Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

Couple month ago in June I described in a post how to cluster SSO. This was SQL Server 2005 cluster on Windows 2003 R2 scenario. How to cluster SSO for BizTalk Server 2009 is described here in online documentation. I have not yet have experience with clustering SSO on Windows 2008, but Kent wrote an interesting post about it. If you want to cluster SSO Single Sign On with BizTalk Server 2009 on Windows 2008, check online documentation before you start and check out this post and some other resources available on web right now discussing SSO, clustering, BizTalk 2009: BizTalk Server 2009 Installation Errors (blog post) – Johan Hedberg; BizTalk High Availability (PowerPoint)  -  Kent Weare; Pricing and Licensing FAQ (SSO questions, website) – Microsoft'; SSO Configuration MCC Snapin – Teekam Gloyal. Technorati: enterprise sso BizTalk Server 2009

I read some posts today around Complex Event Processing ( CEP ) where Microsoft has provided a solution for. This solution is Microsoft’s new Complex Event Processing technology to help businesses derive better insights by correlating event streams from multiple sources with near-zero latency and called: ‘Microsoft® SQL Server® StreamInsight’. A CTP can be downloaded from Microsoft.I have not yet been able to try this out, but I will as soon as time is available. Some bright minds in the BizTalk community already made some comments like Charles Young and Richard Seroter mentioned in his recent post . Latter also written about CEP in BizTalk in his SOA Patterns with BizTalk 2009 book . So it is worth checking out if you have the time. Technorati: BizTalk Server 2009

Michael Stephenson has released a new version of configuration manager for BizTalk. I myself was not familiar yet with this tool. I downloaded it from CodePlex and tried it out on one of virtual machines. To use the tool there is a video out that explains the tool. Tool itself is used to help you manage the different settings needed for binding and configuration files across different environments and allows you to connect this with your build process. Once you have downloaded the tool in zip file, you need to unzip it. There is a compiled help file that will tell you about the tool, how to set it up and install it, walkthroughs and utilities. I did a quick and simple install, setting up the database and application. In VPC I used was BizTalk 2006 R2 environment with VS2005 and SQL2005. Setting up database will result in following database schema   Application will need its connection string set to database (ConfigurationManagement) on your server. I added the test data an...

BizTalk support team has started adding content to BizTalk Development Center on MSDN. Their goal is continually update with information: Common call generators, including Symptoms and potential Resolutions Potential scenarios and their fixes Contributing to the monthly theme Providing learning materials, including some of the same BizTalk 2009 training materials that the BizTalk support team used: BizTalk Server Training from Microsoft Customer Service and Support . The last offers training information about BizTalk Server. There I found some interesting documents, which you can download from there: Learning the New EDI Features of BizTalk Server 2009 Learning the New EDI Features of BizTalk Server 2009 Understanding the New BizTalk Adapter for Oracle E-Business Suite Understanding the New BizTalk Adapter for SQL Server Technorati: BizTalk Server 2009

Last week I posted an issue around BizTalk Adapter Pack 1.0 in x64 environment. Now I like to clarify a couple of things concerning installation BizTalk Adapter Pack 1.0 in x64 environment and running the adapter in x64 host instance. One thing to consider is having an Oracle specialist around and someone with access to meta-link, because for x64 environment you will need patch 5337014 and 6344569, latter being a OPatch. For 64-bit according to installation guide a Oracle 10.2.0.3 64-bit client is required, which supposed to be a part of one of the mentioned patches. This is how I interpreted, but this is not the case. The patches do not contain a 64-bit Oracle client. You will need to download and install 102010 win64 x64 client first and then install ODAC and apply patch 5337014 and oPatch 6344569 in same directory as ODAC. Applying patch 5337014 is pretty straight forward, but oPatch something different. First you will to need to copy patch in oPatch directory of 64-bit client a...

Some of latest posts I read where quite interesting. One is about unattended/silent install of BizTalk 2009 by Kent Weare . Some background on him can be found at Richard Seroter’s interview series on his blog . Brought back a thought of other post months ago from Thiago Almeida about syspreping VHD with BizTalk. Creating BizTalk installation on virtual machine is fun, but also complex depending on what one want to develop solutions for. Developing integration solution for Oracle demand other set of software (LOB Adapters, BizTalk Adapter Pack) than developing solution integrating Dynamics AX 2009 for instance. Having multiple sandbox’s with different set of prerequisite software helps a lot I think and using sysprep or an unattended install of BizTalk helps speedup the process. Having everything on one sandbox to develop any kind of BizTalk solution is not wise idea and a lot dependencies will make it complex. This is just a thought I like to share; comments are welcome. Technorat...

Creating Hosts and host instances can be done with scripts. Below is script for creating hosts: This script will result in following outcome: Looking at properties it, 32-bit only is checked and others are unchecked. The same behaviour occurs if this script is performed in 64-bit environment and something you might not want. Script I showed at begin is one I have been provided with by a colleague and useful to create one or more hosts. Key here is MSBTS_HostSetting that has a couple properties like AuthTrusted, HostType, HostTracking, IsDefault and IsHost32BitOnly (there are more). This gave some insight that script can be altered to have a more desirable outcome. I altered the script by adding setting for HostTracking, Isdefault and IsHost32BitOnly. Running this script gave me a more desirable outcome: As you can see there is a lot flexibility here as you can alter the script to any possible outcome depending on the situation required. There is also a tool available to create h...

On my sandbox with BizTalk 2009 on it I wanted to download and install FileMon and RegMon. I got this message when I wanted to run FileMon. There is tool now called Tool ‘Process Monitor’2.5. I got the wrong version of FileMon, but it showed me this tool is available now.   This UI contains views for Registry, FileSystem, Network, Process and Profiling Events. This 2.5 version has been released about three weeks ago. Excellent tool for monitoring what is going on your machine and very useful for troubleshooting an environment. For me my sandbox.

New BizTalk Hotrod Magazine is out . I have been reading this magazine in the beginning and it is a good resource to read and absorb knowledge provided in there. This issue contains article about: B2B 2.0 Azure Unit Testing Schemas and Maps in BizTalk Server 2009 Book Review for "SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009" How to Throw Typed Fault Exceptions from Orchestrations Published as WCF Services Microsoft Dynamics AX integration using Microsoft BizTalk Server (I am interested  in that one, cause I like to try something's out with AX 2009) Great work guys (authors and publisher). Technorati: BizTalk Server 2009

You can run into some trouble installing BizTalk Adapter Pack 1.0. I stumble upon the following: 1: Messaging Engine The Messaging Engine failed to add a receive location " MyReceiveLocation " with URL " oracledb://xxxx " to the adapter "WCF-Custom". Reason: "Microsoft.BizTalk.Adapter.Wcf.Converters.CreateBindingException: Unable to get binding type for binding extension "oracleDBBinding". Verify the binding extension is registered in machine.config.    at Microsoft.BizTalk.Adapter.Wcf.Converters.BindingFactory.GetBindingType(String bindingName, Type& bindingElementType)    at Microsoft.BizTalk.Adapter.Wcf.Converters.BindingFactory.CreateUserBinding(String bindingName, String bindingConfiguration)    at Microsoft.BizTalk.Adapter.Wcf.Converters.BindingFactory.CreateBinding(String bindingName, String bindingConfiguration, String bindings)    at Microsoft.BizTalk.Adapter.Wcf.Config.C...

In previous post before my holiday to France I tried out BizTalk Adapter Pack 2.0 with SQL Binding. As said back then I also wanted to try out the Oracle Binding. On my Sandbox I installed Oracle 10G Express Database (similar to SQL Express). To download this database you will need to register to Oracle Technology Network ( OTN ). For Oracle Database 10g Express Edition installation I did the following: Password voor SYSTEM database e.a. I used: welkom . Destination Folder: D:\oraclexe\ Port for 'Oracle Database Listener': 1521 Port for 'Oracle Services for Microsoft Transaction Server': 2030 Port for HTTP Listener: 8080 After installation Oracle Database Express Edition browser UI is fired up. I logged in with username system and password welkom. I then unlocked sample user by following the procedure below: To unlock the sample user account: 1.Make sure you are still logged on as the database administrator, as described in the previ...

During my holiday I missed out the release of new BizTalk Server 2009 Operations Guide . BizTalk Server Operations Guide is a valuable resource for anyone involved in the implementation and administration of a BizTalk solution, particularly IT professionals. The guide provides detailed information for planning a BizTalk Server environment, as well as recommendations and best practices for configuring, testing, maintaining, and monitoring this environment. The Operations Guide contains checklists for all the key tasks to help BizTalk users. Guide is for BizTalk deployments on following supported operating systems: Windows Server 2003; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista; Windows XP. I reckon guide will be updated for Windows 7 that will be released this fall probably and for Windows 2008 R2. For documentation of guide there is an pdf, docx and executable available. Besides the Operation Guide that can be downloaded there is a site that contains links to all sorts o...

BPA (BizTalk Best Practice Analyzer) 1.2 is out a couple of months already. I did not think of using it on one of my sandboxes, so I tried on my Sandbox with BizTalk Server 2009 on Windows 2008 Standard Edition OS and SQL Server 2008 Developer Edition. In past I did a blog post of using BPA. First thing one must do is check for updates. After no updates where found I did a scan. Resulted in this: Some jobs have not been enabled or run. Common issues since I came across them before and can be resolved in same way. Besides these critical issues there are other less critical, but not uncommon in case of a sandbox environment. A lot of these issues listed above may apply for BizTalk production (maybe test, acceptance environments), but not for individual development environment. BPA is a valuable tool and useful in following environments: Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista Service Pack 1; Windows XP Service Pack ...