Yossi Dahan [BizTalk]

New Beginnings

2011-10-07T20:45:00.001+01:00

In February this year I have joined the ranks of Microsoft UK as a technical pre-sales guy after working as an independent consultant for about 7 years (and as a developer of kind for several years before that). Prior to joining Microsoft I've been working almost exclusively with BizTalk from the early stages of BizTalk Server 2000 and all the way through to BizTalk Server 2010 and so it made

BizTalk and the MOS protocol

2011-06-21T21:10:00.001+01:00

In a meeting a few weeks ago the question of how to support the MOS protocol with BizTalk came up. The MOS protocol, used in the media industry, has two flavours - Versions 3.x are implemented as ‘proper’ web services Versions 2.x are implemented as ‘xml over TCP’ As the former is a no-brainer for BizTalk, I wanted to look at what it would take to support the later- The protocol (as

From the phone through the cloud and into BizTalk on my laptop

2011-04-19T11:45:00.001+01:00

Last week I sat down to prepare a demo for an ‘application infrastructure’ workshop I’m running next week in which I wanted to demonstrate exposing a BizTalk WCF receive location accessed through the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus. Granted - with the BizTalk Server 2010 Feature Pack released last October – this is merely a case of running the Publish WCF Service Wizard, but I thought it

No A4SWIFT 2.3 folder was found under the SWIFT Messages folder

2011-03-04T11:54:00.001+00:00

Using BizTalk SWIFT Accelerator 2010 on my new laptop I got this error when trying to deploy the BRE validation policies for my schemas. This is only visible by inspecting the log which, on Windows 7, is created at C:\ProgramData by default. The error is somewhat misleading, because I’m not using A4SWIFT 2.3 (but rather the newer 2010 version), but don’t be tempted to run and install that, the

Installing the BizTalk 2010 Accelerator for SWIFT (or any other, for that matter)

2011-03-04T09:59:00.001+00:00

…it’s been a while since I’ve worked with any BizTalk accelerator, and so I was a bit confused when I knew for a fact there’s an updated version of the accelerator for BizTalk 2010, but I couldn’t find a download anywhere. Turns out these are now on the actual BizTalk media, in a folder called….wait for it…BizTalk Accelerators! I just never thought of looking with the actual product. my bad.

Goodbye MVP

2011-02-06T18:52:00.001+00:00

Under any other circumstances, being stripped of my MVP status would have been quite a blow. I just love the MVP programme. over the past 4 years it has given me more than I could have ever imagined (or ask for.) I have met incredibly talented people, engaged in very interesting activities and was given great opportunities to influence technologies I really care about. Sadly, I now have to

WP7, PivotControl and data binding

2011-01-21T10:51:00.001+00:00

I’m playing with windows phone 7 a little bit (anybody isn’t?) and bumped into this today - I have a page with a PivotControl, and the PivotControl is bound to an ObservableCollection. When the page is loaded it calls a service asynchronously and populates the collection with results from the service. On first run everything seemed ok, but playing around with the application it would often

WCF behaviour to track inline WCF requests to BAM

2011-01-10T15:02:00.001+00:00

In the project I’m on, as I’ve mentioned a few times, we have an elaborate infrastructure to log our activity using BAM. This relies largely on a set of pipelines with custom components as its the most efficient and non-intrusive approach in my view. The problem though, is that this approach does not cover ‘inline sends’ to services (which we don’t do too often, but have in a couple of places);

Note to self on workflow 4, context correlation and service parameters

2010-12-23T11:34:00.001+00:00

Sorry if this is a bit too vague, but I wanted to make note of this, before I forget, and figured – if it might help someone – might as well blog it as is - I’ve set-up a workflow with a context correlation scenario – in my scenario I used a pick activity, but I don’t know if that’s significant, where the trigger of one Pick branch has a ‘receive and send reply’ template in which the receive

More on BAM

2010-12-17T11:03:00.001+00:00

In some places we’re using inline WCF calls to services for various reasons (a practice I’m not entirely comfortable with, but I know many people advocate, so I guess the jury is out….) One of the problems with this approach, in our case, is that we’re bypassing the elaborate tracking infrastructure we have in place which relies, largely, on BizTalk pipelines that don’t exist when using inline

Do you instrument you BizTalk application?

2010-12-07T09:23:00.001+00:00

If you don’t, you should. If you do – you should make sure you do it well. Either way I just bumped into this brilliant paper

Controlling the credentials used by the SOAP adapter from an orchestration

2010-11-29T14:41:00.001+00:00

A long time ago I looked into how one could provider the credentials to use when accessing a web service using the SOAP adapter from the process. The context for this is, of course, a multi-tenancy solution, where the system calls a third party service, but needs to make that call in the context of the current user it is serving. Each instance of the process may be serving a different user/

The tale of the mysterious BAM records

2010-11-24T08:03:00.001+00:00

We’ve been using BAM to log the activity of our solution which is running in production under a reasonable load. Most of the data comes from receive and send pipelines but some is written from orchestrations or even custom code as well, all of it is stored using the BAM API, mostly using the buffered event stream, but occasionally using the direct event stream and orchestration event stream.

MockingBird - Reminder to self

2010-11-03T08:30:00.001+00:00

If you’re using MockingBird (I quite like it!), you’re on windows 7, and you keep getting http 404 - Make sure the application pool used is configured for the ‘classic’ .net pipeline (as opposed to the ‘integrated’ one) I keep forgetting!

More on Bindings

2010-11-03T08:25:00.001+00:00

Recently I’ve worked on splitting our binding files - Until now we would normally build our application, deploy it locally, sort out ports and stuff, export binding and package that with our deployment framework; we would typically also create copies of the binding files for the various environment (dev, test, UAT, production) and modify values in there as needed before adding these copies to

Visual Studio 2008, unit testing and partial classes

2010-10-08T11:20:00.001+01:00

Been working on some code for which I have a decent amount of unit tests (around 350 individual tests), and was quite proud of myself. The unit tests are dividing to different test classes, each groups related tests together. At some point I realised one of these test classes is getting quite large, and for ease of maintenance I decided to split it into several files, using the partial class

Great news in my mailbox this evening

2010-10-01T20:35:00.001+01:00

Somebody was working very hard at Microsoft, and is very punctual - it is exactly the 1st of October and the email arrived letting me know that my MVP status renewal has been approved for yet another year. One thing I really like about the MVP programme (out of many) is the fact that it is up for renewal every year and that, despite what some may think, and to the best of my knowledge, MVPs

BizTalk on Windows Update

2010-09-29T14:53:00.001+01:00

..this is the first time I see an update to BizTalk being pushed over Windows Update….

Flowing clear error messages from transforms

2010-09-20T18:12:00.001+01:00

This one comes up every now and again, and although targeted at a specific group – those who use custom xsl for their transforms – as our very own Oleg Gershikov has a nice approach to it, it is worth repeating here - You have an orchestration, in which you have a transform shape, and at runtime, the transform fails. This usually results with a typical BizTalk error message – very detailed,

Generics will break intellisense, so have some faith!

2010-09-14T11:20:00.001+01:00

Sometime there are some BizTalk quirks that whilst not very harmful, can take along time to figure out, and so can really hurt productivity and get developers (and managers) very frustrated; they often happen when you’re taking a step or two away from the paved path, and do things a little bit more adventurous, but not to say not valid….here’s one - We have a helper class we use in many

Value does not fall within the expected range, when starting application

2010-09-01T11:17:00.001+01:00

Roni was phased by this one for a while, and I didn’t have a clue either, but starting an application which had worked just fine and to which he simply added another orchestration failed with the error - Could not enlist orchestration . Could not enlist orchestration . Value does not fall within the expected range Turns out there’s a bug in BizTalk

Let me introduce you to the Windows Server AppFabric CAT team

2010-08-27T09:29:00.001+01:00

The ‘BizTalk Rangers’ are a some of the brightest people I’ve ever met; I’ve been lucky enough to engage with some of them over the past few years and it has always been a very enriching experience, I learnt a lot every time! I always thought that these guys must have no life, I can’t see how else they could be doing all the hard work they are doing as well as stay at the forefront of technology

Lessons Learnt – the story of a recent production issue

2010-08-25T18:07:00.001+01:00

Yesterday we’ve had a major production issue, which resulted in our system being pretty much unusable. Below is much of the story, it is quite long, and that with me skipping a lot of the detail I felt was unnecessary to understand the main points, I wanted to highlight the route we’ve taken to resolution, and the key facts we’ve looked at. You can skip to the summary section in the end, if you

Having trouble assigning a class to a message?

2010-08-09T10:19:00.001+01:00

Despite some maintenance overhead that’s required, for a while now I’ve been a fan of assigning messages to classes and vice versa when needing to move between a BizTalk orchestration and code. I’m pretty sure I (as well as others) blogged about this before, but for completeness sake the idea is that if you have a schema describing an entity, and a class describing exactly the same entity, and

An unclear orchestration designer error in 2006, thankfully one that’s easy to fix

2010-05-19T08:34:00.001+01:00

Yesterday I’ve tried to write a simple expression in the orchestration designer (BizTalk 2006) and got the following - Could not parse expression. System.ArgumentNullException: Collection cannot be null. Parameter name: c at System.Collections.ArrayList.InsertRange(Int32 index, ICollection c) at System.Collections.ArrayList.AddRange(ICollection c) at