Bing..

I have not been excited on anything related to search from Microsoft in a long time . But I am really excited about Wolfarm Alpha the new decision engine from Microsoft . Now named Bing. The site is not up yet and has a video on it's capabilities for now . I cant wait to get my hands on the real thing .

It is pretty cool actually. Check it out... www.bing.com and see the video here

SAP mapping and XSLT fun

If you are on a BizTalk , SAP project , Your XSLT skills can come real handy .
For e.g. here I needed to set a flag to true based on the existence of value in a  node. Normally this is  easy but in this case that node happens to be in a repeatable group node which can occur n number of times where n is unknown .

It would be a mapping nightmare or a custom Xml manipulation if not for XSLT

<xsl:for-each select="//*[local-name()='Receive' and namespace-uri()='http://Idoc/3/DEBMAS06//700/Receive']/*[local-name()='idocData' and namespace-uri()='http://Idoc/3/DEBMAS06//700/Receive']/*[local-name()='E2KNA1M005GRP' and namespace-uri()='http://Idoc/3/DEBMAS06//700']/*[local-name()='E2KNVVM007GRP' and namespace-uri()='http://Idoc/3/DEBMAS06//700']/*[local-name()='E2KNVPM002' and namespace-uri()='http://Idoc/3/DEBMAS06//700']/*[local-name()='PARVW' and namespace-uri()='http://Idoc/3/DEBMAS06//700']">

<xsl:variable name="nodeType"><xsl:value-of select="."/></xsl:variable>
<xsl:if test="$nodeType ='WE'">

<xsl:element name="shipToFlag">
Y
</xsl:element>
</xsl:if>
</xsl:for-each>

Visual Studio 2010

There are some cool channel 9 videos on Visual Studio 2010 out there .
Check them here here

BizTalk and Dublin

Where is Biztalk going Post OSLO , Have heard this being talked about in many forums lot of FUD out there .

For all those I say read Charles Youngs post on Biztalk and Dublin. Highly recommended read .

Playing with BizTalk 2009

I have started playing with BizTalk 2009 previously R3 bits and there is so much exciting stuff here . The one that I am most excited is

Support for Hyper-V virtualization

Support for Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio .NET 2008 and SQL Server 2008
MSbuild (finally )
EDI enchancements
Updated ESB guidance
New SQL and Oracle Apps adapters ( Connect natively to Oracle Financials)
UDDI 3.0
RFID LLRP protocol support (LERP), TDT / TDS standards
more .NET 3.5 /SWIFT enhancements


Check out the BizTalk Roadmap page for more.

BizTalk HTTP Chunked Encoding issues

You are probably reading this snippet because you have a perfectly working Biztalk App that works and performs in development and unit test but fails during volume tests with a downstream LOB app like say Peoplesoft with which you are trying to post via HTTP.

As you may have realized already this due to a chunked encoding issue with BizTalk . BizTalk uses chunked encoding when a message is larger than 48 KB by default.


Well when the message payload size is large HTTP/1.1 RFC implementation allows you to specify to the listener that I am going to send you my message in a series of packets each with it's own size indicator with an Optional trailer containing entity header fields
This is to allow the recipient to verify that it has received the whole message.

To do this the sender must set the in the HTTP Header a property called
transfer-coding = "chunked"

It can then send data in chunks and the recipient if HTTP 1.1 compliant will start collecting data until it gets a chunk with chunk-size set to zero indicating end of transmission.

Great , How does it affect me

BizTalk HTTP Adapter does not set this header when sending chunked data causing downstream listeners to assume this is a whole transmission for a partial data packet. Now you know why your app works in your development box where one tends to test with smaller test files not in server at load :-)

What do I do to resolve this

Since you don't have a way of setting this HTTP Header , the other option is to disable chunking altogether in 2004 with a QFE

BizTalk 2004 SP1 and BizTalk 2006 already has the QFE so in this case all you need to do is to set the registry key DWORD DisableChunkEncoding to 1
as specified here

If you want to learn more about chunked encoding read the HTTP RFC section 3.6.1 here

If you had a scenario this post helped leave me a note

SOA Conference 2007 Photos

Marjan has uploaded the MVP Dinner photos with the product group for those of us who were are at the conference . See the photos at the Biztalk Team blog