Tag: BizTalk 2009

Kayxo BizTalk Exchange Adapter Tips

Introduction

I have been working on an effort to add some automation around processing of emails. In the past I have worked with the built-in POP3 adapter and also the N Software mail adapters found here: https://www.nsoftware.com/products/biztalk/adapters/emails.aspx. The built-in BizTalk mail adapters are not secure because POP3 and SMTP send cleartext passwords. In organizations that use mail functionality in BizTalk it is very important to implement this securely. N Software provides secure receive email support over POP3 and IMAP but these options are not always enabled on Exchange servers.

Today I renewed my search for a good MAPI/Exchange adapter solution. In this post I am going to look at the Kayxo (MAPI) Exchange Adapter and attempt to aggregate some information that is just not in a very good form on the web right now. I will also give some details on some so-far undocumented configurations and how well they are working.

Downloading the Trial

I have been down this road before and find it is typically very hard to get good information about the available BizTalk MAPI adapters in the marketplace. One of the vendors, Kayxo has a very bad website (www.kayxo.com). On many occasions I have not been able to get the site to work at all. Most of the time the home page just gives you a few email links to get more information about the company. If you do some more search engine investigation, you find there is more information, just not linked off the home page. A good overview page is here: http://www.kayxo.com/products/keab_biztalk_partners.php. If you click on the free trial it brings us to a page that looks like an old table of contents: http://www.kayxo.com/downloads/downloads.php. Here is the link to the install guide in case their site dies again: http://www.kayxo.com/downloads/keab_docs/KEAB_InstallationGuide.pdf.

If you try these links you notice PHP errors all over the page – like they have not updated their site in a while. This kind of spotty experience does not fare well if you are looking for a custom adapter, but keep reading, the story does get better.

On the download page there is a link to download the BizTalk adapter (it has a black background) but when clicking on it you just get another PHP/MySql error message (http://www.kayxo.com/downloads/kayxo_exchange_adapter_biztalk.php):

Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Lost connection to MySQL server during query in /home/content/k/a/y/kayxo/html/kayxo/includes/configuracion.php on line 8
Could not connect: Lost connection to MySQL server during query

Apparently they are not very good at working with PHP. 🙂 So I tried clicking on the other links and noticed a naming convention for the downloads. So I tried a few attempts at figuring out the download path. Here it is: http://www.kayxo.com/downloads/keab.zip. I was able to download the 8 MB file and this was the start of a fairly good trial experience.

Installation

After downloading the file you can then open the installer and it loads for a while. Back on the overview page (mentioned above), there is a link to the install guide for the adapter. Be sure to download this – it helps make the install process go smoother. The install guide mentions supporting BizTalk 2006/2009. So far in my experience, I have been able to install it successfully on BizTalk 2009 where CU 1 existed. My other config specs were W2K8 [R1], SQL 2008 SP1 CU 1.  On my VM I have Office 2010 installed. The install guide for the Kayxo installer says Only Outlook 2003 and 2007 are supported but I was able to get everything in the trial to install successfully with Office 2010.

[Important!] One of the steps of the configuration is to specify the credentials to login into Exchange with. It seems like this would be easy, just specify the domain\username and password, but the wizard has the domain\username part grayed out and just pulls it from the current thread. You actually have to login with these credentials in order for it to pull the correct credentials. So this means you should only try out this adapter on a computer that is part of the same domain as your email server.

There are a couple steps during the installation that seemed a little odd, so my tip for the install is to be sure to read every word that appears on the screen. Right before the install there is a wizard that has you specify a few setup options. One of the screens asks for the database information. Here is the screenshot from the install guide:

The default value given for server is localhost. So if you do not read the heading (very easy to miss), it looks like you are specifying your IIS server name. The first time through here I missed the heading and what do you know, it cannot find a SQL Server at localhost. This is actually the page you specify the database name. So remove “localhost” and provide the SQL Server instance name here. Then you will get to run the installer. The installer creates the program directory, registers 2 adapters with the BizTalk administration console, and adds some extensibility inside Visual Studio. There is actually quite a bit of functionality provided with the trial but you do have to discover some of it on your own.

If you open the install folder at C:\Program Files (x86)\Kayxo\KEAB you will see the installed files. There is an SDK folder which gives you a good idea of what the BizTalk messages and schemas will look like. For example, if you then open SDK\KEAB_Sdk_KeabSampleMove\Folders\Inbox\MailSample_PutInsideInFolder.xml, you will see a sample file. Here is this same sample file. If you look at the file it is based roughly off of a name/value approach with a little bit more structure. The format basically revolves around the MAPI properties. One tool I have found helpful to understand these is called Outlook spy: http://www.dimastr.com/outspy/. In MAPI there are hundreds of properties for the different objects in Exchange. You need to know quite a bit about the MAPI properties in order to effectively use the Kayxo adapter.

To explain more of this, you can open some files within the Kayxo install folder to get a better handle on some of the details. Open C:\Program Files (x86)\Kayxo\KEAB\MapiProperties.xml to find a listing of all of the different MAPI properties that the adapter knows about. Each has a tag associated with it. I am guessing the parsing engine creates a sort of keyed dictionary for the MAPI properties and then can serialize the properties as part of the message. The tool found in the start menu known as the KEAB Write Message Creator is helpful too for generating a message structure based off the MAPI properties.

After the installer finishes, there is a tricky configuration wizard to work through. Unfortunately the install guide does not really help us that much from a diagnostic perspective. You have to read the install guide word-for-word all the way through to find out enough tips to work through the configuration wizard.

Configuration

If you have Outlook already loaded on your computer and you can connect to your mail server then you will need to be sure that your profile is not in Cached mode. I am not sure what this means, but it is important to know. Here are some directions for disabling this in Outlook 2010:

  1. Open Outlook 2010, authenticate
  2. Click File\Account Settings\Account Settings button
  3. Find your profile and then click Change…
  4. Under your Server find the “Use Cached Exchange Mode” checkbox and be sure it is cleared.
  5. Click Next, and then Finish

You should right-click “Run as administrator” to run the “KEAB Configuration” start menu item to start the configuration wizard. Not doing this will result in you getting some access denied error messages. Then you just have four pages of a wizard to fill out. These pages are documented well in the install guide.

I will be trying to expand this content with some more screenshots and will provide other tips here as well.

Additional Documentation

I did some more search engine investigation and found some good YouTube videos on the adapter: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=keab+biztalk&aq=f. The send and receive port ones show a very rich adapter experience so be sure to check these out.

Thanks,

0

New BizTalk Service Pack Model: Cumulative Updates

Introduction

Recently I heard from Microsoft that there is now a new release model for hotfix rollups for BizTalk. The new model is similar to the service pack model (like with BizTalk 2006 R2 SP1) but is known as a Cumulative Update (CU). From what I have heard this is to provide greater frequency to the collective hotfix releases and a more predictable iteration for releases. This model is similar to what is being done with SQL Server and SharePoint Server. This new model of releases applies to all currently supported BizTalk versions including BizTalk 2006 R2 SP1, BizTalk 2009 and BizTalk 2010. Cumulative updates should be applied after running the older rollup of SP1 for BizTalk 2006 R2. It may seem like old news since BizTalk 2006 R2 SP1 is already at CU 3 but I had not heard many announcements about this or people mention CU 3 so I think most people do not know that the rollup release model was changed.

The BizTalk Developer Center Support page at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/biztalk/aa937674.aspx mentions a little more about the new CU model, that the expected frequency is every 2 months, and that each subsequent CU will include all previous CU hotfixes. I was wondering what was the best way to find all of the latest CU releases and the way that worked for me was to search at support.microsoft.com for “BizTalk cumulative update”, so here is the link for this: http://support.microsoft.com/search/default.aspx?query=biztalk+cumulative+update&catalog=LCID%3D1033&mode=r. The released CU versions show up at the beginning of the search results, ordered, nice and easy.

At this time the CU releases are not being localized so if you are using a localized version of BizTalk you will need to install the English version of the CU. If you encounter any issues with the English CU release on your non English system you should report this as a bug so that a corrected localized version of the CU may be created.

Related Resources

BizTalk 2006 R2 SP1 CU 3: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2286501/en-us 

Thanks,

0

BizTalk 2010 Party Migration Tool Issues & Workarounds

Introduction

Back during the BizTalk 2010 beta I was testing out the Party Migration tool. This tool enables a smoother migration path from BizTalk 2006 R2 and BizTalk 2009 to BizTalk 2010. It is very useful once you get it to run successfully. Back during the beta I experienced quite a few issues and apparently these issues remain in the final version (RTM) of the tool. This post will describe these issues and give the full steps for a workaround. I am using very similar steps I used during the beta here.

Issues

The party migration tool can be found on the install media at <install media path>\core\BT Server\PartyMigrationTool\PartyMigrationTool.exe. The help description found at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa578307(BTS.70).aspx mentions this should be run from a CD.  It would be nice to know this when trying to run the tool but this is not mentioned in the error messages.

Back during the beta the files were distributed just as they are now with the BizTalk 2010 Developer edition – as an extractable exe that does not come as an ISO. This is problematic because the intention for running this tool is that it will be loaded on an ISO or removable media. So you will need to either burn an ISO or use a workaround.

This tool does require you to right-click Run as Administrator or to execute it from an elevated prompt. Otherwise you will get odd CAS errors:

Request for the permission of type ‘System.Security.Permissions.UIPermission, mscorlib, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089’ failed.. For more details please see the event log.

Initially, if you are using the BizTalk 2010 Developer edition or have not burned an ISO, and try to open the PartyMigrationTool.exe you will receive assembly not found errors like this:

System.IO.FileNotFoundException was unhandled
Message: Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.BizTalk.Migration.PartnerManagement, Version=3.0.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35’ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

If you run off the ISO or removable media everything works but there is another way for this to work.

Workaround

  1. If you are using BizTalk Developer edition or did not make an ISO, go to the PartyMigrationTool folder. Keep this open.
  2. You will need to add 3 assemblies to the GAC next. I found it easiest to copy these three assemblies to the PartyMigrationTool folder to keep everything together. All of these assemblies are found on the BizTalk 2010 install media. The assemblies you will need are:
    a. Microsoft.BizTalk.B2B.PartnerManagement.dll in \core\BT Server\MSI\Program Files\Developer Tools
    b. Microsoft.BizTalk.Migration.PartnerManagement.dll in \core\BT Server\MSI\Program Files
    c. Microosft.BizTalk.Migration.PartnerManagement.XmlSerializers.dll in \core\BT Server\MSI\Program Files
  3. [Note]: I had previously recommended modifying the PartyMigrationTool.exe.config to redirect the assemblies but upon retrying with the RTM bits I thought it was just easier to GAC everything necessary. 2.a. fails anyway because there is not an entry for it in the config.

I did want to mention one other note. When you finally get the tool running, you will need to connect to SQL Server using Windows authentication, SQL authentication is not supported.

Thanks,

6

BizTalk 2010 Likely Compatible with Commerce Server 2007 Adapters

Based on a thread today on the MSDN forums I tried working with BizTalk 2010 RTM and the Commerce Server 2007 adapters. These are the same adapters used for Commerce Server 2009. I had worked with these adapters on a recent project with BizTalk 2009. I just wanted to post that the adapter install went successfully and I was able to add the adapters in the BizTalk 2010 administration console and able to create ports like normal. So this is an excellent compatibility story.

I had already confirmed these adapters worked with W2K8 R2 about a year ago. My test today of BizTalk 2010 RTM was also on W2K8 R2 with SQL 2K8 R1. Be aware that I only tested the BizTalk adapters and did not work with the Commerce Server business applications or any other aspect of Commerce Server.

Last year Cactus eventually certified/verified that these same adapters appeared to work successfully with BizTalk 2009: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rdonovan/archive/2009/07/22/biztalk-server-2009-now-works-with-commerce-server.aspx, so I would expect a similar announcement eventually.

Thanks,

0

Known Compatibility Issue between Windows SDK 6.1, VS 2008 Team Suite affects ESB Toolkit 2.0

Overview

As part of my work installing the ESB Toolkit 2.0 on BizTalk 2009 I have been encountering some significant traps in the configuration of VS 2008 Team Suite and ESB Toolkit 2.0.  I have found that it is very important for you to install Visual C++ as part of the VS 2008 install if you want to build the ESB Toolkit locally. This is not a directly expressed dependency in the documentation so this is something to watch out for. On my VMs to preserve space I will typically avoid installing extra features (such as C++, SQL replication, or Books online) that I usually do not need on the applications I work with but I found out the hard way that you should not take the C++ shortcut with the ESB Toolkit.

Another gotcha I have encountered deals with the Windows SDK 6.1. The current version of the ESB Toolkit 2.0 install documentation will refer you the SDK 6.1 download but I think the install originally referenced Windows SDK 6.0A. For all general purposes, the SDK 6.1 is fine but you are recommended to also install a hotfix, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974479 if you install the SDK 6.1 after having installed VS 2008 SP1.  This hotfix overcomes some of the changes brought with 6.1 that alter the behavior of the SDK 6.0A. VS 2008 itself installs the SDK 6.0A if it is functioning correctly. The problem I experienced was that VS 2008 Team Suite does not work properly after VS 2008 SP1 and this leads to many unresolvable problems.

Detail

The issues I experienced were because VS 2008 Team Suite does not correctly keep track of the installed features after VS 2008 SP1 is installed. The Team Suite installer behaves unpredictably and will not adequately keep track of the extracted files found in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC or C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A.  If I leave C++ checked during the Team Suite install I will usually always need to go back and repair the install after VS 2008 SP1 because some of the C++ components will be missing or the Windows SDK 6.0A files will be missing by the time I try to compile the ESB Toolkit.

One of the problems I experienced included the problem of the VS 2008 Team Suite installer giving the message (similar to problem identified in this thread: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vssetup/thread/2f3d0378-3175-49ae-acb7-012594a1bf3c):

A selected drive is no longer valid.

The install order I took when encountering this issue was:

  • BizTalk prerequisites – W2K8 R1 x64, SQL 2008 R1, SQL 2008 R1 SP1
  • VS 2008 Team Suite with C++ unchecked (SQL express was also unchecked)
  • VS 2008 SP1
  • BizTalk 2009 x64
  • Other BizTalk 2009 installs such as WCF LOB SDK, Adapter Pack, etc.
  • BizTalk 2009 ESB Toolkit Pre-Requisites such as MSChart, VS 2008 SDK
  • Windows SDK 6.1 

Conclusion

Unfortunately, I was not able to come up with a corrective solution for handling this configuration incompatibility. I tried a couple things but was unsuccessful:

  • Install the hotfix 974479 which should resolve most of the problems with the Windows 6.1 and VS 2008 SP1. I was still unable to get the VS 2008 Team Suite installer to work
  • Uninstall the hotfix 974479.
  • Uninstall Windows SDK 6.1 
  • Uninstall VS 2008 SP1

These last attempts certainly show some despiration but I found that once the Windows SDK 6.1 is installed the VS 2008 Team Suite installer seemed to me to always fail. VS 2008 SP1 is a requirement for BizTalk 2009 so I could not choose to avoid this. I recommend avoiding the Windows SDK 6.1 if possible on a computer or VM with VS 2008 Team Suite and SP1 otherwise you may not be able to compile the ESB Toolkit.

Thanks,

0

Using a Named SQL Instance with the ESB Toolkit

Introduction

Lately I have been working on building out some VMs for working with BizTalk 2009/ESBT 2.0 and for BizTalk 2010/ESBT 2.1. I am working on a project that is targeting BizTalk 2010/ESBT 2.1 but there is a feature we would like to use which is currently only compatible with BizTalk 2009/ESBT 2.0. So I am working on managing the feature migration as well as planning for how things will work with BizTalk 2010.

One of the proprietary systems I work with uses a named instance in development for the SQL database and no default SQL instance exists. To keep everything relatively simple I have been installing BizTalk on the same named SQL instance. For most of the BizTalk prerequisites and setup this is straight-forward, but once I start working on the ESB Toolkit there are so many changes to make because the ESB Toolkit samples are all based on a default SQL instance.

It seems that the documentation is quite poor in this regard so I wanted to make a list of the things I have had to change to get a named instance to work properly. I did see Andy Morrison’s article mentioning bits of my content at http://geekswithblogs.net/andym/archive/2010/02/02/137753.aspx but it does not mention all of the relevant items specifically for a named instance. Some of the items listed below are steps done before the ESB Toolkit itself but I am including them here for completeness.

Pre-Requisite Setup

  • Install SQL using a named instance
  • Configure BizTalk using the named instance. Most of the steps in the wizard will work automatically(if SQL is local) but the BAM Tools lines for BAM Analysis and BAM Star Schema databases will still require you to manually enter the named instance information.
  • The UDDI configuration wizard will pick up the named instance automatically (if SQL is local) so no extra work here.

ESB Toolkit Setup

  • During the ESB Toolkit Configuration Tool you will need to specify the name of the named instance. If SQL is local you can use “.\<instance name>”.

ESB Toolkit Management Portal Setup

  • Edit the web.config in c:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Samples\Management Portal\ESB.Portal
  • Edit the App.Config in c:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Samples\Management Portal\ESB.UDDI.PublisherService
  • Edit the web.config in c:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Samples\Management Portal\ESB.Exceptions.Service\ESB.Exceptions.Service
  • Edit the App.config in c:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Samples\Management Portal\ESB.Exceptions.Service\ESB.Exceptions.Service.Implementation
  • Edit the web.config in c:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Samples\Management Portal\ESB.BAM.Service\ESB.BAM.Service
  • Edit the App.config in c:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Samples\Management Portal\ESB.BAM.Service\ESB.BAM.Service.Implementation
  • Edit the App.config in C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Source\Samples\Management Portal\ESB.AlertService
  • Open the ESB.Portal solution in C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Source\Samples\Management Portal\ESB.Portal and do a find on “data source=” to find a few other locations where the default SQL instance is used with Entity Data Models and other files
  • Open the ESBFunctions.ps1 file in C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Source\Install\Scripts and search for “sqlcmd” to find places where SQL is being called using the default instance. I did a find/replace on “sqlcmd” and replaced it with “sqlcmd -S .\<instance name>” because my named instance was local. You can enter something different if your named instance is remote.

As you can see, there are so many different places that must be changed in order to use the ESB Toolkit with a named SQL instance. This list holds true for both BizTalk 2009 and BizTalk 2010.

Thanks,

1

How to Abort a Commerce Server Catalog Import Part II

A couple months ago I wrote a post about a dirty way of aborting a Commerce Server catalog import which involved stopping SQL Server and various other invasive procedures. Tonight I found out there is at least one but maybe two ways of doing this, one supported and other basically a hack.  
 
First for the supported way. I was able to dig up this API method for cancelling an import as part of the ImportProgress class. It seems like the cancel method would be on a catalog import class rather than on the progress tracking class but I am just glad to know there is a supported way: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.commerceserver.catalog.importprogress.abort(CS.70).aspx. Once I can build a utility class to do this I will post it here.
 
I did find another approach that seemed to work too. A colleague suggested looking at the CatalogStatus table in the productcatalog table to watch the status of the imports. When looking at this table I noticed the AbortRequested field which is a bit flag that can be set to cancel a pending or ongoing import. It seemed like this would be documented better and I did find a small amount of information on this field: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb509008(CS.70).aspx. I set the field to 1 in order to stop some pending imports and they did not start. The statement to run is based on the StatusId column which seems to hold an arbitrary value so I am not sure if it is possible to get this value from somewhere else. So you would run something like this to cancel a catalog import with a StatusId of 1:
 
Update [MyCommerceSite_productcatalog].[dbo].[CatalogStatus]
Set AbortRequested = 1
Where StatusId = 1
 
Again, I wish this were documented better but was quite glad to have at least a hack to save me a couple hours waiting for some imports to finish. Thanks!
0

BizTalk MsBuild Generator Tips

Introduction
 
A couple days ago I was working on creating some msbuild scripts for building my BizTalk solutions. I am not particularly knowledgeable about the way this is usually done. I checked out my friend (and fellow MVP) Michael Stephenson’s CodePlex project, the BizTalk MsBuild Generator at http://biztalkmsbuildtool.codeplex.com/. This tool is really helpful for getting something rapidly created that you can run with. There were a couple things I did to make this free tool work a little better and I wanted to share some of these tips so that others could get the most out of Michael’s great contribution to the BizTalk community.
 
Tips
 
I was working on some solutions in BizTalk 2009, SQL 2008, Windows Server 2008 R1/R2. I first started with some solutions that were building fine in VS 2008. There were a couple of minor things I had to get some of my projects to build properly. Some of these tips will seem very simple for someone with experience doing automated builds in TFS. But for someone with less experience, it can be confusing.
 
1. After going through the wizard to generate the msbuild files, the generator created a folder full of files so I tried to kick off the build with one of the .cmd files. It got errors part way through. Basically the build was having trouble finding my projects because my solution file was in a different place than it expected it to be. After a bit of inspection of the generated files, I opened up the generated .proj file. Here is what was initially under the Build target:
 
<Target=“Build“>
    <CallTarget Targets=“CleanUp“/>
    <CallTarget Targets=“Setup“/>
    <MSBuild Projects =“$(SolutionName)“ Properties=“Configuration=$(ConfigurationName);“/>
    <CallTarget Targets=“Deployment“/>
    <CallTarget Targets=“Publish“/>
    <CallTarget Targets=“ApplyBindings“ />
    <BizTalk.BuildGenerator.Tasks.StartApplication MessageBoxConnection=“$(BizTalkManagementDatabaseConnectionString)“ ApplicationName=“$(ProductName)“/>
    <CallTarget Targets=“UnitTests“ Condition=“$(IncludeTests)“ />
</Target>

 

I changed the MSBuild element’s project attribute by setting it to $(SourceCodeRootFolder)$(SolutionName) so that it could find the location of my projects. You could use a hard coded path here if the SourceCodeRootFolder value is not valid for your solution.
 
2. I rebuilded after making the change above and the build file works almost completely until it executes the last steps and fails. Some of the default assumptions of the generator are that you will want to deploy the BizTalk applications immediately and part of the same process which is common in continuous integration environments. In my environment I am not able to do this due to some deployment rules and constraints of how my BizTalk applications are being used.
 
I seemed to particularly have trouble with the following line:
 
<BizTalk.BuildGenerator.Tasks.StartApplication MessageBoxConnection =“$(BizTalkManagementDatabaseConnectionString)“ ApplicationName=“$(ProductName)“/>
 

 

My troubles were because in my local development environment I do not always maintain bindings and binding configurations for some ports. You can comment this line out to avoid trying to start the BizTalk application.
 
3. I used the tool a couple times and did not have any problems generating the file. For one of my solutions I was not able to complete the wizard and I got the following error:
 
************** Exception Text **************
System.IO.FileNotFoundException: The system cannot find the file specified. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070002)
at System.Reflection.Assembly.nLoadFile(String path, Evidence evidence)
at System.Reflection.Assembly.LoadFile(String path)
at BizTalk.BuildGenerator.BizTalkHelper.AddResourceReferences(Resource resource, ApplicationResource applicationResource)
at BizTalk.BuildGenerator.BizTalkHelper.DescribeApplication(String applicationName)
at BizTalk.BuildGenerator.UI.UserControls.ApplicationDescriptionControl.GetDescription()
at BizTalk.BuildGenerator.UI.UserControls.ApplicationDescriptionControl.MoveNext()
at BizTalk.BuildGenerator.UI.WizardForm.ChooseApplicationPage_BeforeMoveNext(Object sender, CancelEventArgs e)
at Divelements.WizardFramework.WizardPageBase.OnBeforeMoveNext(CancelEventArgs e)
at Divelements.WizardFramework.Wizard.GoNext()
at Divelements.WizardFramework.Wizard.c(Object A_0, EventArgs A_1)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.OnClick(EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Button.OnClick(EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Button.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.OnMessage(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)
 
This error occurs because one of the assemblies for a deployed BizTalk application cannot be found. This can happen if you have deployed your BizTalk application and then ungac an assembly by hand using gacutil /u or by deleting a file from c:Windowsassembly. For one of my solutions this was a problem. It can be notoriously hard to determine which assembly reference is the problem for large complicated solutions. This problem is repeatable – I tried a couple times.
 
I decided to dig into the problem a little deeper and downloaded the source for the generator from CodePlex. I was able to implement a quick workaround for the issue that resulted in being able to run the wizard successfully as well as generate a build file that built correctly. My patch for this issue can be found here: http://cid-62e68922e47bc425.office.live.com/self.aspx/Public/Community%20Contributions/BizTalk%20BuildGeneratorPatch%20-%207-12-2010.zip I also uploaded the patch to CodePlex and you can get it on the source codepatches link on the site. The patch includes both the assembly and the single source code file I updated.
 
If you just want the built file to fix your local installation of the BizTalk MsBuild generator, just copy the BizTalk.BuildGenerator assembly to your install folder and copy it to the GAC. If you want to build it from source, do the following. Take the BizTalkHelper.cs file from the patch and copy it over the same named file in the BizTalk.BuildGenerator project. The changes were just to wrap the body of the AddResourceReference method with a try/catch. I also added a line for logging the exception informatin.
 
Conclusion
 
These tips help you to be even more productive using the BizTalk MsBuild Generator tool. I was able to get quite a few solutions ready for MsBuild very quickly so I am glad Michael released this tool.
 
Thanks,
 
3

New CodePlex Project – Custom WCF Bindings

I opened up a codeplex project for housing some custom WCF binding work I have been doing: http://customwcfbindings.codeplex.com/. I uploaded my progress on a custom SalesForce binding based on the WCF LOB SDK if you want to take a look. There are a couple bugs I would like to get out of the way before making an initial release but I am happy to say you can download the source and it will show up in the add adapter service wizard and with the right parameters will connect to SalesForce and generate a basic WCF proxy stub. The source includes an installer project based off of the WCF LOB SDK samples.
 
One innovation on the current experience of use of the WCF LOB SDK and the BizTalk adapter pack is that I include a property on the property grid to load properties from a config file. This helps reduce the time it takes to enter all of the properties on the grid for connecting to the LOB system. Entering connectivity information and LOB system details for every time a new BizTalk schema or WCF client proxy is generated is a huge annoyance in the current WCF LOB SDK lifecycle.  Once I get a release out for my codeplex project I promise to show some screenshots for some of the improvements on the development experience I have come up with.
 
At this point not all of the functionality in the SalesForce custom binding is working and I am only supporting .NET method calls. My SalesForce custom binding does support invocation from BizTalk and does generate BizTalk schemas and binding files but there is not type information in the generated metadata at this time, just method invocation details.
 
While I prepare for my next WCF LOB SDK presentation I will be moving the source code over to VS 2010 and the BizTalk 2010 beta libraries for the WCF LOB SDK. Please let me know if you have any feedback!
 
Thanks,
0

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