Connected Systems in the Great White North : ESB

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

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

Disabling Itinerary Encryption in the ESB Toolkit 2.0

pkelcey — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 23:14:00 GMT

Those of you that worked with the CTP of the ESB Toolkit 2.0 will notice a new feature in the final release, namely "Itinerary Encryption". The Itinerary Design now allows you to use a certificate to encrypt your itineraries before you export them out of Visual Studio. This is a key new piece of functionality since your itineraries may potentially contain sensitive configuration information or sensitive processes that you do not want to leave exposed as open text XML.

In the properties window for the Itinerary Designer you can see a new property called "Encryption Certificate". You can use this property to select a certificate from a certificate store.

Now as important as this option is, what I'm going to write about is how to disable this. On my dev machine, I did not have any valid certificates installed, so I wasn't able to select one to use or encryption. This prevented me from validating or exporting my itinerary since the validation tool kept throwing an error. Since this was only a dev machine, I didn't care about the security of these itineraries, so I really wanted to disable this feature so that I could keep working. Fortunetly, there is a simple and easy way to do this.

If you have installed the ESBT to the default location, you should be able to find a file called "ruleset.config" in the "C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0\Tools\Itinerary Designer" folder. This file contains a list of validation rules the the Itinerary Designer uses when validating or exporting your itinerary. If you open this file in Visual Studio, you will find a node called <property name="EncryptionCertificate">. Inside this node, you will see there are two rules that define how the validation of certificates should be handled. The first rule is the one the designer uses by default and it says that an error should be thrown if you do not have a certificate assigned. I commented out this rule and when I ran the validation routine again, I only received a warning message about the lack of a cert. I was then able to export my itinerary. Here's what the modified file looked like for my system.

Cheers and keep on BizTalking

Peter

BizTalk 2009 Book and ESB Guidance

pkelcey — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:06:22 GMT

Some of you might be familiar with George Dunphy's "Pro BizTalk 2006" book that was released a couple of years ago through APress. Well, he's getting set to release a new one for BizTalk 2009 and I was very excited when he asked if I would be a contributing author. I've been given the task of writing a chapter about the ESB Guidance 2.0 for BizTalk 2009. There are a number of very smart and experienced guys contributing to the book, so if you're looking for a good BizTalk 2009 book, I'd recommend this one... (and of course I'm not biased ;) )

http://www.amazon.com/Pro-BizTalk-2009-George-Dunphy/dp/1430219815/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239727570&sr=8-1

Cheers and keep on BizTalking

Announcing free training on the ESB Guidance (Canada only)

pkelcey — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 21:40:00 GMT

The concept of Service Oriented Architecture and the Enterprise Service Bus is huge topic for many organizations now days. To address this, our patterns and practices team have recently released the Enterprise Service Bus Guidance which organizations can use to implement an practical and effective ESB solution using our .NET technologies.

In order to accelerate your understanding of this guidance, the Canadian BizTalk team is excited to announce that we will be running a one day deep dive training course focused entirely on the ESB Guidance. We have created this training course to radically accelerate your understanding and adoption of it. The course will be held on April 16^th at the Microsoft Canada Head Office in Mississauga (Full details are on the registration page). This is significant event as there will be no cost to attend and attendees will get some real deep hands on experience with the solution. This is the first public offering of a course that we recently delivered internally to our MCS community which received very positive reviews. The course includes architectural discussions on the ESB concept, deep dive views into its internals as well as proctored hands-on labs.

This course will be focused towards the deeper technical components within the ESB, so this is best suited for architects, developers and other technical roles.

The agenda for the course is a follows:

1) The ESB as an architecture concept. What is it? What should it do? Why would I need it?

2) Getting Started – Installing and configuring the ESBG

3) The Core ESBG Engine: What are the core components and how do I use them?

4) ESBG External Services: How are these different from the Core Engine?

5) The ESB Exception Management Framework and Administration Portal

6) Introduction to Microsoft's ESB & SOA Governance Partners

7) Bits and Bites: Miscellaneous Topics

If you are interested in attending, you can access the registration page at:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032373531&Culture=en-CA

Hope to see you there.

Cheers and keep on BizTalking...

Microsoft ESB Guidance: Error - Host restarting every minute

pkelcey — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 09:33:00 GMT

We'll I just spent about three hours tonight fighting with this issue, so I thought I'd post about it to hopefully save someone else from having to go through this.

I was trying to run a couple of samples from the ESB and I noticed that whenever I used an example that had to use an orchestration, I received the following error in my event log

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: BizTalk Server 2006
Event Category: BizTalk Server 2006
Event ID: 5410
Date: 12/4/2007
Time: 4:08:39 PM
User: N/A
Computer: EDIBTS2006
Description:
An error occurred that requires the BizTalk service to terminate. The most common causes are the following:
1) An unexpected out of memory error.
OR
2) An inability to connect or a loss of connectivity to one of the BizTalk databases.
The service will shutdown and auto-restart in 1 minute. If the problematic database remains unavailable, this cycle will repeat.

Error message: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.
Error source: mscorlib

My host instance would then shut down and try to restart itself every minute. Each retry would fail with this same error. I also ended up with a running service instance in the admin console that I couldn’t terminate.

Each time I sent another message, I would have to manually clean these left over instances from the DB before I could restart the host instance successfully. I finally noticed that this error was only occurring whenever a component in my “In-proc” host instance tried to run. Base on this I tracked the issue down the btsntsvc.exe.config file that we were suppose to edit during install. I had forgotten to remove the “[path]” place holder that is in the <ConfigurationFile> tag. We were suppose to replace this with the actual path to the Microsoft.Practices.ESB.PipelineComponents.config file. (I’ve did not have this step in my install checklists, so I have since added it). I realized that the AppDomains were not loading correctly and this caused my errors in every orchestration in that tried to run in that AppDomain.

This is what I had left in my config file:

<ConfigurationFile>
[path]\Microsoft.Practices.ESB.PipelineComponents.config
</ConfigurationFile>

As I said, I had forgotten to replace the [path] place holder. Anyways, I put in the proper path and I expected this to correct the situation, but I kept getting the same annoying error. After another hour of frustrated debugging, I realized that I had entered the config data like this:

C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\source\code\core\config\Microsoft.Practices.ESB.PipelineComponents.config

</ConfigurationFile>

You’ll notice that I had put line breaks before and after the path and filename. It was these dam line break that were causing the problem. I took them out and and used this:

<ConfigurationFile>C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\source\code\core\config\Microsoft.Practices.ESB.PipelineComponents.config</ConfigurationFile>

Everything worked fine and the issues are gone.

I’ve seen a number of people asking about this on codeplex and other locations, so double check your settings and avoid the headaches.

Cheers and keep on BizTalking...

Peter