Finding BizTalk    

The Next generation of BizTalk related technologies was unveiled at the SOA Conference in Redmond last week.

The new direction is codenamed "Oslo" and its focus is an initiative across multiple products, so its not just a BizTalk application but will encompass the notition of end to end development using the principles of SOA driven thru the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft.

The Official press release is here.

The key themes for the Oslo initiative are Modeling and and service orientation, especially across the internet.

This PDF will give you a much deeper overview of what was announced: Olso1107.pdf

Labels: BizTalk Server "6", Oslo

I didn't know this, but in BizTalk 2006 and R2 its no longer required to wrap a "call rules" shape in an atomic scope.

In BizTalk 2004 it was required but this is no longer the case. Be careful though, because the atomic scope served to protect the orchestration's processing from the potential problem of an error occuring and a persistence point being reached which will re-run the message which has been passed thru the rules again.

Take a look at your process and decide whether there is any risk of the message being run a second time, if not, save the performance hit if an atomic scope and just use the call rules independently.

Labels: Business Rules Engine

Virtual PC 2007 virtual hard drive files (.VHDs) can grow to very large sizes. The virtual hard drive can be configured to automatically expand when things like service packs are installed and they don't shrink back.

In addition, if you move a VHD file from a FAT32 partition to NTFS it comes with .V01, .V02, etc files, you can join and shrink these as well using the process below.

While storage is not expensive at the moment, if like me you have more than a dozen Virtual PC drives for various reasons or back them up regularly, you can easily eat up a 250 gig drive in no time.

So how do you shrink a .VHD file?

• Install CCLEANER.EXE (http://ccleaner.com) to remove unnecessary files
• Disable hibernation (power options in Control Panel > disable hiberation)
• Defragment your local hard drive that has the VHD files on it
• Start your Virtual PC
• If you have not installed the Virtual PC Additions, do so (File > Virtual Machine Additions)
• Once started, run the “Virtual Disk Precompactor.iso”; to do this, go to the little cd disk icon at the bottom of your Virtual PC and mount the “Virtual Disk Precompactor.iso” file located at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Virtual PC\Virtual Machine Additions
• Run the Precompactor if it doesn’t start automatically by going into Windows explorer and clicking the CD drive that was created, takes a little while
• Shutdown your Virtual PC
• Run the Virtual Disk Wizard, go to the Virtual PC console > File > Virtual Disk Wizard and choose the "Edit an existing virtual disk" bullet > then Next > Then navigate to the .VHD file > then Next > then select the compact option. This takes a while.
• When done, you should have a smaller VHD

Labels: Virtual PC

A great resource has just been published to support or debunk many of the myths surrounding the configuration of BizTalk databases in a production environment.

Applies To:

• Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 and BizTalk Server 2006 R2
• Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 and SQL Server 2000
• BizTalk Server 2004 with SQL Server 2000
• Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.x and 6.x

The article is titled "BizTalk Server Database Optimization" and details techniques for optimizing the infrastructure of a BizTalk Server system. The goal is to increase the throughput and reduce the latency of the system, maximizing performance.

The listed techniques have demonstrated performance gains in throughput (30-300%) and latency reduction (50% or more).

Most of these changed can be scripted and rolled in as part of a general installation process.

All of the techniques in the doc were tested and BizTalk Server performance lab in Redmond.

The document is highly relevant and recommened.

Labels: BizTalk 2004, BizTalk 2006, IIS, SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005

Recently at a client site there was a need for a very cheap and easy way to install BizTalk 2006 on a server which was outside the companies firewall.

They didn't want to spend the money on an extra SQL Server license so we opened a support call with Microsoft. Turns out a BizTalk installation is supported with SQL Express. I have read in a number of places this was not a supported type of installation but it in fact is.

You have to be careful with a few things, mainly database size and number of connections, but otherwise, for these very simple installation requirements you can slim down the costs associated with having a BizTalk environment.

Labels: BizTalk installation

Something new I have discovered with the rules engine in BizTalk 2006 that did not exist in BizTalk 2004, you must explicitly retract an asserted object.

I was getting a strange behavior where older rules calls were appearing over and over again in my DebugView window and couldn't understand why. In 2004 rules were retracted automatically so I dismissed the problem as being a retraction problem out of hand.

Turns out I was wrong. When you have to assert, for example a .NET object in memory, remember to retract it and also to set the priority of the rules to be first and last respectively.

Labels: Business Rules Engine

Recently we had a problem executing a web service using BizTalk which was provided by an external party. We could not modify the schema and were getting some pretty strange results when we tried to add a web reference.

To make a long story short, we tried all kinds of things to get the web reference to generate correctly and by chance someone tried to import the reference in Windows Vista. Low and behold, it worked.

We did a bit more digging into this situation and learned that there are differences in a BizTalk installation for Vista and Windows 2003, mainly in the .NET assemblies. Vista comes with all NET 2.0 and 3.0 assemblies as part of the overall OS package.

The Windows SDK for Vista should fill in the extra missing bits:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ff6467e6-5bba-4bf5-b562-9199be864d29&displaylang=en

This download has updates to .NET 2.0 and 3.0 assemblies and it should bring the assemblies on a Windows 2003 Server up to date with Vista.

Labels: .NET 3.0, BizTalk 2006, Windows 2003, Windows Vista