Jose Luis Calvo : Biztalk

Real artists ship

joselcs — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:33:17 GMT

There is life after one project is announced. Banco de España -Spain's central bank- selected Microsoft for Target2 a couple of years ago.

The solution, built on top of Biztalk, is not very demanding from a functional or performance point of view, but is pretty critical -it handles cross-borders payments over 50K euros-.

I worked for that project for more than one year between 2006 and 2007, leave it on the testing phase, and now is up and running. That's one of the better feelings working on software.

The title, "Real artists ship", is a phrase from Steve Jobs. I like the phrase a lot and the story is sad but true :).

Technorati tags: Biztalk, architecture

More than one thousand orchestrations per second

joselcs — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 22:53:28 GMT

Finally it's public, last summer I worked on a benchmark in order to prove the viability of BizTalk processing 62 million messages (with orchestrations involved) each day. That means more than 1,000 messages per second.

It was pretty fun, we started with a very small number -as usual on performance testing-, and grew up until 1,156 messages per second.

Technorati tags: Biztalk, architecture, performance

Upgrading MQSeries Adapter from BizTalk 2004 to 2006

joselcs — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 22:42:00 GMT

I have an environment with BizTalk 2004 and the MQSeries Adapter which I’m upgrading to BizTalk 2006. I have updated the BizTalk server and a development computer and tried to create a couple of ports. I had this error when trying to configure the MQSeries port, when opening the Queue Manager combo in the Queue Definition dialog box:

The adapter is not installed or configured correctly on the server. The COM exception is: Retrieving the COM class factory for remote component with CLSID {86E96D72-0011-4B28-B1AC-BF52AB47F1B4} from machine failed due to the following error: 80040154.

The issue is pretty simple; the MQSeries agent running on the MQSeries server needs to be updated also. The BizTalk setup has the option for install the MQSeries agent under the “Additional Software” branch.

Also, the MQSeries Manager needs to be updated to the Windows 2003 Server SP1 and some other new requirements.

After that I still had the message:

Retrieving the COM class factory for remote component with CLSID {86E96D72-0011-4B28-B1AC-BF52AB47F1B4} from machine failed due to the following error: 80070005.

And a new “Access Denied” appeared on the old BizTalk 2004 machine. So, the Windows 2003 Server SP1 has something to do here. My first guess was about a new default security on DTC. DTCPing wasn’t running, so I did the calls anonymous and some registry changes on the client, DTCPing run perfectly but I still had the 80070005 error.

Finally I noticed a new local group called “Distributed COM Users”. Seems pretty straightforward. I added the Visual Studio user to the group for configuration and the BizTalk host user for execution, and everything running!!

If interested on running different BizTalk versions against the same MQSeries manager, the new MQSeries Agent runs side by side with 2006, 2004 and 2002 BizTalk releases. Also interesting, this new release has a wizard for configuring the COM+ Application –which avoids some common errors-, named MQSAgent2.

WMI error on Biztalk

joselcs — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 18:34:00 GMT

From time to time I have found this error when opening the Biztalk management console: "A connection to Windows Management on \\.\ROOT\MicrosoftBizTalkServer cannot be established: Invalid namespace".

It can be solved executing "mofcomp" on the BTSWMISchemaXP.mof file found on the biztalk installation directory.

BizTalk FAQ: Problems validating an Any Element?

joselcs — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 20:00:00 GMT

did you remembered to check the Process Contents property?

see the help about it.

I spent today sometime trying -and failing- in validating an Xml against a very simple Schema with an Any Element. The curious thing is that Xml was a generated generated instance of the schema. Just set the Process Content to 'Skip' and running...

BizTalk 2004 Adapter for MQ WebSphere 2.0

joselcs — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 00:06:00 GMT

I have spent a couple of days doing some proof of concepts with the MQSeries Adapter, and I have found some issues which took me some time solving.

Access Denied. I had this error message while setting the configuration data for the Queue Definition, when trying to open the Queue Manager Combo. Obviously is a permissions problem, you have to add your account to the role created in the MQSAgent COM+ Application on the MQSeries Server. If you forget to add also the BizTalk account the error is much more descriptive: "The adapter has encountered an 'Access Denied' error while attempting to contact the COM+ object on the MQSeries server. Ensure the BizTalk account is added to the Role on the MQSAgent COM+ application."
UPDATE: Lately I have found an error code 2018, which is caused because the Identity of the MQSAgent COM+ Application isn't in the 'mqm' windows group.
Once everything developed and deployed I had a "Error encountered on opening Queue Manager name = QMSVMLT0 Reason code = 2195.". The origin for that is the MSDTC. Common configuration since the SP2, you need to enable the Network DTC Access, Allow Outbound and Allow Network Clients & Outbound for the client and the server respectively.
CorrelId. I was trying a request-reply scenario, but generating the Correlation Id in BizTalk instead of MQ. The SDK sample uses a constant which is not a commonly valid scenario, I would prefer something like the InterchangeID. The key was that MQ needs a 48 characters Id, and some characters like '-' are deleted. This code with a correlation set on the MQSeries.MQMD_CorrelId worked:

MyGuid = new System.Guid(RequestMessage(BTS.InterchangeID));
CorrelationValue = MyGuid.ToString("N") + "0000000000000000"; // 32 + 16 = 48 characters
MQRequestMessage(MQSeries.MQMD_MsgId) = CorrelationValue;
MQRequestMessage (MQSeries.MQMD_CorrelId) = CorrelationValue;