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

Debugging BizTalk 2004 and .net 2.0

I had to debug an old project in 2004 so got one old 2004 machine but I was not able to get my visual studio to attach to the Biztalk service . The machine had .net 2.0 Framework installed .
Some googling and saw this post from Tom about problems with BAS installation and whidbey.

So on similar lines I made the followwing changes to my BTSNTSvc.exe.config

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<configuration>
<startup>
<requiredRuntime version="v1.1.4322"/>
</startup>


and now you can attach your debugger , go ahead and debug !

OSLO - The Microsoft SOA Road Map

OSLO - The new SOA innovation Wave
The SOA Conference in Redmond always has something that gets you excited , This time it is OSLO .
No OSLO is not another cool name for a new product . In fact I wont call OSLO one
product but a new way of thinking about having a comprehensive ( Shudder ! ) way of
MODEL driven developing and consuming web services delivered through out the stack spanning multiple products . There will be a new underlying modeling language ( XML based ) which will allow you to describe your application with support for a visual design surface
So what are the key new products which are part of the puzzle. - BizTalk Server will continue to provide foundation for distributed and highly scalable SOA and BPM solutions, - BizTalk Services ( currently Non production mode http://labs.biztalk.net) will move commercial supporting hosted applications that cross organizational boundaries. The release will have Messaging , Identity ( Federated ) and workflow. Some now call it the ISB ( Internet Service Bus) what ESB is for applications within the organization , In a Software + Services world you will need an ESB on the cloud which is the ISB .
- WCF which is already there will be further extended in .net Framework 4
- Variety of Tools in Visual Studio 10 to support this
- Service Repository
When will OSLO be ready
Oslo is getting delivered through a set of applications . I pulled this graphic from a Handout at the SOA and BPM conference which gives a good view



I am sure we will be hearing more and more about OSLO in coming months .
Two things are clear 1. ) Microsoft does do SOA ( though they did not say so before ) 2. ) Microsoft does have a very good SOA story and a clear Roadmap to look forward to ..
The future is Plug and play :-) . What do you think . Leave me a note.
Read More

Releasing Source code for .net Framework , WCF, WPF , LINQ

Visual Studio 3.5 Release 2008 is coming with an icing on the cake . The .net framework libraries souurce code is being released under Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL).
The release will include full visual studio integeration and will intially have The .NET Base Class Libraries (System, System.IO, System.Collections, System.Configuration, System.Threading, System.Net, System.Security, System.Runtime, System.Text, etc), ASP.NET (System.Web), Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms), ADO.NET (System.Data), XML (System.Xml), and WPF (System.Windows).

Additioanl release in months ahead will have WCF, Workflow, and LINQ !

Boy that is exciting , No more wondering what happens inside that sealed function and step right through ! Read more at ScotGu's Blog .

Custom XSLT in Biztalk Maps

Recently someone asked if you can use custom XSLT in Biztalk Maps . The answer is of course yes as the map you built .btm gets translated to an xslt anyway if yo look at the code that gets spewed out .
In any case to do that create the map and select source and destination . Click on the map and go to properties. There you will see a property custom XSLT . You can select your custom XSLT here . This feature was there since 2004 but I am not sure if it widely used though , on the flip side using custom xslt you kind of lose the graphical view on the map on what is being done , which many BI analysts like (the visual part of the transformation ) . but sometimes custom XSLT's could be the way to go .

Microsoft BPM and SOA Conference 2007

The dates for the Microsoft SOA and BPM Conference has been announced from Oct 29 to Nov 2nd in MS Campus in Redmond , WA. I like going to the SOA and BPM Conference as it is a more targeted to the line of work I do around BizTalk server 2006 and R2 and frankly between MVP Conference and SOA conference in a year takes up 7 days which I think are well spent on my conference allocation days. Hm.. last year there was a developer Track too . Apart from Keynotes from several MS Executives and technical leaders there are Over 60 breakout and chalk talk sessions, Hand-on-labs (Bring that External Hard Drive),Customer case-study roundtables ,Ask The Experts event and Partner Expo

Check out the Conference Site

Hey this looks like a marketing post ! But I would love to meet whoever you are there . So if you will be at the conference and wants to meet up drop me a line in the comments.