Tag: BizTalk 2010

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

BizTalk 2010 Beta Notes and Details

 
Initial Thoughts / Experience
 
I have been testing the BizTalk 2010 beta for about a week now and have been actually having pretty good success with it. I have configured all of the features successfully in the base install, setup the WCF LOB SDK beta, setup the BizTalk adapter pack, setup the ESB toolkit 2.1, and setup both the RFID server components and RFID mobile. The UDDI install on the BizTalk 2010 beta has also gone successfully. So the good news is that this beta is pretty stable in my experience. My environment includes Windows Server 2008 R1 (W2K8 R1), SQL 2008 R1, and VS 2010 RTM Premium. I wanted to mention a couple items for those people who are trying the 2010 beta bits based on the installs:
 
  • Start with a fresh VM if possible
  • Make sure you have uninstalled all pre-release .NET 4 bits such as the client profile and extended profile otherwise your VS 2010 application will not work properly. Ensure you have all of the .NET 4 RTM versions installed.
  • Make sure you are using VS 2010 RTM.
  • It is a good idea to uninstall the WCF LOB SDK from BizTalk 2009 before installing the WCF LOB SDK for BizTalk 2010. I had a failed install of the SDK for BizTalk 2010 when I did not uninstall the previous version of the WCF LOB SDK
  • I was able to get the Notification Services hotfixes from BizTalk 2009 to install correctly on BizTalk 2010. As always, with new versions of BizTalk, some of the hotfixes no longer work but fortunately these are working fine. Here is the URL for getting these: http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=953752
  • Some of the features of the new BizTalk 2010 are meant to run from a CD. So you want to burn an ISO of the extracted files to see this. Make sure your ISO burner supports a format like ISO+JOILET because there are some very long file names in the extracted files.
  • (Cheesy tip #1): If you actually have to burn a CD in your ISO maker, you can remove the x64 folders from the extract for x86 target systems or vice versa to make all the files fit on a CD.
  • Once you create an ISO, check out the PartyMigrationTool folder in the root folder of the install media. It has an exe with the same name for migrating the BizTalk 2006 R2 or BizTalk 2009 parties to the new trading partner agreement and business profile format, new for 2010.
  • Do not try copying the PartyMigrationTool files from the CD to your VM or server – the config file pulls these using assembly redirects and it takes a lot more work to copy the file and all of its dependencies to get it to run correctly. You could alternately update the config for the tool to point to the corrected path to the MSI folder…

There are many new features to describe in BizTalk 2010. First of all, all of the improvements made with BizTalk 2006 R2 SP1 should be available in BizTalk 2010. I found the WCF extension behavior pop-up in the send/receive handlers for WCF-Custom to work and the certificate overrides for AS2 functionality is also working. I know some of these have been long awaited features that were not in BizTalk 2009. Here is a list of the features from R2 SP1 if you want to check on them: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee532481(BTS.20).aspx.

Changes in BizTalk 2010
 
There is quite a bit of improved functionality as well as some new features as well. I will list out many of these features and then spend more time on some of them. Much of the documentation is now available in the beta. Please see http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/results.aspx?freetext=biztalk+2010&displaylang=en&stype=s_basic for a listing of downloads and documentation pieces. During BizTalk 2009 beta much of this was not available so a big kudos to the BizTalk documentation team for having this available with the beta!
 
Improvements
 
  • Platform realignment, now officially supported for W2K8 R2, compatible with SQL 2008 R2, VS 2010, SharePoint 2010
  • Updated BizTalk map VS extension – many new features such as copy/paste, easier to use interface for connecting lines, suggested mapping column hints, etc.
  • BizTalk admin console changes in the organization of parties through business profiles and agreements
  • Simplified console experience for host settings including new fields for many registry keys and config settings.
  • Support for using .NET 4 although not complete at this point
  • Many ESB Toolkit improvements.

One of the changes I am excited about is the way parties are handled within BizTalk 2010. One of the pain points for doing AS2 and EDI work in BizTalk has been the complexity of so many forms and screens for all of the many settings for the parties. The product group (PG) has been working on making all of this work more intuitive and has restructured both the party display in the BizTalk admin console and the layout of settings in the property pages.

Below you can see the new structure added to the admin console so you can classify more than one business profile (which represents the identifiers and settings for communications) for each organization:
 
 
For each business profile you can communication tabs based on message format (X12 or EDIFACT) or communication type (AS2). This is nice – you no longer are required to right-click on a party to get the AS2 or EDI settings :). The use of a tool strip in the UI is a good modernization of the party manager. Perhaps we will also see icons or other wizard links here in the future. The AS2 profile selection is shown below:
 
 
The EDI selection is shown below:
 
 
Agreements form the basis for describing message exchanges and the layout for managing these has become more intuitive. In BizTalk 2006 R2 or 2009 it easy to get mixed up about “Party as Sender” vs. “Party as Receiver” when you have many transactions that can go either way. The following shot shows some visual cues to help with this:
 
 
In general, the party configuration has been organized and I think you will appreciate the ease of use compared to previous versions of the party settings pages.
There are lots more improvements, be sure to download a copy of the beta and test it out! I will be sure to post more on gotchas and workarounds as I find them so check back here! Thanks!
0

BizTalk 2010 Public Beta Tomorrow

I just heard about this tonight that the public beta 1 for BizTalk 2010 will occur tomorrow based on Ofer Ashkenazi’s post at http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalk_server_team_blog/archive/2010/05/20/biztalk-server-2010-beta-availability-and-virtual-launch.aspx?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter.  
 
There is an Application Infrastructure Virtual Launch event discussing various connected system technologies and BizTalk 2010 at http://www.appinfrastructure.com/ tomorrow starting at 8:30 Pacific Time. The clock on this website says it starts at 8:30 central time but this is pretty early for Redmond time so I would tune in at 10:30 central time.
 
I have been involved extensively in the pre-launch beta 1 so I am excited about helping the community embrace this new version of BizTalk.
 
Thanks,
1

WCF LOB SDK Talk on May 26

I will be speaking at a Magenic sponsored mini conference called Code Mastery on May 26 2010. Here is a link to the site: http://codemastery.com/index.htm. Magenic is hosting a couple of these mini conferences in the regions we have offices. The site will be updated soon with more information on the sessions and speakers. It is a free event so bring a friend!
 
I will be talking about the WCF LOB SDK from both a BizTalk and general .NET user perspective. This is a technology that is fairly well known in the BizTalk community but almost completely unknown in the general .NET community. I give some introductory articles below but notice that almost everything is directly from Microsoft and on the heavily technical side. I will be reviewing some of these concepts but will also be approaching it from a practical perspective about how this technology would fit within the enterprise and how you might use it in your software projects.
 
Here are a couple of good links to get you started:
 
 
 
 
 
 
0

BizTalk Changing Again – 2009 R2 Now 2010

Today I heard that BizTalk 2009 R2 will be changing names and release features. I had just started to appreciate the regular R2 release with BizTalk 2006 R2 and then BizTalk 2009 R2. The changes in scope for the 2009 R2 release grew large enough to require renaming to a full version release. Here are a couple good posts on this(http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=5656, http://blogs.msdn.com/johnbreakwell/archive/2010/03/23/techready-biztalk-server-2009-r2-renamed-to-biztalk-server-2010.aspx.
 
There are a couple of impacts I can see from such a change:
  • The expected updates following 2006 R2 SP1 that were supposed to be in 2009 R2 will probably be delivered later due to the change in scope. This is a little painful for some people waiting for those hotfixes and improvements that only currently exist in 2006 R2 SP1.
  • Host Integration Server 2009 R2 release will also be renamed (?)
  • There are new features (perhaps some of the scope change) now being included in the 2010 release that had not been discussed previously:
  1.  
    1. Updated adapters for SAP 7, Oracle eBusiness Suite 12.1, SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2
    2. Simplified management through single dashboard which enables IT Pros to backup and restore BizTalk configuration

It does seem exciting to see adapter upgrades for SQL 2008 R2 and a better backup and restore story for BizTalk. Both of these new capabilities could be a positive result of the aggregation of product team resources between BizTalk and SQL Server. I would stay tuned – the BizTalk roadmap page (http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/roadmap.aspx) has not been updated at the time of this posting with the new branding so I would expect the full scope change to be still under discussion.

Thanks,

1

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑