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Showing posts from May, 2007

BizTalk Challenge add namespace to message

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T oday I faced a new challenge with BizTalk Server, where I needed to add a namespace to an incoming message. Through Google I found an excellent post by Richard Seroter. If you had installed the BizTalk Adapters for Enterprise Applications, you’d find a Visual Studio.NET project located at: C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Adapters for Enterprise Applications\Pipeline Component . For me this is interesting since I am working with BizTalk Server 2006 on 64-bits and currently integrating with Oracle eBusiness Suite (see previous posts). Pipeline component is called SetNSForMsg. You can open solution, build project. One can encounter an error stating the Designer.cs is not present or is visual but with an exclamation mark (delete it). Change code in SetNSForMsg.cs class in IComponent IBaseMessage Execute. Rest you can find in Richard Seroter post. Change if necessary the delayed signing into singing of the component and copy it to C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\Pipelin

SOA Principles

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Coming Wednesday I have another discussion with a couple of architects of Inter Access (my company) about SOA. We will discuss the principles of SOA. Some of the principles to be discussed are published by Stefan Tilkov in InfoQ and SOAWorld magazine April 2007. It is a good written piece and very useful in our discussion. In a previous post What is SOA? I also mentioned a discussion with the same architects. Together with my colleague architects we are currently working on a SOA framework, where definition, principles and so on are building blocks. In the end this framework can be used to guide our potential customers to set up a SOA. Some principles of SOA can be found here at eBiz or here . Have a look if you are interested by going through the links provided. If not you could try have a look at our new website build entirely with MOSS 2007. Technorati: SOA Inter Access MOSS 2007

BizTalk Hotrod Magazine

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Today I found out there is a new magazine for BizTalk. Thanks to a site called BizTalk 24 * 7 from Saravana Kumar. Great site I can recommend it if you want to find more BizTalk resources and so on. It out for a couple of weeks now and can be downloaded here . There some posting out there from a number of people like Bundy's .NET and BizTalk Server Blog , Tim Rayburn and Saravana himself. Have a look for yourself at BizTalk 24 * 7, if you haven't already. I am going to read the magazine now. Keep you all posted. P.s. I found out there is another great list of resources by Brain H. Prince. (29 may 2007) Technorati: BizTalk Server BizTalk 24*7 BizTalk Hotrod BizTalk Resources

Working with BizTalk Adapters for Enterprise Applications on Windows 2003 R2 64-bit

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Y esterday I was configuring a BizTalk production environment for a customer which involved the BizTalk Enterprise Adapters. In a previous post I mentioned how to set up an environment where one can integrate between Oracle eBusiness Suite and BizTalk. This environment was 32-bit and now I was facing 64-bit. This is a bit different in a way of configuring, so I did some googeling and found a very good blog post of Wade Wegner . He explains step by step what to do. There are some things I had to find out like to change from Program Files(x86) to Progr~2 since the adapter has some flaws (use good old dos command like dir /x). Another to note here is that registry settings for 64-bit are not found in the suggested article http://support.microsoft.com/?id=923650 (32-bit). The registry key to update can be located here: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\BizTalkAdapters]. After that following the rest of the posting and you are all set to go. Technorati: BizTalk Enterprise

Services everywhere

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H ere you see me at gravity bar at 7th floor of the Guinness storehouse in Dublin. I spent a weekend with my wife and friends in Ireland (see other picture below). Besides Dublin I have been in Malahide, Lusk, Rush, Howth, Powercourt Waterfall and Glendaloch. I visited a couple of bars including the gravity bar and drank a lot of Guinness (one of my favorite's stouts). Yesterday evening I returned home again and was thinking that before this trip I used a couple of services like booking a flight and a hotel room. During the trip I used credit card to pay for tickets, meals and drink (there are a couple of services behind the transaction too). When I came home I ordered a pizza online that was brought to my home later on. Another of couple services used here. As so see a lot of things around use are services. If you ever thinking of going to Ireland start off with Guiness storehouse, a good experience and nice taste of Guinness at the top Gravity bar with a nice view over Dublin Cit

SOA Readings

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L ately I have read some new SOA material like books and articles. Yesterday I finished reading a book from Sandy Carter about new business language. The book reads like a journey from innovation to don'ts of SOA. It contains a lot of case studies from companies around the world applying SOA and plenty of information collated from years of research done at IBM labs. Chapter 3 on Component business model lays the foundation for how an enterprise can link the business and IT alignment for success. Chapter 9 on the top 10 don'ts reflects some true real world experience and the easy to make mistakes when one undertakes SOA projects. ESBs to Governance are explained in terms that both business and IT execs can understand quickly while carrying enough content for the technology people to refer back. This book introduces the reader to many important aspects of SOA and shows how to use them to achieve business flexibility: component business modeling, the SOA reference architecture, t

SOA and Host Systems

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M icrosoft recently released a white paper about leveraging value of host systems with real world SOA. The paper can be downloaded here . We from Microsoft Unit at Inter Access are now doing some researched based on this paper. We are trying for instance to call RPG code on AS/400. In a previous posts I mentioned I have been able to extract data from DB2 on AS/400, so connecting to AS/400 was easy. Same counts for connecting to a DB2 database. My colleague Hugo has written a nice tool to view data inside DB2 that helps to indentify tables, colums and so on. I must say he has done a nice job with only a few lines of code: MsDb2Connection con = new MsDb2Connection(textBox1.Text); MsDb2Command command = new MsDb2Command(textBox2.Text, con); MsDb2DataAdapter adapter = new MsDb2DataAdapter(command); MsDb2Transaction tran = null; DataSet ds = new DataSet(); try { con.Open(); tran = con.BeginTransaction(IsolationLevel.ReadCommitted); command.Transaction = tran; adapter.Fill(ds); dataGridView1

Integration Challenge: BizTalk Functoid Blues

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R ecently I was facing an integration challenge by creating a custom functiod to use in a mapping. How do I create a custom functiod? Well one can look at a sample on a machine, where a BizTalk instance is present (usually C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\SDK\Samples\XmlTools\CustomFunctoid). Important is to import the BizTalk assembly: Microsoft.BizTalk.BaseFunctoids. This one can be found on the server containing the BizTalk instance in folder: C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\Developer Tools. So you can start creating a custom functoid by creating an empty solution. In that solution one adds an empty project. Why this way, well if you want to create a custom functoid the same way as in the sample, starting off with a class library template in Visual Studio will give you a different set of things like properties. After adding the empty project, change properties of project to class library. Next create a strong name through properties, the assembly will la

SOA Deployments will grow !

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Today received an email containing article stating the SOA deployments will grow. So I googled around and found some more promising signs that SOA will be become big. It will be important for BI, click here . Gartner says it will grow more than fifty percent, nice . InfoWorld brings the same good news. . SOA World is very postive . The lists goes on, so happy times ahead for SOA. Good for us !!! Hype or no hype (see previous post). Technorati: SOA

Integration with Oracle eBusiness Suite and BizTalk 2006

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I n this post I will give some pointers how to set up a couple of things so you are able to integrate Oracle database/Oracle eBusiness Suite with BizTalk Server 2006. The adapters can be downloaded here . To install and configure them Microsoft also released documentation . The adapter uses databases through ODBC and runs on W2K, W2K3 and XP. And Oracle client 9.2 at least is required which includes the Oracle ODBC Driver (update to driver 9.2.0.5.4). Installation of the client can be found in the documentation provided in the link above. After installation of the client, ODBC connection has to be setup. Here comes the tricky part. As soon one chooses System DSN, the name should exact ba as the TNS name i.e. mytnsname (TNS) mytnsname (DSN), see picture below. As soon as this all behind you next thing to do is setting up a receive location to use the adapter. The following link gives you a very good explanation how to do this . At the end of this blog post a simple orchestration is show