10 Things to get excited about the BizTalk 2010 R2 CTP

Microsoft officialy announced the CTP of BizTalk server 2010 R2 yesterday.

I am personally excited about this release due to multiple reasons , the first of which I had used the pre-CTP bits on my earlier webcast and I had mentioned some of this would be landing pretty soon.
So I am glad to see that come true and the early access to everyone.

The second thing I am excited about is despite the new version note getttting a new name upgrade and and is relegated to a Release 2 of 2010, there are such huge investments and proming set of tools that is getting added to your arsenal , that it makes  hybrid connectivity scenarios a real first class citizen in the BizTalk middleware platform.

What that means is really intuitive integration with  Windows Azure Service Bus Queues/Topics/Relays.  by the introduction of the  following adapters and Bindings

• SB-Messaging, for sending/pulling data from Service Bus Queues/Topics
• WCF-NetTCPRelay, for hosting relays or sending data to NetTCPRelay end points 
• WCF-BasicHttpRelay, for hosting relays or sending data to BasicHttpRelay end points

The third thing that I am excited is that with this CTP , BizTalk now has native support for ACS authentication and is extensible to other auth mechanisms from other identitiy providers

 

The fourth thing that I am excited is REST support ( frankly this came a little late  considering how prevanlent RESTful services are today. so ability to consume was a no brainer ) So with the new WCF-WebHttp adapter. All the HTTP operations like GET,/PUT/DELETE/POST are now supported natively.

 

The fifth thing that make me excited is ( I will harp on REST a little bit more)  now not only can you consume , you can also expose RESTful Services from BizTalk Server.

 

The sixth thing would be  BizTalk IaaS, I have lived through enough years in my consulting life when I have always felt we are the mercy of procurement in the ability to chamipion innovation. Now that you can spin up your own BizTalk infrastructre in the cloud with a few clicks and a Credit Card suddenly procuring a few servers to load test becomes a snap . It also now becomes a Opex cost rather than a capex cost , that should make some CFO's ad CIO's drool on ability in Azure.

 

Seventh  would be platform updates  Windows 2012 / 2008 R2 , SQL 2012/2008 R2 , VS 2012.

SAP 7.2/Oracle DB 11.2 and Oracle EBS 12.1,

 

Eight  since I  am now a Houtonian after having bougtht  a house here and we are big on Medical  and Health in this town so it is heartening to see more robust  support for HL7 2.5.1 , improvements in the MLLP adapter and a commitment to HL7 2.6 schema update in Beta timeframe .

 

Ninth would be no surprise If you have listened to my talk last week , you would know that I am pretty passinate around EDI in general and how much of a strong case I have made for BizTalk to be your middleware of choice when it comes to implementing EDI solutions that gives you most bang from the buck.  So in that area I am happy to see B2B enhancements to support latest standards natively
 ◦Support for X12 5040, 5050, 6020, 6030
 ◦Support for EDIFACT D06A, D06B, D07A, D07B, D08A, D08B, D09A, D09B, D10A, D10B

  Support for 999

 

 

Last but not the least would be the messaging from Microsoft and the stability of the build ( which I have been playing with for a while ) for which our the Microsoft Product team  should recieved Kudos is . This release has dispelled many myths and conspiracy theories , This takes the BizTalk brading to a much broader messaging and is maximizing the BizTalk brand value to new level which has today 12,000 plus customers and growing and with the new ability to run BizTalk in the cloud make it a commodity that even new companies can innovate on without investing in big iron which has essentially lowered the barriers to innovation. The team has also done a fantastic job of listening to customers and really taken the platform to address all the top concerns from current customers who have made huge bets on the platform. So kudos to the PG Team. 

 

So in that sense I believe BizTalk 2010 R2 which is promsed to land 6 months post Win8  is a new landmark release of BizTalk Server just like waht BizTalk 2004 was , improved and ready  with changes to take it through the next 10 years.

You can read the full announcement here

 

Webcast covering EAI and EDI Services capabilities

Integration Evolved - EDI

Defying analyst predictions pronouncing the death of EDI more than a decade ago, IT investment continues to grow. Today 80 percent of B2B transactions, representing between $5 trillion and $7 trillion in trade, are conducted with EDI. Developing mature EDI and AS2 capability is a strategic imperative for organizations that engage in electronic commerce or must comply with regulatory requirements. As the cost of traditional, secure networking both on-premise and in the cloud continues to drop, and the economies of scale delivered by cloud computing become more compelling, there's never been a better time to consider how the Microsoft platform can help you plan and future proof your EDI strategy. Join Abhilash Shanmugan, Neudesic's Connected Systems Practice Director, Microsoft Virtual Technology Specialist, and two-time BizTalk MVP, for a look at how the exciting new EDI capabilities of the Microsoft platform can lower barriers of entry, whether your EDI strategy is purely focused on-premise or you're interested in the benefits that PaaS can deliver. Whether you're looking to reduce operational costs of your EDI infrastructure, have suppliers that demand EDI integration in manufacturing, retail and supply chain management, or need to comply with healthcare regulations such as HIPPA, you'll learn how to plan your EDI investment and realize the benefits of contemporary capabilities available both on-premise and in the cloud  Thursday - August 9, 2012 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM PDT		SPECIAL OFFER With the landscape shifting to a platform-oriented, capability-driven approach to application integration, more of our clients are seeking guidance as they plan for the future. Be one of 3 registrants to receive a complimentary 90-minute briefing with a Connected Systems architect to review how current capabilities of BizTalk Server, WCF, WF, Windows Server AppFabric, Neuron ESB and Azure Service Bus can help your organization build best-in-class, on-premise and hybrid composite solutions that will shape your future platform strategy. Watch past installments of our Integration Evolved series: Enabling Hybrid Composition On-Premise and Beyond Maximize Customer Experience with Dynamics CRM Application Integration Driving Innovation with SAP On-Premise and Beyond

      

Nice Regex Tool Espresso..

Nice Regex tool .http://www.ultrapico.com/Expresso.htm

Sharepoint and BizTalk Goodness

Found this excellent post on Sharepoint BizTalk adaptor

How Enterprise Ready is SQL

I recently got into an interesting debate on Oracle vs SQL and my point was SQL is pretty rock solid and cheaper for most customers. I will let some statistic do some talking

BizTalk 2010 Beta available for Download

Folks get your hands on the new BizTalk 2010 Beta here

The mapper imporivements alone is worth the money if you do lot of complex maps , HIPPA maps , EDI maps.

Quick EDI Sample Reference

Just Bookmarking for my own use a good link while I mentor people on BizTalk EDI

Biztalk 2009 R2

Cant wait to get my hands on BizTalk 2009 R2 after the demo video from PDC .
See here

The mappergets a complete overhaul with help from MSR

Top Features
- Relevance Tree
- Auto Scroll
- Gray out out of focus links ( reduce clutter )
- Move to Page
- Search
- VS 2010 integration

Returning Data from SAP Tables.

After spending a few frustrating hours on why my SAP RFC call was not returning data and the call was successful . We founf this little gem here from the LOB adapter team blog




If you're sending messages using the channel model instead of using a .NET proxy (for example, in BizTalk) - if the table node is missing from the input XML, we interpret that as if you're not interested in that table. If you do want the rows from that table in the response message, you should pass in the node in the input XML (0 rows, just the starting and ending parameter tag).

DTC

I find myself referring to these mostly trying to analyze SQL issues with BizTalk using DTCPING.I thought I will bookmark these links


INFO: Configuring Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC) to
Work Through a Firewall
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/250367/EN-US/

How to configure RPC dynamic port allocation to work with firewalls
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/154596/

How to troubleshoot RPC Endpoint Mapper errors
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=839880

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

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 .