Integrating to the max...BizTalk Style

The other day I was using the Dynamic SMTP port to send an email message after a technical error had occurred in BizTalk. I used a BRE Policy to configure the Email settings and had set the SMTP.EmailBodyText property. Although there are a lot of things that can go wrong I was convinced it was rooted in my BRE call and result. It took me several dreadful minutes before i stumbled on a post of a fellow BizTalk developer who had faced the same issue. It turns out that when you use the BodyText you MUST set the charset: EmailMessage(SMTP.EmailBodyTextCharset) = "UTF-8";   Cheers.

Hi there, I just finished providing some feedback for the upcoming BizTalk 2010 exam and I hope the input was valuable. As I am preparing for the SQL Server 70-342 I hope the exam will be finalized early next year so that I can it to my list of exams to take. Cheers.

Since I try to have posts for all the adapters I have encountered it can be that this is a post that it not new for all the people already working with BizTalk for a long time. It just wanted to have it on my blog for the sake of completeness; The FILE adapters requires that the Host Instance account user has FULL Control on the folder it tries to read from. I was giving a course on security in BizTalk and explained the security modal of BizTalk (like BizTalk operator / BizTalk administrator) and the ability to run Host instances under minimal privileges accounts (BizTalk Application Users member) and had a hard time to explain why the file was not picked up when Read only rights were assigned. This answer is: because I said so   Regards.

After considering the options for a project where interfacing in a scheduled manner was required i came across the Scheduled task adapter. This thing is so easy to use, I must speak about it! The following section describes the steps required to implement the scheduled task adapter. Installation Register the components To install the Scheduled task adapter download the adapter from ‘Codeplex’ ( http://biztalkscheduledtask.codeplex.com/ ). Run the setup and follow the steps during the setup. Note: In the current version the setup does not register the necessary dll’s in the Global Assembly Cache. These steps have to be performed manually. - Start the Visual Studio command prompt - Navigate to ‘C:\Program Files\Biztalk ScheduledTask Adapter’ - Run ‘GACUTIL –i Biztalk.Adapter.ScheduledTaskProperties.dll’ - Run ‘GACUTIL –i Calendar.Schedules.dll’ - Run ‘GACUTIL –i ScheduledTaskAdapter.Admin.dll’ - Run ‘GACUTIL –i ScheduledTaskAdapter.dll’ - Run ‘GACUTIL –i Scheduled...

I am now using the BizTalk mapper 2010 frequently, I faced 2 changes I don’t appreciate: PROS - Search elements When you type in a fieldname, it is highlighted! You can even toggle buttons so that only the highlighted elements are shown. Cool - Copy Paste Copy/paste works like a charm, elements can be selected easily and it now works as it should have been a long time…intuitive. CONS - Replace functoid does not work anymore It used to be, that when you drag a functoid and drop it over a functoid already on the mapping grid that it would replace the existing functoid. Well, it’s noted, not really what I wanted. - Create a message from scratch When I make a new message and I don’t have input for it a Assign a new message using a Message variable of type XmlDoc. Assign it a value with the first element of the schema (e.g. <Error />) and then use the mapper to set all the different elements in the message (using a string concatenate with an empty value). I am not 100% finished with a...

I recently used a virtual machine that included the BizTalk ESB Toolkit. When i tried to start the machine everything worked fine, so i decided to startup some projects. At the part where i wanted to design an ESB Itinerary i faced the issue that the designer was not showing. At first i suspected that a corrupted registry entry was the cause and was preparing myself for a fresh install untill i noticed something. The visual studio version link that i used was different than another link i had on the system;’ "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /rootSuffix Exp /RANU As Aaron Marten points out this is related to the new security layer where it should not be required for a visual studio developer to have full access to the machine. In my case this postfix was added due to a earlier installation of the VS.Net CTP or some other not released version. Later on the newe...

My colleague Rene Brauwers (Wren’s world) faced some issues when converting BizTalk projects created in 2006 R2 to the new BizTalk 2010 version. Please read his post i you are facing this problem as well: Migrating Biztalk 2006r2 solutions to Biztalk 2010

Besides the already well known BizTalk scale out poster and the MSDN documentation regarding scaling out the BizTalk Server Tier i found the interactive version that i can higly recommend! This version provides the user with spoken comments, a transcript and the ability to click on the scale-out scenario of interest providing you with info in a sort of mini-presentation. Going through the entire presentation will take about 10-15 minutes. See: BizTalk interactive scale out-poster     Cheers, Sander

A customer recently asked about the interoperability of the Workflow modelling tool NinTex (on top of sharepoint) with other systems like BizTalk. Since i was not familiar with NinTex i downloaded the SDK, some product sheets and the help to find out about the capabilities to interop with other systems. Since workfows can be developed quite easily with NinTex the first customer question was; ‘How can the flows from NinTex be used in developing BizTalk’. NinTex has the ability to export the developed workflow to (unfortenately) an propietary format only. This means that it it not possible to re-use even parts of this workflow in for example visio. " A workflow can be exported and saved in the file format ".nwf" in order to be used in another location. " http://nintexdownload.com/HelpFiles/NW2007/NintexWorkflow2007UserManual.html The second question was related to integrating with NinTex; ‘How can BizTalk provide integration in such a way that the back-...

The BizTalk developer center and BizTalk247.com contain lots of usefull information and documentation for every BizTalk developer. Today i noticed the BizTalk 2010 ESB Toolkit Interactive poster and its quite cool! Cheers.

The migration from BizTalk 2006 R2 to BizTalk 2009 was a fairly smooth one, untill we faced an issue that the MQSC Adapter was not working on the 64bit environment. We tried to define a 64-bit host and run the adapter inside this host, this however did not proved to be the solution; After browsing through the MSDN pages we found that it just wasn’t going to be a 9till5 workday; “Only x86 (32-bit) Windows operating systems that are supported by BizTalk Server 2006 are supported by the MQSC Adapter. WebSphere MQ on Windows is not supported on 64-bit Windows operating systems. This means that the MQSC Adapter is not supported on either X64 (64-bit) Windows or a 32-bit BizTalk Host Instance on x64.” ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa705007(BTS.10).aspx ) The setup we had previously used was; - BizTalk 2006 R2 32-bit / MQ Client 6.2.5 + SSL / MQSC Adapter “IBM WebSphere MQ Client 5.3 with CSD10, or IBM Websphere MQ Client 6.0 with Fix Pack 6.0.1.1.” ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/e...

In our project we are doing some additional logging like message payload, customer ids etc. The other day i want to provide the request/response times based on the starting point of the business transaction and information in an XML column that was filled when the message was sent. On a lot of websites i could find some examples but they all involved using namespaces etc. I thought i could do that with the lazy-goggles on and hereby the starting point of what is now a monster query ;) SELECT m.id as MessageID, i.createdon MessageReceived, CAST( m.messagesent.query('//*[local-name() = ''Timestamp'']/text()') as varchar) MessageSent FROM instance i, message m WHERE m.parentid = i.id and i.customerref = 'CUSTID_00014041' and CAST (m.messagesent.query('//*[local-name() = ''Action'']/text()') as varchar) = 'SendResponse' Note: the is required for the <xmlcolumn...

I recently faced this not so welcome friend of mine. This was the case on mine development environment consisting of: - separate BizTalk machine + separate SQL Server I could track down the source of this message being an atomic scope with a timeout of 60 seconds (receive shape waiting for a web service response). Since the error was pretty clear i finally found the cause….please take note of this for future generations ;) The SQL Server machine clock was advanced 2 minutes compared to the BizTalk server running the orchestrations Therefore the orchestration was ‘running in the past’ forcing a time-out in the atomic scope shape. Somehow the time synchronisation service was not doing it’s job. I fixed the issue by using the ‘w32tm’ command line tool. “w32tm /resync” (force the machine to resync the windows time using the PDC time) Note: to view the difference between the current machine and the PDC you can you the monitor parameter; “w32tm /monitor”

This article will go into detail about one of the possible approaches to connect from BizTalk to IBM MQ. Note: This is not the only or best approach and this article serves as an example for the few out there facing the problem in setting up MQSC Adapter for IBM MQ + Certificates. For starters i would like to quote a fellow BizTalker that spoke at the BTUG last week and said that in order to do SAP with BizTalk you would have to fulfill requirement #1: ‘Search for a SAP buddy’. Well although i think this will apply to other adapters as well (e.g. Dynamics AX 2009!) it is a good general rule to have someone at the other side for support. It can get tough! Overview When communicating with IBM MQ there are a number of scenarios, although i might forget some, i believe the following are possible: 1) MQ Server hosted within your BizTalk environment This would require the use of the MQSeries Adapter. 2) MQ Server hosted outside your BizTalk environment This woul...