Using File|Open..., add the BizTalk assembly you'll like to decompile to Reflector's assemblies list. Right click on the BizTalk assembly and select "BizTalk...(read more)

BizTalk Server 2006 Best Practices Analyzer has shipped!

2006-06-02T03:42:00Z

The BizTalk Server 2006 Best Practices Analyzer automatically examines a BizTalk Server 2006 deployment and generate a list of issues pertaining to best practices standards for BizTalk Server deployments. The primary use of this tool is to examine BizTalk Server production and staging environments, though it will still be useful on Dev machines. You can donwload it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DDA047E3-408E-48BA-83F9-F397226CD6D4&displaylang=en ....(read more)

BAM Query Service: What is it and how can I use it?

2006-06-01T00:48:00Z

If you have installed BAM (BizTalk Server 2004 or BizTalk Server 2006), you may have noticed that a web service called the "BAM Query Service" got installed. As its name hints, this web service allows the BAM Portal to retrieve BAM instance data without connecting directly to a SQL server. This web service is intended to be called by the BAM Portal only. Therefore, it is not documented and Microsoft will not support code which makes direct calls to this web service. A long time ago, when we designed...(read more)

BizTalk Server 2006 runs great under Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2!

2006-04-04T01:36:00Z

Today, Microsoft announced that Virtual Server 2005 R2 can be downloaded free of charges. BizTalk Server 2006 works great under Virtual Server 2005 R2. When we were developing BizTalk Server 2006, I ran all tests under Virtual Server and never saw any problem. One caveat: make sure you have plenty of physical memory (I use 2Gb), give your guest operating system at least 1600Mb. Do not remember to install the Virtual Machine additions as soon as possible - this is critical to get Windows Server 2003...(read more)

I am not working for Microsoft Japan, but thanks a lot Jeff!

2006-03-30T06:40:00Z

In a recent entry , Jeff noticed my Debugger Visualizer for MessageContext and mentioned that I am from MSFT Japan. Well, this is not true. I am in Redmond, USA and I work for the BizTalk team. It it true that I do like Japan and I have visited this gret country numerous times. Every once in a while, you'll find Japan related posts here. Jeff, I'm happy you like the visualizer!...(read more)

BisTalk Server 2006 Released Today!

2006-03-28T04:16:00Z

You probably know this already. You can find an overview of BizTalk Server 2006 features here . Now that BizTalk 2006 is released, I can speak a little more freely about the product. You can use the "Contact" link to suggest topics you'd like me to shed some light on. I do not promise I'll be able to answer every single question, but I'll do my best....(read more)

BizTalk Server Team Product Management has a Blog!

2006-03-22T01:47:00Z

Visit it here . Kris, Steve, Michael and Mark share product updates, links to training materials and even employment opportunities ! I subscribed to their RSS feed....(read more)

Debugger Visualizer for BizTalk 2006: MessageContext

2006-03-20T21:10:00Z

Visual Studio 2005 added support for Debugger Visualizers. With debugger visualizers, developers can define what information (and in what form) is shown in the debugger for a specific type. There are many visualizers for various .NET types floating around. Here is a small list of the most popular ones: ASP.NET Cache, Regular Expression, XmlDocument (and other Xml related types), a powerful looking DataSet visualizer and there is even a WindowsIdentity visualizer.

I am not going to explain in details how to write your own visualizer. You can find step by step instructions on MSDN. Most existing debugger visualizers I mentionned in the previous paragraph also have home pages where you will find details on how to write your own or even source code.

I'd like to share some tricks you might find useful when writing your own visualizers:

You can write visualizers for public (obvious!) or internal or private types. The trick for non public types is to use the Assembly Qualified Name of the type you want to visualize. For instance, BizTalk 2006's MessageContext property is actually an internal type (see purple type name below):

[assembly: DebuggerVisualizer(typeof(<type of visualizer> ), typeof(<type of visualizer source>), TargetTypeName = "Microsoft.BizTalk.Message.Interop.MessageContext_ManagedViewOfNative, Microsoft.BizTalk.Pipeline, Version=3.0.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35", Description = "<description>")]

Your visualizer code runs non JIT'ed. So make sure you do not perform too much work or it will be slow. If you do too much, the expression evaluator will time out and interrupt your visualizer with an "Expression Evaluation timed out exception".
Use DataGrid instead of DataGridView. I know I used a DataGridView in my visualizer, but the DataGrid is faster, especially when running non JIT'ed.

To illustrate these points, I wrote a BizTalk 2006 MessageContext debugger visualiser. You can download the complete solution BTSVisualizers.zip below. It works with Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk 2006 only.

Load the visualizer solution in Visual Studio and build the release comfiguration.To install the MessageContext visualizer, shut down all instances of Visual Studio and copy BTSVisualizers.dll to %VS8ROOT%\Common7\Packages\Debugger\Visualizers. (If you installed Visual Studio at the default location, that would be C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\Packages\Debugger\Visualizers) That's it!

The next time you debug a pipeline (by attaching to BTSNTSVC.exe), you can hover the mouse on the "Context" variable of the message and see all entries in the message context:

Unfortunately, this visualizer will not display anything useful unless you are debugging a BizTalk artifact by attaching to BTSNTSVC.exe. This is because most debugging tools (like pipeline.exe) do not populate the message context.