Integrating to the max...BizTalk Style

In order to start using the ESB Toolkit you can use the tutorials and alot of help which can be found on the internet. However, in each project i find myself giving information to project members on some of the gotchas or things which are not documented or all so sparsely documented i thought bundling would be usefull.   In the items below you find most of the tools you will need when digging deep into the BizTalk ESB Toolkit which should get you up and running (after installing it :));   ·          Itinerary Test tool ( Enables: manually testing of Itineraries)   1)       Locate the ESBSource.zip 2)       Extract and compile ESB.Itinerary.Test 3)       You’re ready to manually test Itineraries   ·          ESB Rules tester ( Enables: manually testing of ESB Rules) 1)...

When you have the BizTalk Adapter pack installed, it will update the (machine) config, with some endpoints for certain line of business adapters… After starting a WCF service, the testclient will start; you might get an error for each MEX endpoint registered for the LOB adapter as shown in the figure below; Even though MEX is not enabled in the web.config of the particular project; it’s problably documented somewhere, but i could not found a fix, so hereby the workaround, the manual of the LOB adapters already states which config file to edit; And comment the adapters you don’t need;   The annoying thing is however, that with this setting, generating schemas using the ‘Add generated items’ wizard will not work as expected and you can’t see the tables/procedures in you database. So remember to enable IMEX if you need to create schemas for the SQL adapter!   HTH, Sander               Start the svc editor

The BizTalk deployment framework is being so greatly maintained by Thomas F. Abraham and Scott Colestock that i can proudly say there is another update. After raising a request for an update to include additional shortcuts to be able to update SSO / Bindings information without doing a full deploy (which was possible with some custom command line tools), i am really happy that 2 days after my request, it has been implemented, and a day later a new release is out there; Release 5.1 beta 2 (supports BizTalk 2013); Change history (and new features). How to migrate from an earlier version   Keep up the great job!   - download the new version - uninstall – install - create a new build - install and then…watch the new features (only what i requested is shown, there plenty more where that came from!) So importing the bindings, updating the SSO settings is now a matter of updating the SettingsFileGenerator (overwriting the file) and click on the particular shortcut...

My colleague Tomasso Groenendijk is quite actively working on extending the ESB Toolkit, his latest extension: Orchestration OnRamp is just fantastic, he did not only enabled an Itinerary to be started from anywere (Orchestration, database) but also analysed and proved that with some tweaking the Itinerary can be started in any step . This is awesome, i'm trying it out in a new solution where this would enable to start an itinerary dynamically. This opens up the opportunity to have a 'MasterControl' itinerary and several 'Processing' itineraries, where the 'MasterControl' itinerary kicks of the next itinerary to use ( http://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/ProcessManager.html ) I’m really happy he is digging into all this and am axious to see what’s next.   Nice job Tomasso! Sander

  On a recent project we’ve implemented ETW tracing following the best practices and it indeed gave a great feeling of being able to enable tracing whenever we needed to. My colleague Tomasso Groenendijk implemented an ESB Itinerary Service for ETW tracing and we used the Cat controller to create log files and perform analysis, i didn’t knew about a great tool (or how to use it) called LogParser which basically is the missing puzzle piece (thanks to my other colleague Glenn Fecunda). LogParser is a great tool which is superfast at analyzing large amounts of data by building up some sort of internal database. It allows you to query the data, in a SQL like syntax. Below is a small example, which shows a simple query, however, once you see how fast it is on large amounts of data, it sure is a tool worth looking at. The most practical use if when you have a log for which there are special providers (EventLog, IIS etc), but still, with the ‘general’ providers TEXTLINE you can get t...

Recently i tried to get a BizTalk 2013 up and running. As i normally do, i use the BTDF to deploy the whole bunch of projects, so i downloaded the betaversion 5.1 from codeplex, and started the deployment. Unfortenately i ran into a problem when trying to deploy to the SSO store. I thought, let’s go crazy and enable SSO, unfortenately, this wasn’t a cakewalk, it wasn’t my birthday, but was certainly treated on some stuff i didn’t request, the pop-up; And of course, the error that helps you out in tough times; C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\DeploymentFrameworkForBizTalk\5.0\BizTalkDeploymentFramework.targets(1684,5): error MSB3073: The command ""C:\Program Files (x86)\Deployment Framework for BizTalk\5.1\Framework\DeployTools\SSOSettingsFileImport.exe" "<…>" /settingsFile:"<…> " /userGroupName:"BizTalk Application Users" /adminGroupName:"BizTalk Server Administrators"" exited with code -532459699. Build FAILE...