Connected Systems in the Great White North : BizTalk 2009

PDC & Source Code for ESB Toolkit How To Videos

pkelcey — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:18:00 GMT

Since I started releasing the ESB Toolkit how-to videos, I’ve had several people ask me for the source code for all of the components I demo’d. Well, it took me way to long to get them packaged up, but here they are finally. I’ve packaged up everything that I used during the demos and it should be fairly straight forward for you to install it. There is an installation guide (Word 2007 format) contained in the attached ZIP archive that walks you through the install process.

The reason that I finally got around to getting this done is that my examples are now going to be used for the hands-on-labs at PDC 2009. If you want to get some hands on experience with the ESB Toolkit, drop by the Hands-On-Labs area of PDC and you will be able to work through the same projects that I have demo’d in the ESB Toolkit How-To series.

Cheers and keep on BizTalking…

Peter

SCOM Management Pack for BizTalk 2009 is Available.

pkelcey — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 17:24:42 GMT

To all you folks who have been waiting for the new Management Pack for BizTalk 2009 to be released, it is finally here. You can download it at

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=389FCB89-F4CF-46D7-BC6E-57830D234F91&displaylang=en&displaylang=en

Cheers and keep on BizTalking…

Peter

“Pro BizTalk 2009” Book is Finally Available

pkelcey — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:04:39 GMT

Yeah! Pro BizTalk 2009 is now published and available. It was an interesting project to be involved with (even in just a small way). You can find it on Amazon now at http://www.amazon.ca/Pro-BizTalk-2009-George-Dunphy/dp/1430219815/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251208723&sr=8-2

I wanted to thank Richard Seroter who acted as the technical reviewer for my chapter. I also wanted to point out his great book “SOA Patterns with BizTalk 2009” (in case anyone hasn’t already seen it).

Cheers and keep on BizTalking…

Peter

ESB Toolkit How To Video #7: A SharePoint Adapter Provider

pkelcey — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 18:39:31 GMT

Welcome to #7 in my series of ESB Toolkit How To Videos. If you have not seen the previous videos, I encourage you to do so. The previous ones can be found here

1) Basic Itinerary Routing and UDDI Integration

2) Composite Itinerary and Dynamic Mapping

3) Itinerary Resolution in the Bus

4) Dynamic Itinerary Resolution in the Bus

5) Including Custom Orchestrations in the Itinerary Designer

6) Performance Metrics using Built in BAM

One very common thing that people will want the ESB to do is to route message to SharePoint where they can potentially kick off human based workflow. However, the base ESB Toolkit does not have an adapter provider for Windows SharePoint Services. BizTalk does have an "Adapter" for WSS, however the ESB toolkit does not have an "Adapter provider" for WSS. The Adapter Providers in the ESBT bridge between the new ESBT code and the traditional BizTalk components.

Now fortunately, the ESBT can be extended very quickly and we can add in our own adapter providers without the need for very much code at all. This past week, I was working with the guys over at QuickLearn to build out a WSS adapter provider that they planned to use in an upcoming BizTalk/ESBT demo. In this video, I'll show you how we created the adapter provider (using only a few lines of code) and how we registered it so that the design time tools and the runtime engine could use it. Now, while creating the adapter doesn't require much effort, I will admit that I had a hell of a time trying to get it registered properly and all of the associated configuration files aligned correctly. The ESBT relies heavily on reflection to load components at runtime, so if you don't name your component properly or register it correctly in the config files, then the ESBT engine won't be able to load the provider properly and you'll have a fun time trying to debug just exactly what you did wrong.

In order to make it easier for you, I've included my code and configuration files for download so that you don't have to rebuild everything that I show in the video.

I need to credit Nick Hauenstein over at QuickLearn (http://www.quicklearn.com/) for doing most of the initial leg work on building this out.

You can access the video here

You can download the project here

Cheers and keep on BizTalking

Peter

ESBT Toolkit How To Video #6: Performance Metrics using Built in BAM

pkelcey — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 04:32:00 GMT

Welcome to #6 in my series of ESB Toolkit How To Videos. If you have not seen the previous videos, I encourage you to do so. The previous ones can be found here

1) Basic Itinerary Routing and UDDI Integration

2) Composite Itinerary and Dynamic Mapping

3) Itinerary Resolution in the Bus

4) Dynamic Itinerary Resolution in the Bus

5) Including Custom Orchestrations in the Itinerary Designer

There is a great (but sadly under appreciated and under discussed) feature in the ESB Toolkit that I want to focus on today. Back at last years SOA conference, I spent some time talking with Dmitri Ossipov (who lead the development of the ESBT) and he showed me some of the new features he was adding into the toolkit. The one that caught my eye immediately was the built in BAM tracking. The ESB Toolkit has the built in ability to automatically log tracking and performance information for your itineraries as they are processed by the ESB components. If you have enabled "Tracking" in your itineraries, then the ESBT automatically logs information to a BAM table in SQL Server every time any of the itineraries services execute. This data includes data about which service executed, which itinerary and version it was part of, what time it executed, what specific instance it was part of as well as the status of the overall itinerary. This data is a gold mine for those of you looking to track the overall performance of your ESB and related services. It can be used to view all kinds of invaluable information about which itineraries are being used, how well they are performing, which ones are too slow, which ones are failing, which individual services are under performing etc.

Now while the ESBT will automatically capture all of this information you, it doesn't come with any kind of user friendly mechanism for viewing, analyzing or interacting with this data. In this video, I'll show you how to easily setup a number of BAM Views that will allow you to quickly assess performance stats about your itineraries. I build these views out in Excel and that allows me to use standard pivot tables and charts to view the data and I slice it up. I have also created views that allow me to tracking the performance of specific itineraries across different versions and across time. This is great info to have if you want to understand if recent changes to an itinerary have resulted in better or worse performance than you previously had.

The following image shows one of the views that I setup to show me what the average, worst and best performance times were for my itineraries. This is pretty useful information to have as I can quickly identify performance issues in my itineraries. You can easily see that the "ComposedDemo" takes quite slow when compared to the "DemoService" itinerary. I can even drill down in the specifics of a single itinerary and find out if a specific ESB service is causing the overall poor performance.

Now, unlike my previous videos, where I just showed you how to build out a specific solution, I'm going to actually provide you with the components I've built. I've attached the Excel file that contains my BAM Views and you should be able to easily deploy these into your system and access the charts and tables that I show in the video. You will just need to have the ESBT installed as well as the BizTalk BAM components installed and configured.

In order to avoid make an hour long video, I do not go very deep into what BAM is or how you work it. If you are not familiar with BizTalk's BAM feature, there may be some elements of this video that are not 100% clear. However, if you have a basic understanding of what BAM is, then I hope this video will offer some great value.

The video can be accessed here:

The BAM Excel Project can be accessed here:

Cheers and keep on BizTalking

Peter

ESB Toolkit How To Video #4: Dynamic Itinerary Resolution

pkelcey — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:37:39 GMT

Update: After I posted this originally, I was notified that my video did not contain any audio! Therefore, it was probably difficult to understand what was going on :) I've recreated the video and replaced the old one so that the video and audio are both working. Cheers

Welcome to #4 in my series of ESB Toolkit How To Videos. Each of these videos has built up from the one before it, so if you have seen the previous videos, I encourage you to do so. In video #3 (found here), I showed you how to use the toolkits new "Itinerary Resolution" feature. In that video, I showed you how to use the Static Itinerary Resolver within a BizTalk receive port to load up an itinerary from the itinerary database and attach it to an incoming message. To do this, we added a resolver configuration string to the pipeline such as "ITINERARY:\\name=DemoService;" (where DemoService was the itinerary that we wanted to load) One shortcoming of that solution is that had multiple itineraries you would need a different receive port for each one. In a real world solution, you might want to assign an itinerary to a message based on the message's schema, or some piece of data found within the message or based on who sent it and you would want to do all of this with as few receive ports as possible. Therefore, the ESB really needs to be able to dynamically and intelligently figure out what itinerary an incoming message needed with us having to hard code the name.

Fortunately, the ESB Toolkit provides us a flexible and intelligent way to resolve itineraries and this is the Business Rules Engine resolver. This allows us to the use the BizTalk Rules Engine to make a decision about what itinerary should be used. We can create rules to look at Context properties associate with the message (such as the message type, the sender etc) or we can look at the content within the message to make our decision on which itinerary to use. In this video, I'll show you how to create an BRE policy to resolve itineraries and I'll show you how to setup your BizTalk receive ports to use this policy. I'll show you how to implement context and content based itinerary resolution.

Here's the link to the video

Cheers and keep on BizTalking...

Peter

ESB Toolkit How To Video #3: Itinerary Resolution in the Bus

pkelcey — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:57:08 GMT

Hi folks

Here's video #3 in my "ESB Toolkit How To" series. In the last video (found here) we built out a complex itinerary that implemented dynamic mapping and dynamic routing. We also saw how to use the resolver mechanism to retrieve service information from a UDDI version 3.0 server. At the end of that video we used the Itinerary Test Client (which ships with the toolkit) to test our itinerary. When I show this demo in person, I'm always asked the same question. "Does the client always have to submit the itinerary along with the message when they call the ESB?" In version 1.0 of the ESB Toolkit, the was "Yes". The ESB did require the client to provide the itinerary along with the message. This was of course an issue for many of the architects I spoke to. Most people wanted the ESB to be responsible for figuring out what itinerary was needed for an incoming message. Ideally, the client should just have to submit their message into the ESB and the bus would figure everything else out for them. Requiring the client to create, manage and submit an itinerary is just not a solid architectural pattern.

Fortunately, in the ESB Toolkit 2.0, this is no longer a problem. We now have a great new feature called Itinerary Resolution that allows the ESB to figure out what itinerary a message should have. Additionally, version 2.0 of the toolkit, gives us the new "ESB Itinerary Database". This DB gives us a central location to store our itineraries in and the Itinerary Resolution component is actually able to dynamically retrieve messages from this central database. These two new features allow us to implement a solution where a client no longer has to have any knowledge of itineraries. Now, they simply have to pass in their message to the ESB where it will dynamically figure out what itinerary is needed and it will load that itinerary from the database.

In this video, I'll show you how to implement this feature. To demo this feature, I use an InfoPath form which sends data to a generic OnRamp which uses the Itinerary Resolver. I'll walk you through the process of storing your itinerary into the database, creating the new generic OnRamp that will use the itinerary resolution feature and I'll show you how to configure the Itinerary resolver to retrieve the itinerary from the database.

Here's the link to the video.

As always, I try to show as much detail as possible in these videos. If you feel that I have skimmed over something too quickly, or if some element is unclear, please let me know and I'll post a follow up video.

Cheers and keep on BizTalking...

Peter

ESB Toolkit How To Video #2: Service Composition

pkelcey — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:57:00 GMT

Hi everyone, it was quite a long time since I posted the first "How-to" video (found here), but I have finally completed the second one. In this demo, I show you how to do a number of new things

to create an itinerary that compose three services together into a single composite service
How to setup your BizTalk environment to support this type of itinerary. Including how to create the send ports required for a composite service itinerary
How to retrieve information from a UDDI v3 server from within your itinerary
How to test resolvers inside visual studio using the resolver web service
How to implement dynamic mapping and dynamic routing inside an itinerary

Based on feedback from my last video I understood that the AVI format I used sucked and that you didn't want to have to download multiple ZIP archives just to watch a short video. Therefore, I've found a better recording tool that creates WMV files. Therefore this video is only 13 megs in size. Hopefully that is more convenient for everyone.

If you happen to hear a baby crying at the end, I apologize, that is my new daughter trying to make her first appearance on my blog :)

This video covers a lot of ground and I show a lot of things. So if I have gone too fast over something, or some element isn't clear, let me know and I'll post a follow up video.

Here's the link to the video

Cheers and keep on BizTalking...

Peter