Integrating to the max...BizTalk Style

Sometimes life is just cruel; you receive an error, search for the cause and are utterly frustrated when you can find the reason. I recently had a visit from this ‘good’ friend of mine: ‘Errors exist for one or more children’ Apparently it is possible that during compilation time an error occurs, and even though you solve it, the error will still occur. The error that can occur is shown in the picture below:   What i did to solve this bugger…. - open the ODX file in Notepad (important if you do not want to meet your friend encoding mismatch) - search for ‘#error’ (should be in the XLANG body() {…} ) - remove the line (shown in the screenshot below)   This worked for me, sincerely hoping that you will not use this, if so hoping that you can take the advantage of this post….

Another item that is open for discussion is when to use a pipeline inside an orchestration. Whatever your opinion of using pipelines inside your orchestration is, please keep in mind that when any exception occurs in the pipeline, you want to catch the: Microsoft.XLANGs.Pipeline.XLANGPipelineManagerException! “Any failure in pipeline execution which would have resulted in a suspended message were this pipeline to be called from within the BizTalk Server Messaging Infrastructure will instead result in an exception being thrown. The exception thrown is of type Microsoft.XLANGs.Pipeline.XLANGPipelineManagerException . This thrown exception can be handled in a catch block within the calling orchestration. If the orchestration does not catch the thrown exception, the XLANGs engine reports an error the text of which includes the exception information in the thrown exception.” Ref: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa562035(BTS.10).aspx

I have recently taken the BizTalk 2006 R2 exam and came across some interesting stuff; - Runtime validation With this it is possible to force runtime validation for assemblies/correlations/schemas etc ensuring that everything is correctly deployed! See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa561963(BTS.10).aspx

During the creation of the ebMS Getting started environment i ran into problems with using IIS and the HTTPReceiver. Some problems that i had were: - messages would not be picked up the the HTTP Receive Adapter - messages remain in the dehydrated state One of the most difficult things about the HTTPReceive Adapters is the dis-ability to do some hi-tech debugging…even the tool ‘DebugView’ / ‘Fiddler’ will not help when trying to find out what the problem is, TCP/IP Listeners might provide some help but the best thing you should be doing is to walk through all the MSDN steps. Since i had some trouble finding the steps, hereby the steps for setting up the Adapter for IIS 6 en IIS7. ‘Creating the virtual directory for the HTTPReceiver’ The BizTalk HTTP Receive Adapter can be used in a http receive location configured in Internet Information Services (IIS) inside a virtual directory. Read the Microsoft guidelines for setting up an HTTP BizTalk Receive location (see reference ‘En...

In the previous posts ( part1 and part2 ) i have described some features of the Covast ebMS Adapter and the usage of pipelines to set the message properties and destination. When using orchestrations, the message can be sent directly to the message box because the message context properties can be set inside the orchestration. This approach can be used to implement additional requirements in inter party communication such as error handling, correlation and other implementations where more dynamic control is required beyond the static configuration of pipelines. Let’s build an orchestration using the ebMS context properties to send message to a specific party and collaboration protocol agreement (CPA). ‘Building an orchestration for ebMS messaging’ The orchestration in this scenario used message context properties to ensure that the correct collaboration protocol agreement was used during processing. The following paragraph, will explain the construction of this Orchestration. The figu...

As described in my previous post on the Covast ebMS Adapter ( part1 ) there are 2 ways of leveraging the functionality of the ebMS Adapter 1) Pipelines 2) Orchestration Using pipelines The ebXML Messaging Service pipeline components can be configured to use a specific collaboration protocol agreement (CPA) when assembling, encrypting and signing or disassembling and authenticating the ebXML message. This configuration is performed when the pipeline is selected for usage in a BizTalk port. This requires that pipeline properties are configured so that they match the corresponding properties of the collaboration protocol agreement (CPA). The configuration is used at runtime to process messages. When a message arrives, the properties of the message, in addition to the pipeline properties, are used to locate the correct CPA and to apply the settings during message exchange. For instance: the CPA can dictate the requirement to return an Acknowledge message and the message destination. The CP...

Getting started with the Covast ebMS adapter The Covast ebMS Adapter for BizTalk Server 2006/2009 is a suite of components that can be used to develop and deploy BizTalk solutions, which require secure and reliable data transmission. A getting started package is included with the demo version of this adapter, using a loopback scenario to demonstrate the usage of this adapter. In this multipart series i will explain the 2 methods of using the adapter. The Covast ebMS Adapter implements the specifications of ebXML Message Services. To get started with the ebMS Adapter, the following steps have to be followed: · Install the adapter · Define the collaboration protocol agreement · Configure the adapter using pipelines or context properties inside an orchestration This part will explain the steps to follow for setting up the adapter….Here we go… · Install the Covast ebMS adapter The Covast ebMS Adapter consists of several components that aid in the development of ebMS solutions. The installa...

Recently i had the ability to use 2 dedicated development machines, one for setting up BizTalk and i figured to use the other for SQL Server. I sounds easy enough, be it that there are some steps that you should not forget. Possible error to look for: “Cannot open database BizTalkMgmtDb on server <dummy>.Verify that you have the required security permissions and that communication between Distributed Transaction Coordinator services on the machines involved is not prevented by current DTC security,   firewall or authentication settings.” Setting up the machines Preconditions: o SQL Server is installed o BizTalk is installed but not configured Setting up the SQL Server machine 1) Start ‘SQL Server Surface Area Configuration’ o Enable remote connections (Choose: TCP/IP or TCP/IP and named pipes, disable shared memory) o Start the SQL Agent o Start the SQL Browser 2) Start ‘SQL Server Configuration Management’ o Goto ‘Protocols for MSSQL Server...

Previous posts were published using the WYSIWYG webeditor of blogspot.com, hereby the first post using live writer: Hello world….

After taking the BizTalk 2009 Deep Dive training the next step was to upgrade my certifications on BizTalk. Today was the day and i am very happy that i have passed the BizTalk 2006 R2 70-241 exam. I am now certified on both the BizTalk exams 70-235 and 70-241 :) I found the 70-235 exam to be focused on usage of tooling and terms, and a really nice exam that is based on experience. The 70-241 exam was focused on more 'advanced' knowledge on exception handling, orchestration design, pipeline processing etc, also a nice exam (except for the 20 questions i had to fill in before i could actually take it). Completing the exam i was nervous and reviewed all the questions that i had marked for review 3 times. When i decided that is was time for the verdict i clicked 'End exam'. Each time i do this on a exam my internal timer starts ticking; 1...did i pass?, 2....oh no i forgot that!....3....come on! 4..what's the verdict....it was a 972, that made my day! Happy studying fo...

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 is a new version of one of Microsoft ERP systems tailored for a specific market. The advantages of the new Dynamics AX 2009 version is that the technical integration of trading partner integration is much more robust and interfacing with other applications using BizTalk has now become even easier because the accompanied BizTalk AIF Adapter. Dynamics AX 2009 exposes documents using an application platform called AIF. AIF enables the integration of Microsoft Dynamics AX through Web services, Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ), the file system (using a directory), or BizTalk Server. The AIF framework uses documents wrapped in envelopes for processing. A downside to not using the BizTalk adapter is that the envelope processing has to be performed additionally while the BizTalk adapter will solve this for you. A colleague of mine has an article on how to do AIF processing without the AIF adapter (see: http://www.microtalk.net/2009/04/23/AssignAHeaderValueInAnAIFDyna...