BizTalk Message Life Cycle

BizTalk Message Life Cycle
Receive Ports and Receive Locations
A receive port is a collection of one or more receive locations that define specific entry points into BizTalk Server. A receive location is the configuration of a single endpoint (URL) to receive messages. The location contains configuration information for both a receive adapter and a receive pipeline. The adapter is responsible for the transport and communications part of receiving a message
The receive pipeline is responsible for preparing the message for publishing into the MessageBox.
Send Ports
A send port is the combination of a send pipeline and a send adapter. A send port group is a collection of send ports and works much like an e-mail distribution list.The send pipeline is used to prepare a message coming from BizTalk Server for transmission to another service
Orchestrations
Orchestrations can subscribe to (receive) and publish (send) messages through the MessageBox. In addition, orchestrations can construct new messages. Messages are received using the subscription.

BizTalk 2009 - up coming Version - Whats New?

Hi Friends, Today I am going through the MS site and I found some of the Useful information which I would Like to share with you Guys. MS is planning to lanch a new Biztalk 2009 ( BTS R3). Below are the new enhancements of BTS2009. ( I just copied the details from MS site)

BizTalk 2009 The next version of BizTalk Server continues to build on the investments made to address the concerns of service oriented architecture and enterprise connectivity.

Updated Platform Support
New Application Platform Support
BizTalk 2009 supports the latest Microsoft platform technologies, including Windows 2008, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, SqlServer 2008 and the .NET 3.5 SP1. These platform updates enable greater scalability and reliability, and many advances in the latest developer tools.
New Hyper-V Virtualization Support
(BizTalk / Moss Virtualization Issues [Hyper-V]) BizTalk 2009 now takes advantage of the latest virtualization improvements included as part of Windows 2008 Hyper-V, which can lead to reduced costs through lower hardware, energy, and management overhead, plus the creation of a more dynamic IT infrastructure.
Improved Failover Clustering
By taking advantage of Windows 2008 clustering, BizTalk Server is now able to be deployed in multi-site cluster scenarios, where cluster nodes could reside on separate IP subnets and avoid complicated VLANs.

Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services
New Web Services Registry
BizTalk 2009 includes a UDDI 3.0 registry which provides support for registry affiliation, extended discovery services, digital certificates and extensibility for a subscription API.
New Line of Business Adapters BizTalk 2009 provides two new adapters for Oracle E-Business Suites and SQL Server, plus additional improvements have been made to the existing set of adapters.
Enhanced Host Systems Integration
BizTalk 2009 adds a new WCF WebSphere MQ channel by providing the transport, data formatter and encoder to integrate directly with WebSphere MQ via WCF and a new WCF Service for Host Applications has been added to expose the traditional Transaction Integrator to .NET Framework developers. Additionally, BizTalk 2009 includes updated platform support for the most recent versions of CICS, IMS, CICS HTTP transport, DB2, DB2/400, DB2 Universal Database, and WebSphere MQ. ( as well as TIBCO Chooses Microsoft .NET WCF & Silverlight )
Enhanced Business Activity Monitoring
By expanding the out of the box BAM functionality with SqlServer 2008 Analysis Services, BizTalk 2009 provides support for UDM cubes and scalable real-time aggregations which enhances support for Microsoft PerformancePoint Server 2007.
Enhanced
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Guidance ESB Guidance 2.0 delivers updated prescriptive guidance for applying ESB usage patterns, improved itinerary processing, itinerary modeling using a visual Domain Specific Language (DSL) tools approach, a pluggable resolver-adapter pack, and an enhanced ESB management portal.

Business to Business Integration
Enhanced Support for EDI and AS2 Protocols
BizTalk Server 2009 provides support for multiple message attachments, configurable auto message resend, end-to-end filename preservation, improved reporting to address new features, and Drummond re-certification for AS2.
Updated SWIFT Support
By building on a rich SWIFT foundation, BizTalk 2009 updates all message schemas and business rules for compliance with SWIFTReady Financial EAI Gold certification, as a result adds support for SWIFT FIN Flat File message types and business rules, BIC Plus IBAN interface, and Extensibility to support SEPA Routing.

Device Connectivity
New Mobile RFID Platform and device management
BizTalk 2009 delivers a new lightweight platform for a variety of mobile devices, which simplifies the development of mobile applications that expose relevant, real-time business information. BizTalk RFID Mobile includes support for enhanced device management, Powershell support for administration of edge infrastructures and the ability to monitor RFID infrastructure using System Center Operations Manager 2007. New RFID industry standards support
Support for key industry standards (including LLRP, TDT, TDS, WS Discovery and partial EPCIS support).

Developer and Team Productivity
New Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) support
BizTalk 2009 provides support for Team Foundation Server (TFS), and allows development teams to be able to leverage the integrated source control, bug tracking, support for team development, Project Server integration and support for automating builds via MSBuild.
Enhanced Developer Productivity
BizTalk 2009 introduces a number of improvements have been made to the underlying Visual Studio based BizTalk project system which enhances debugging support for artifacts such as BizTalk Maps (XSLT), pipeline components and XLANG Orchestrations, and enables support for unit testing via Visual Studio Test.

Other Enhancements
Messaging
BizTalk 2009 improves recoverable interchange processing of validation failures by providing support for recoverable interchange processing for disassembly (DASM) and a validation stage within the pipeline. The WCF Adapter has been enhanced to provide support for configurable transactions and the ability to choose the transaction isolation level in the WCF-Custom Send Adapter.
Administration
By continuing to build on the improvements to the BizTalk Management Console made in BizTalk 2006 R2, two new query types have been added for tracked message events and tracked service events which consolidates all queries – tracked/archived data, live data and specialized EDI reports, into a single tool.

"Oslo" is the codename for Microsoft’s forthcoming modeling platform. Modeling is used across a wide range of domains and allows more people to participate in application design and allows developers to write applications at a much higher level of abstraction. "Oslo" delivers a new integrated platform for connecting across modeling domains, including a new "Oslo" modeling tool, an "Oslo" modeling language, and an "Oslo" repository. As we gathered feedback from BizTalk customers, they indicated they would prefer to take a disciplined, evolutionary path to adopting some of these newer platform technologies. We have thousands of customers that have deployed mission-critical applications on top of our BizTalk Server architecture; they want to decide for themselves when to move to newer versions of the platform.

Performance and Optimizing BizTalk Server

The new Microsoft BizTalk Server Performance Optimization Guide has been released to the web. This document provides guidance & best practices on optimizing BizTalk Server performance for demanding production environments.

The guidance consists of the following 4 sections:
Getting Started: an overview of the BizTalk Server functional components that can affect performance. It also describes the phases of a BizTalk Server performance assessment.
Finding and Eliminating Bottlenecks: The Finding and Eliminating Bottlenecks section describes various types of performance bottlenecks as they relate to BizTalk Server solutions and information about how to resolve the bottlenecks.
Automating Testing: Describes how to implement an automated build process and how to automate functional and load testing using Visual Studio Team System, BizUnit and Loadgen.
Optimizing Performance: The Optimizing Performance section provides guidance for optimizing performance of specific components in a BizTalk Server environment
The guide is available in several formats and from several locations:
Full MSDN URL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc558617.aspx
Full TechNet URL: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc558617.aspx
As a word document on Microsoft Download Center.

Distinguished field Promoted Property Field Difference

Every one aware that what is the difference between distinguished field and Promoted Property Field. I am not giving the same definitions here.
This could be additional information, which can help you to understand better for Distinguished and Property Promotion.

Distinguish property uses common namespace http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/btsDistinguishedFields for all messages

Distinguished fields do not have a size limitation.
The IsPromoted property of Distinguished fields in the Message context is set to False.


Promoted field uses message namespace defined in the document schema and store the unique id at bts_DocumentSpec table in biztalk management database.

Property fields are limited to 255 characters.
The IsPromoted property of Property fields in the message context is set to True.

BizTalk FTP Adapter File Delete issue with Unix servers

BizTalk FTP Adapter File Delete issue with Unix servers

Use /n Software FTP V2 for Unix Server(Open VMS) with special adapter settings.

Hope you are all femiliar with using FTP adapter in BizTalk server 2004 and 2006.
Did you ever tried to use FTP adapter with different versions of Unix Servers(Hp OpenVMS) ??

If Yes , You would have faced an issue with FTP file delete.

What this issue is all about ?
When ever BizTalk pick the file from FTP Server it deletes the File in actual location automatically which will not happen with Unix Servers( mostly older versions of Unix servers like OpenVMS).

The alternate solution is you can go for /n Software FTP V2 adapter to solve this issue, However this requires a specific settings which I explained bleow.

Mentioned Below settings in your Adapter Other
UseSimpleDirList=TRUE
IgnorableDirListErrors=TRUE

These two properties are most important to pick the file from the Server and Delete the file from the source location. However this statements should print in two seperated lines.Use Control Enter Character to define these statements.

Some times these statements may behave differenly Look at the below observations with different servers.

Server-1


Server-2

When you export your Binding file these two lines should come with Control Character otherwise it may not delete the file from source location.

For example , If your binding file contains the statement as mentioned below
<Other>UseSimpleDirList=TRUEIgnorableDirListErrors=TRUE</other> -- Wrong

<Other>UseSimpleDirList=TRUE
IgnorableDirListErrors=TRUE</other> -- Correct

How to check the correct one had been imported to your MSI ??
To check this settings open your /n Software FTP V2 adapter Properties and goto Other and place your Mouse Icon to show the Tool Tip. If your can find the tool tip in two separate lines then your statement is correct.

If you need any more clarifications, reach me @ raj.webjunky@yahoo.com.

Virtual World - Installing Virtual PC

Virtual World

What is Virtual?

I have been hearing the word Virtual from many people and I was bit curies to know what all about virtual. Till I learn about Virtual i had a big hype about virtual in my mind, now I can talk some thing about virtual.
A simple definition of Virtual is Existing in essence, in other hand (technical aspect) you can say nothing is required physically. I know you can give many other better definition then man… Cool

For some of the best examples are
Virtual PC - You can install your workaround soft wares without get disturb your simple desktop OS.

Second Life – It is an Online, 3D Virtual Game. You can discover new friends, fashion, Music, videos and fun virtually. http://secondlife.com/

Indian Famous Stock market broker site – You can do online trading virtually (no money required to invest – No money comes to your pocket also :-) ) http://moneybhai.moneycontrol.com

Today I am describing how to install Virtual PC on your Desktop/Laptop without get disturbed of your primary Operating System.

Hope most of you experienced installing dual operating systems on your Home PC and faced lot of issue like “DLL Hell” , Missing components ( when you uninstall some software which get impact of your primary OS). Now take a deep breath and get relax – you know why?? Virtual PC does not have such complications. You just need to install all your soft wares in you Virtual Hard Disk (Any time you can Delete with out get impact of your primary OS).

Easy Steps
Download the Virtual PC 2007 from the below link
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=04d26402-3199-48a3-afa2-2dc0b40a73b6&displaylang=en
Install your Virtual PC 2007 on your Primary OS ( by clicking Next – Next –Next) and then restart your PC.

Install your Virtual PC 2007 on your Primary OS ( by clicking Next – Next –Next) and then restart your PC.

While you install VPC you may get below warning message for Windows vista Home Premium users


You are reading that VPC is not supported on Vista Home Premium, not that it does not run. It does run. "Not Supported" means that Microsoft will not give you technical help for any problems you encounter. VPC is supported by MS on Vista Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate....

Don’t worry much its only a warning It means that you will not get any Support for if any issues occurred.

Apparently you can install Windows vista Service Pack-1 and Virtual PC 2007 Service pack-1 for better connectivity.

Windows Vista Service pack : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=B0C7136D-5EBB-413B-89C9-CB3D06D12674&displaylang=en

VPC 2007 Service Pack : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=28C97D22-6EB8-4A09-A7F7-F6C7A1F000B5&displaylang=en

It always recommended upgrading your system with updated patches
Let us start create a new Virtual PC, I am giving any explanation for each screen.

In below screen you can see various OS. It doesn’t mean that it installs the OS automatically.
(Many people had this feeling...). It creates only the basic setup . You need to install your OS with your CD/ Image File. Like how you install operating system in your band New System.






If you would like to install Linux/ Unix or any other OS you can select Other Option.



If you already installed any Virtual hard Disk then you can choose that disk other wise you can selct New virtual Hard Disk option , it creats the disk for you.

Once Finish your installation go to your VPC Console and Click Settings you can see the below screen. Here you can increase your RAM from 128 to 512 / 1GB Ram.

Note : do not change any other settings , Leave it with default settings except RAM settings.




Select CD from Menu and select your CD Drive / Capture Image option to start install your OS.



Hope the screen shorts are enough to understand how to install VPC. If you need any more help

Reach me @ raj.webjunky@yahoo.com

How to use Environment Variable in BizTalk Server

Why Where and How to use Environment Variable in BizTalk Server

In general Global Environment variables are offen used to specify the Folder paths to shorten the path.

I have been Installaling my Biztalk MSI’s which I got it from my Developers and getting confused to find the path where the DLL are storing in my TestServer.

As you aware each developer maintain the different folder staructrure. You can ask a question what is the big deal to maintain a different folder structrue? Yes you are correct, you can maintain your own folder structure and create a BizTalk Project however, once you deploy the interface and Build the MSI you can see the Source and Destination Location of each DLL (Biztalk Administration Console -> application-> Resource) deployed in your machine.

What is Destination Location ?
This is the path your assemblyes are going to be copied when you deploy your MSI in any other Remote system(TestServer). If you maintain different folder structure it creates similar Folder structure in your TestServer while deploy.

I found some better solution to make it standardize this Destination path. This document explains you how to create Global Environtment Variables and How to use it in BizTalk.

Step-1
MyComputer –> Properties --> Click Advanced Tab --> Click New
And create your new Global Environment Variable(GEV) , Here I am creating MyBizTalkDeployFolder as my GEV and "E:\WindowsVariableTest" is my Location.

Once you created successfully you can use this environment varible in our BizTalk, where ever you want to deploy your MSI you create similar variable ( Repete Step-1) and specify your path.

Note: Be carefull while you create, do not tempt to delete any existing environment variable you may endup with un-necessary errors when you restart your system.

Step-2
Now we need to use this GEV in our BizTalk Goto Resource and select your Assembly and Click Modiy as shown in below Image.

Step-3
Enter your Global Environment Variable between two % Character in Destination Location path.And build your MSI.

Repeate Step-1 in any of your Virtual PC / any Test Server and deploy your MSI and check the path which you mentioned for GEV. You cand find all your assembly files.

Some time you may get LongString error which you can avoid using Environment Variables.

If you need any more clarifications, reach me @ raj.webjunky@yahoo.com.