Connected Systems in the Great White North : SOA

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

Content from the Canadian Connected Systems Conference

pkelcey — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:39:00 GMT

We've been to Vancouver and Toronto so far and lots of people have been asking about the presentations that we delivered at the Connected Systems Conference. We're uploading them now to a skydrive site and you should be able to access them at

http://cid-ece4536d84e10155.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Connected%20Systems%20Conference%202008/Final%20Slides

The site should be open for anyone to download the presentations and you won't need a password or ID. It may take us a day to get all of the presenters to upload their decks, so if you don't see the one you wanted, give it a day and then check back.

Cheers and keep on BizTalking

Peter

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...

ESB Exception Management fails with Canadian Regional Settings

pkelcey — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:28:00 GMT

I spent an hour or so this morning working with a college to debug a strange error he was getting when he tried to use on of the Exception Management Framework samples that are in the ESB guidance for BizTalk. He was intentionally creating exceptions and he expected to see them routed into the ESB exception database. However, every time the ALL.Exception SQL Send port tried to route the message to the SQL Server, he got the following error.

The adapter failed to transmit message going to send port "ALL.Exceptions" with URL "SQL://VBROKERSERVER7/EsbExceptionDb/". It will be retransmitted after the retry interval specified for this Send Port. Details:"HRESULT="0x80040e07" Description="Error converting data type nvarchar to datetime."

Now we both expected that he had made a mistake during the installation and configuration phase, but after we spent a fair bit of time comparing his installation to my installation (which worked by the way!) we realized that we had identical configurations. We finally realized that the only difference between the environments was that I had configured my Windows server to work with a regional setting of "English (United States)" while he was using "English (Canada)". The problem was occurring because the two countries store the day/month data in reversed order. Once we changed his system so that the user account that BizTalk ran under used "English (United States)" his system was fine.

I've since seen someone with a near similar problem using the Dutch regional settings. He found a code level work around that can be used to fix the problem and allow any country's setting to be used. Details are at http://www.codeplex.com/esb/workitem/view.aspx?workitemid=4430

Cheers and keep on BizTalk

Using the ESB Guidance - Installation Process and Checklists

pkelcey — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 07:16:00 GMT

Many people are eager to get their hands on the new Microsoft ESB Guidance for BizTalk and to start exploring all of the great stuff it contains. However, we’re seeing that a lot of people are struggling with the installation process. Therefore, I thought I’d put together some documentation on the process I followed and I also figured that it would be useful to create some simple checklists that outline all of the tasks, actions and software you need to complete.

Based on my experiences (and backed up by my college Jim Bowyer’s experiences) most of your time will be spent installing the prerequisites that the ESB guidance requires. The guidance does include some fairly comprehensive help files that do outline all of the service packs, hot fixes etc that you need, however I’ve found that most people rush through this section a bit and miss one of two of the required components or required tasks. I myself spent several hours trying to debug the sample applications only to realize that I had missed one key hot fix and one key step in the configuration process. My strongest recommendation is to really take your time when setting up your environment and make sure you’ve got everything install and configured properly before you try and install the ESB guidance. A little care taken at early will save you massive amount of time later when you’re trying to debug malfunctioning components and sample applications.

After running through this process a couple of times, I’d estimate that I could do a complete installation in a little less than ½ a day. It took me almost two days the first time I did this due to fact that I rushed through the process and missing a couple of steps. The ½ day estimate is also based on the fact that I have a base Virtual PC image that I can start from. Without this image (I.e. if you’re building a machine from the O/S up), you’ll obviously need more time (perhaps even up to 2 days). Finally, please note documentation is not my day job; these are merely supplementary notes to help folks get started with the ESB Guidance. I hope you find this valuable and I welcome your feedback.

I've attached a PDF document containing the process overview and checklists.

Update: For those of you that are reading this through an RSS feed or from a syndicated blog site, you might not be able to see the attachment. Here's a link you can use to download the file. http://www.peterkelcey.com/downloads/ESBInstallProcess_V1.pdf

Cheers and keep on BizTalking..

Using the ESB Guidance: Dynamic Transformation and Routing

pkelcey — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 10:42:00 GMT

In my last entry, I showed how developers could use our new ESB guidance to submit generic messages into BizTalk and have that message routed to a Service Endpoint based on a UDDI entry. Today, I thought I'd expand on that example and add in another common scenario that occurs within an ESB architecture, namely "Dynamic Transformations". (If you haven't seen the last post, its probably best to check it out first as I'll be building on the concepts introduced there)

The Goal

Submit a generic message to the ESB and have it dynamically transformed and then have the new message dynamically routed to a Service Endpoint that is defined in a UDDI entry. The client application needs to be able to specific the transformation map to use as well as the name of the Service.

The Solution

The first thing I did was to build out a test client that I could use to submit message to the ESB. I needed to be able to specify the body of my message, the map I want to use for the transformation and the name of the Service that I want the message submitted to.

In my last post I spoke about the ESB On Ramp Web Service and show how you could submit generic XML message to it. I also outlined about how to submit message processing instructions to the ESB by using SOAP headers attached to that SOAP message. To achieve dynamic transformation and routing, we'll again need to use the this On Ramp and we'll again attach message processing instructions via the SOAP Headers. Therefore, the first thing I did after creating my test client was to add a Web Reference to the ESB On Ramp Web Service.

Next, I created a function that would handle all interaction with the OnRamp Web Service. To achieve both dynamic transformation followed by dynamic routing, I needed to use four of the SOAP headers.

ProcessingInstruction - (Allows me to specify the first processing task for the ESB to perform)
Itinerary - (I'll talk more about this in a minute)
MapType - (Allows me to specify the fully qualified name of the map I want BizTalk to use in the transformation)
EndpoingUddiLabel - (Allows me to specify the name of the Service that I want message routed to)

private string Submit_Transform_Route(string strService, string strMessage, string strMap)

{

// Get an instance of the On Ramp Service

ESB.OnRamp ramp = new ESB.OnRamp();

// Assign security credentials

ramp.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential("username", "password");

// Assign values to the headers we need to perform the UDDI based routing

ramp.EsbSoapHeadersValue = new ESB.EsbSoapHeaders();

//Tell the ESB that the first task is to "Transform" the message

ramp.EsbSoapHeadersValue.ProcessingInstruction = "TRANSFORM";

//Let the ESB know what all of the steps I want performed are

ramp.EsbSoapHeadersValue.Itinerary = "TRANSFORM,ROUTE";

//Tell the ESB which Map to use in the transform

ramp.EsbSoapHeadersValue.MapType = strMap;

ramp.EsbSoapHeadersValue.EndpointUddiLabel = strService;

// Get the message to send

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();

doc.LoadXml(strMessage);

try

{

//Send the message to the OnRamp and return the result

ramp.Receive(doc);

return "Message Submitted Successfully.";

}

catch (System.Exception ex)

{

return "Error: " + ex.Message;

}

You'll notice that its almost identical to the function I developed for my last post. In that function I had to set three of the EsbSoapHeaders to achieve UDDI based routing for my message. I had to set the ProcessingInstruction = "ROUTE", the Itineray to "ROUTE" and the EndPointUddiLabel to the name of the Service I wanted the message routed to.

For this example, I actually wanted the ESB to perform multiple and sequential tasks on my message. (i.e. transform it first and then route it). Since the "ProcessingInstruction" header only allows me to specify a single task for the ESB to perform, I needed to find some header that would let me submit a list of instructions. This is where the "Itinerary" header comes into play. It is this header that allows me to pass in a comma delimited list of tasks which the ESB will perform one after the other.

Once I had this function built, all I had to do was call it from the onClick where I passed in the Map name and the Service name.

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

Cursor.Current = Cursors.WaitCursor;

btnSubmit.Enabled = false;

string result = Submit_Transform_Route(txtServiceName.Text, txtOriginalMessage.Text, txtMapName.Text);

btnSubmit.Enabled = true;

Cursor.Current = Cursors.Default;

MessageBox.Show(result, "Result", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Information, MessageBoxDefaultButton.Button1, MessageBoxOptions.DefaultDesktopOnly);

}

Its important to understand that you can only use a Map that has already been deployed into your BizTalk server. So you do need to pre-develop the Map before you can use it. For my example here, I just used one of the prebuilt samples that comes with the SB guidance. Also, you have to provide the fully qualified name of the map.

How it Works

The way this scenario works is very similar to the Dynamic Routing scenario I explained in my last post. Our message is submitted to the OnRamp Web Service, it promotes all of the SOAP headers that we provided up into the standard BizTalk Message Context. Within BizTalk, we then have our "Agents" (i.e. Orchestrations) that are setup to subscribe to our message. Each Agent subscribes to a message based on the "ProcessingInstruction" property. In my example, I set the ProcessingInstruction equal to " TRANSFORM". This resulted in my message being picked up by the DynamicTransformation.odx orchestration. (Found in the Microsoft.BizTalk.ESB.Agents.Transform project). It is this orchestration that will perform the transformation for us.

This transformation orchestration does a couple of things for us.

It checks to see if we have specified a map for us. If we haven't it attempts to determine the map name based on information sent in the SOAP headers.
Once a map name is determined, the transformation is performed for us.
Advance the itinerary for us.

"Advance the itinerary"??? What's that mean? We'll lets take a look ...

Itineraries

Things to understand:

Message processing tasks are performed by "Agents" which are really just BizTalk Orchestrations
Agents subscribe to messages based on the "ProcessingInstruction" property. I.e. The Transform agent only picks up messages with a ProcessingInstruction set to "TRANSFORM". The delivery agent only to messages with "ROUTE"
Itineraries are comma delimited list of processing instructions that will eventually be moved up into the ProcessingInstruction property as each step is completed.

After an agent picks up a message from the messageBox and completes its core task, it is required to examine the current message itinerary. If there are additional steps that need to be completed, the agent is responsible for extracting the next step out of the itinerary and moving it up into the ProcessingInstruction property. The message is then published into the messageBox where another agent can potentially pick it up based on the new processing instruction. It is this mechanism that allows us to "chain" together our agents and complete multiple tasks on our message as it moves through the ESB.

Lets take a look at a portion of the Transform agent orchestration.

In this image, we can see the 2 key tasks that the agent is performing. In the "MessageAssignment" step, the actual transformation is performed. The code that performs the dynamic transform is:

tMapType = System.Type.GetType(FullyQualifiedMapType);

transform (OutboundMessage) = tMapType(InboundMessage);

The second key box is the "Advance Itinerary" one. It contains the following code:

OutboundMessage(*) = InboundMessage(*);

itineraryStep = Microsoft.BizTalk.ESB.Helpers.ItineraryHelper.Advance(OutboundMessage(Microsoft.BizTalk.ESB.Itinerary));

OutboundMessage(Microsoft.BizTalk.ESB.Itinerary) = itineraryStep.Itinerary;

OutboundMessage(Microsoft.BizTalk.ESB.ProcessingInstruction) = itineraryStep.NextStep;

As you can see, this code advances the itinerary forward one step by calling the ItineraryHelper class. The ProcessingInstruction property is then updated to contain this next step. For our example, the "TRANSFORM" instruction I manually assigned to the ProcessingInstruction is replaced with the second Itinerary task "ROUTE". Once this code runs, a new message is published back to the messageBox where our Routing agent picks it up and perform the dynamic routing. (If you want details on how that agent will run, check out the previous post) This is one way in which Dynamic Transformation and Dynamic Routing can be achieved using the ESB guidance.

Extending Beyond this Example:

The ESB guidance currently ships with two default agents, the Transform agent and the Delivery agent. It's important to understand that you can extend your ESB beyond this basic functionality by creating you own Agent orchestrations that subscribe to your own custom ProcessingInstructions. The guidance contains a set of guidelines on how to develop your own agents so that you can develop your own custom and potentially complex ESB tasks.

Now, if you are interested in leveraging the ESB guidance for your organization, we have currently released it to a core set of Microsoft Partners. You can find a list of these partners at http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/solutions/soa/esbpartners.mspx

Using the Microsoft ESB Guidance: UDDI

pkelcey — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 22:18:00 GMT

Some of you may have heard by now that we are in the process of releasing the Microsoft Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) guidance. This guidance contains pre-built components, use cases, documentation and sales material that our Business Process Integration partners can use to rapidly deploy ESBs on top of BizTalk, Windows, SharePoint and SQL Servers. Over the holidays I spent some time digging into the code and thought I'd share a bit of what I've been seen.

I thought that I'd first talk about the standard ESB concept of "EndPoint Resolution" and how our guidance allows you to achieve this. Endpoint resolution is core requirement in any ESB as a Service may not always reside at the same address or endpoint. Therefore we need to be able to locate our services at runtime (wherever they may be). The Microsoft ESB guidance comes prebuilt with this capability, so I thought I post a small "How-To" blurb about how you can do it.

The Task

The basic task I thought I'd tackle is to submit a generic message from a basic client application into the ESB and have it routed it to a Service based on a entry in a local UDDI server. The following image show the Services that exist in my UDDI server.

The service that I'll wanted to submit the message to is "ENDPOINT: PostOrderMessage". You can see from the screen image that this Service has been setup with a File Folder as its endpoint. "C:\projects\Microsoft BizTalk ESB\Tests\Common\Filedrop\Output\Order %MessageID%.xml" If the solution works properly, I should be able to find my messages sitting in this folder.

ESB Concept: The "On Ramp"

As you dig into the guidance you'll quickly learn that one of the key components within it is the "On Ramp". The On Ramp acts as a central entry point into the ESB engine and it allows client applications to submit generic messages that contain processing, routing and transformation instructions. The On Ramp is a key concept to understand in order use the ESB guidance and if you're planning on using it, you'll need to have a good understanding it.

To keep things simple, the On Ramp is a Web Service that applications can use to submit XML based messages into BizTalk. On top of this, the On Ramp allow us to specify a number of processing, routing and transformation instructions that the BizTalk will follow when processing the message. To send these processing instructions, we use specific SOAP headers that are attached to our message when we submit to the On Ramp . If you've got the ESB guidance already, you can view all of the possible headers by opening the "EsbEnvGeneric.xsd" property schema file in the Microsoft.BizTalk.Esb.Schema project. This XSD file is a standard BizTalk property schema and denotes the properties that our SOAP headers will eventually be promoted into. For those of you that don't have the guidance, here a quick list of the parameters you can use when submitting your messages.

ProcessingInstruction
Itinerary
MapRulesPolicy
MapSelAssemblyName
MapSelMethodCall
MapSelTypeName
MapType
MapUddiLabel
MapXPath
EndpointAddress
EndpointConfigurationString
EndpointConfigurationRulesPolicy
EndpointConfigurationUddiLabel
EndpointConfigurationXPath
EndpointDeliveryAgent
EndpointMessagePattern
EndpointRulesPolicy
EndpointSelectAssembly
EndpointSelectMethod
EndpointSelectType
EndpointUddiLabel
EndpointXpath

For most projects, you'll ending have to work with most these headers in order to achieve full ESB capabilities, but for our simple task we'll just need to use three:

EndPointUddiLabel - We use this to tell the ESB the name of the Service to lookup in the UDDI
ProcessingInstruction - We use this to tell the ESB that the message needs to be routed.
Itinerary - Where we'll tell the ESB that this message needs to following a routing itinerary

Building the Solution

The first thing I did was to deploy and configure the ESB guidance as per the installation instructions it ships with. I won't cover those steps here, so I'll just jump to what I did once that process was complete.

The first thing I did was to build out a client app that I could use to submit my messages to the ESB. I used a very basic Windows Forms application as my client. All I needed was a form that would let me to define my message and specify the name of the Service I wanted to route the message to.

Once I had my basic form built out, the next step I needed to take was to add a web reference to the ESB On Ramp.

Once I'd added the web reference, I had everything I needed to submit messages into the ESB. For my project, I created a function to handle all interaction with the On Ramp web service. It creates my message, assigns the three SOAP headers I need and submits the message it to the On Ramp Web Service. Here's the code:

/// <summary>

/// This function prepares a message and submits it to the ESB on ramp

/// </summary>

/// <param name="strMessageBody">The core content of the message</param>

/// <param name="strServiceName">The name of the service in the UDDI that we want to send the message to</param>

private string SubmitMessage(string strMessageBody, string strServiceName)

{

// Get an instance of the On Ramp Service

ESB.OnRamp ramp = new ESB.OnRamp();

// Assign security credentials

ramp.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential("username", "password");

// Assign values to the headers we need to perform the UDDI based routing

ramp.EsbSoapHeadersValue = new ESB.EsbSoapHeaders();

ramp.EsbSoapHeadersValue.EndpointUddiLabel = strServiceName;

ramp.EsbSoapHeadersValue.ProcessingInstruction = "ROUTE";

ramp.EsbSoapHeadersValue.Itinerary = "ROUTE";

// Get the message to send

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();

doc.LoadXml(strMessageBody);

try

{

//Send the message and return the result

ramp.Receive(doc);

return "Message Submitted Successfully.";

}

catch (System.Exception ex)

{

return "Error: " + ex.Message;

}

As you can see, the ESB class that was created when we added our Web Reference, contains a 2 classes. The "ESB.OnRamp" class which is our proxy to the actual Web Service and the "ESB.EsbSoapHeadersValue" class. This second class contains all of the properties that relate to SOAP headers that the ESB On Ramp will use.

I setup the OnClick event of my Submit button to call this function and I passed in the values of my two textboxes. As easy as that, I had built an application that was able to send a message into my ESB architecture. Once I'd done that, the ESB engine took care of everything else. It only took me ~10 minutes to build out my app and start routing my messages to Services. Its really is pretty simple and easy to get going with this. I've included a screen cam video at the end of this entry that shows me running the solution. (Its set for 1024x768 resolution)

Now that you've seen how to route message using UDDI, some of you might wonder what exactly is going on under the BizTalk covers. So lets take a look.

The Inner Workings

The first thing to look at is obviously the On Ramp. The On Ramp is essentially a Web Service and a BizTalk receive port. The receive location within the port uses the SOAP adapter to interact with the Web Service and also uses a custom pipeline "ReceiveForESBGeneric".

The SOAP adapter is configured to use the same Web Service that we made a web reference to in our client application. The custom pipeline is responsible for promoting the SOAP headers into BizTalk message properties so that other elements within BizTalk can access our instructions. Once the receive location processes the incoming message, the message (along with its promoted properties) is published into the standard BizTalk MessageBox and the On Ramp is done its work.

At this point, another BizTalk artifact takes over, the "Generic.odx" orchestration. This orchestration comes as part of the guidance and can be found int the Microsoft.BizTalk.ESB.Agents.Delivery project. The messages received from our On Ramp receive port are sent to this orchestration using BizTalk's standard publish/subscribe mechanism. This orchestration handles all incoming messages that need to be routed.

The orchestration has a direct bound receive port based on specific filter expressions. The receive shape that has a filter setup to receive all messages that have their "ProcessingInstruction" property set to "ROUTE". Hence why I had to set that that SOAP header to use a value of "ROUTE" in my client application.

Once receiving the message, the orchestration checks to see if an proper endpoint has already been assigned to this message. If it hasn't, then the orchestration will begin the process of resolving it. This is done in the "Call Resolution Class" expression box in the "Resolve EndPoint" scope. In this expression box, a call is made to a function call "Microsoft.BizTalk.ESB.Helpers.Resolver.Resolve". This function is a part of a custom library that ships with the ESB guidance and it handles the lower level steps required to resolve the endpoint.

In our example, we specified a UDDI service name in the EndPointUddiLabelField SOAP header. Because we did this, the Resolve function will attempt to resolve the endpoint by making a call to the UDDI server. If it finds the requested service in the directory, then the endpoint is returned (as a string) to the orchestration.

This endpoint is then used to configure the "GenericDeliveryAgentSend" dynamic port . The configuration of the port is done in the "Set Endpoint" expression shape.

Once configured, the port is able to transmits our message to the Service endpoint.

As you can see, the orchestration also contains number of exception handling steps which all tie into the central exception management framework that the guidance contains. The orchestration also contains a number of "Tracing" steps which allow for easier debugging of the process.

More than just UDDI and more than just Routing

I've quickly shown how to submit a message to the ESB engine that ends up being routed based on a UDDI entry. However I must add that you aren't limited to UDDI lookups for your address resolution. Using the SOAP headers, you can tell the ESB engine to use the Business Rules Engine or you can pass in the End Point directly with your message and there are also options for using XPath. The code contained in the guidance is incredibly flexible with regards to how you want to handle your endpoint resolution.

Also, message Routing is just one feature of the guidance. It also provides some great capabilities around dynamic message transformation, centralized exception management for services, linked itineraries and more. There are more than a few projects I've worked on where I wish I had this functionality prebuilt for me!

Cheers and Keep on BizTalking...