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Showing posts from June, 2012

BTDF–Use a different binding for Test as Dev

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  The BizTalk Deployment Framework utilizes MSBuild and is therefore highly flexible. In case you wan’t to use FILE ports in DEV and an entirely different protocol in TEST you have 2 options: 1) Use Macros and leverage the XmlPreprocess and Masterbindings functionality 2) Override the Portbindings/PortbindingsMaster MSBuild property. I will show you how to realize option #2 Configure the binding file in the BTDF Settings file Configure the BTDF Project        </PropertyGroup>        <PropertyGroup Condition="'$(Configuration)' == 'Debug'">               <PortBindings> $(Portbindings) </PortBindings>               <OutputPath>bin\debug\</OutputPath>               <DeployPDBsToGac>false</DeployPDBsToGac>        </PropertyGroup>       HTH, Sander

BizTalk still being updated…CU5 released

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Ok, so no major updates but still some fixes that seem very critical, now bundled in a cumulative update (CU5) Among other fixes; 2703644 FIX: Orphaned rows are created when you run the "DTA Archive and Purge SQL Server Agent" job in BizTalk Server 2010 BizTalk Server Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) Runtime 2676141 FIX: An instances table is changed to use the primary filegroup in the BAMArchive database when you run the BAM SSIS package in BizTalk Server 2010 During installation Restart of services Note: Make sure that the virus scanner (e.g. TrendMicro) can be stopped or is stopped as this will prevent the WMI service from stopping and prevent you from installing the update (changes can not be rolled back). Even a free summary screen with log is included   If you’re really interested in the all the windows that pop-up, I suggest to open the log file as well.   Best regards,   Sander

ESB Toolkit – Unit testing BRI lookups

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One of the major advantages of the ESB Toolkit is that you can leverage the highly flexible Business Rule Engine (BRE) and use the BRE to dynamically configure various ESB related functionality: - Itinerary to be started - Transformation Type (thus, the name of the map) - Endpoint (Set End Point Outbound Transport Location, e.g. Transport Type, Location, Action etc.) This wonderful stuff can be done by doing BRI Lookups in the pipeline (executed in the ESB Pipelines using the ESB Dispatcher pipeline component) or even from within an itinerary (this applies for Transformation Type and Endpoint information off course) Problem One of the difficulties of this is that testing this is fairly cumbersome since tooling wasn’t readily available to do some automated testing….now there is! Tool for testing BRI calls My colleague IT Hero - Tomasso Groenendijk has created a very useful tool to do manual testing on BRI lookups. This enables you to quickly test rules and determine if the ESB

Centralized SSO Application Configuration Data Store

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Reading application configuration data from a Single Sign-On database is a well-known concept within the BizTalk community. There are other means of retrieving application configuration data for BizTalk, yet retrieving them from SSO is the most powerful one. Microsoft has built an SSO Application Configuration Snap-In that provides a good user experience maintaining custom configuration data. With the Snap-In you will also get code for a .NET Helper Class to support retrieval of application configuration data in BizTalk. This approach has some major benefits. Your application configuration data is cached, has a built in refresh mechanism (ESSO Service) and is secure. What if you have a requirement that to remotely (from a non-BizTalk machine) retrieve application configuration data, because you like to benefit from SSO Config Store? Consider the following diagram In this scenario a mapping is implemented using a Functoid based on a shared helper class that reads the co

WCF-Oracle–Install the 32- and 64-bit client (the following assemblies are installed SDK assemblies…)

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  There are probably already lot of posts on the installation of the Oracle client, so this is a small note; Error: If you start visual studio on a machine that hasn’t got the Oracle 32-bit client installed, prepare to face the following error; ‘The following assemblies are installed SDK assemblies but could not be shown in the customize toolkit dialog because they…..’ Solution This is because VS.Net is 32 bit and you only installed the 64-bit Oracle client. Install for your DEVELOPMENT environment both the 32-bit and 64-bit client.   HTH, Sander

BizTalk Pub/sub vs Topics based routing–discussion

My colleagues and I had a brief discussion about the subject ‘Topics’ and what it brings… Do you all agree/disagree with the following statement: topic-based pub-sub messaging doesn’t really exist in BizTalk “In my opinion; I disagree, as BizTalk offers the following 'out-of-the-box' • Message Routing (f.e build in context properties like message type, trading partner, operation etc) • Content Routing (f.e. promoted properties, message inspection in orchestrations/pipelines icw orchestration logic)” My colleague Rene Brauwers Here my 2 cents…. I agree that it exists...however the current offerings in BizTalk are tightly coupled, making the usage far from perfect. When doing content based routing on custom fields (promoted properties), you will be making the solution message-coupled; Your custom message property schema is deployed, and the message filter on these fields have a direct relationship with this property schema. Making any change to this schema will g