BizTalk 360

by Administrator 25. september 2011 20:20

Hi all

A couple of days we were lucky at the Danish BizTalk User Group because we had Saravana Kumar come to Denmark to talk about BizTalk 360.

BizTalk 360 is a very complete BizTalk support tool. It will monitor your BizTalk environments and let you know the overall health status of the environments. It uses red/green indicators to let you quickly know if there are problems and if there are problems such as stopped send ports and so on, you can drill down and check them.

BizTalk360-Home

Amongst other possibilities, you get complete auditing of what happens in BizTalk 360 and as such you can always see who did what and when.

BizTalk 360 runs as a BizTalk Administrator and inside BizTalk 360 you can then configure users and what parts of your BizTalk environment these users should have access to support. This way you can give people a minimum of rights and you don’t have to be either an Administrator or Operator as we know it from normal BizTalk administration using the administration console. This can be very useful. For instance you can even let an account manager disable receive locations for a specific customer if she knows that customer has maintenance on Monday. With BizTalk administration console, the account manager would have to access the BizTalk Administration Console, which is way too complicated for a non-BizTalk Expert.

Another nifty thing is alerts. You can create alerts so you get alerted if some functionality has been stopped for a period of time or perhaps a daily alert about the overall health status and other such things.

All in all, BizTalk 360 is a support tool that provides a nice user friendly interface to monitoring and supporting your BizTalk environments and it is really looking good. You can restrict access for certain users to certain parts of your environment, you get auditing… oh yeah, and you get alerts about the status of your system if you want it.

I’d recommend it any day!

You can find more information about BizTalk 360 at the following places:

--
eliasen

Tags:

BizTalk 2010

BizTalk Server 2010 Unleashed is now out

by Administrator 16. september 2011 01:10

Hi all

I am VERY happy to announce, that the book I have been writing alongside Brian Loesgen, Charles Young, Scott Colestock, Anush Kumar, and Jon Flanders is now finally out.

You can buy it here: http://amzn.to/qYuPHb

I am responsible for the four chapters about:

  • Schemas
  • Maps
  • Orchestrations
  • Pipelines

I welcome ANY feedback about what I have written, but should you have feedback to other parts of the book that you are anxious to write to someone, feel free to send me an email about that too Smile

It has been quite a journey and there have been times when I was REALLY tired of writing. It is my understanding, however, that my chapters have turned out very well and I am looking forward to learning more about BizTalk, reading the stuff from the other great authors.

If you buy the book, you can see my acknowledgements, but just in case you are not buying the book, let me just quickly mention Randal van Splunteren (MVP) who did me a great personal favor and reviewed all the stuff I wrote before I handed it in for official review. It was a fantastic help.

--
eliasen

Tags:

BizTalk 2010 | BizTalk 2010 Unleashed

The next DBUG meeting

by Administrator 23. august 2011 23:35

Hi all

Just a quick note to let you all know that the next meeting in the Danish BizTalk User Group (DBUG) will be on September 21’st. I won’t be speaking for a change, so do come around Smile

You can find the invitation at http://www.dbug.dk/files/biztalk%20brugergruppe%20september%202011.pdf

--
eliasen

Tags:

DBUG

My first BlogEngine widget

by Administrator 20. august 2011 22:21

Hi all

I recently switched all my blogs to use BlogEngine.NET. I am quite happy with the switch so far but I needed a widget to show an image on the blog page. so I decided to create one.

You can download the zip file with the widget here:

Basically, you need to unzip it in the <root>/widgets folder. This will create a folder called “Show Image” and you can now use this widget.

There are three properties you can set in the settings dialog:

widgetsettings

The Filename is the filename of the image you want to show. The image must already have been uploaded to the <root>/app_data/files folder. If you have placed the file in a subfolder of the <root>/app_data/files folder you can just enter “<foldername>/<filename>” in this property.

The “Image link” is optional. If you enter something here, the image will be created as a hyperlink to this text.

The Label property can contain a text that will be shown below the image.

The above settings are used on my blog for this widget:

widgetexample

The widget is released as a “It’s free, use it, change it, do what you want, just don’t blame me”-widget Smile

--
eliasen

Tags:

BlogEngine.NET

Developing InfoPath 2007 forms using Visual Studio 2008

by Administrator 13. august 2011 00:20

Hi all

I have been on a project for quite some time now, that amongst others, include developing InfoPath 2007 forms that will be hosted by Forms Services on SharePoint 2007.

I decided early on, that we will develop the forms using Visual Studio 2008 for a couple of reasons;

  1. This way we have all the source files easily accessible without having to save the form as source files and packing them back together as an .XSN file. I often need to edit either the Manifest or one of the XSLT’s
  2. We get the file in Source Control individually so one developer can change an XSLT while another changes another XSLT or the Manifest or whatever
  3. We get a nice way to reference .NET projects from our forms and automatically keep them updated when the projects change.

It has been, however, a complete NIGHTMARE using Visual Studio (And Team Foundation Server for source control) with the following really silly limitations:

  1. If you want to build your entire solution, you need to check out all the projects in the solution… or at least the Manifests because they get updated on a build. So if someone else is modifying a form you will get conflicts in source control if you need to build the solution Sad smile
  2. If you want to publish a form you again need all the projects (or at least the manifests) checked out because for some reason, Visual Studio simply builds the entire solution just because you choose to publish one form. It doesn’t stick to just the one form or the projects that are referenced by this one form – oh no, it builds the entire solution.
  3. If you have one of the forms open in Visual Studio (The Manifest file) you cannot do a “GetLatest” from source control. You need to close that file first.
  4. Some times you get an error about not being able to do anything because you have a modal window open… without you actually having a modal window open…
  5. If I want to open up a form I need to do it BEFORE I create the VPN connection to my customer. If the VPN connection is established first, Visual Studio crashes.
  6. If I delete an image from the form, it isn’t deleted from the Manifest, so next time I try to open the form, it won’t.
  7. Some manual changes to the XSLT is simply overwritten by the designer

All in all, it just sucks. How this ever came to be released is beyond me.

--
eliasen

Tags:

InfoPath

Welcome to the new technical blog

by Administrator 13. juli 2011 23:38

Hi all

Since BlogEngine.NET now supports multiple blogs in one installation, I have decided to consolidate my blogs into this one installation at http://blogs.eliasen.dk.

This blog will be the new home for my technical writings and I will migrate all my previous posts from http://blog.eliasen.dk to this blog and in time the old blog will disappear. his blog will from now on not only focus on BizTalk as the old one did, but also on any other technical issues/findings I run into.

Please update all RSS readers that currently use http://blog.eliasen.dk to use http://blogs.eliasen.dk/technical/syndication.axd instead.

Thanks!

--
eliasen

Tags:

BlogEngine.NET | Blog

Slides from presentation for DBUG on 2011-05-04

by eliasen 17. maj 2011 20:25

Hi all

On May 4’th I gave a presentation about transactions in orchestrations in BizTalk for the Danish BizTalk User Group.

You can find the slides from the presentation here:

And you can find the sample code I used here:

--
eliasen

Tags:

BizTalk 2010 | DBUG | Speaking engagement

Passed the exam in BizTalk 2010

by eliasen 1. maj 2011 21:42

Hi all

I took the exam (70-595) in BizTalk 2010 a couple of days ago.

This was my fifth exam in BizTalk, counting the exams in BizTalk 2000, BizTalk 2004, BizTalk 2006 and BizTalk 2006 R2.

And just to answer the most common questions:

  • No, I didn’t prepare
  • No, I can’t give you any pointers as to what to read

This completes my still perfect streak in BizTalk exams Smile

--
eliasen

Tags:

BizTalk 2010 | Certification

DBUG meeting on May 4’th 2011

by eliasen 19. marts 2011 15:33

Hi all

Just to let you know that the next meeting in the Danish BizTalk User Group (DBUG) will be on May 4’th 2011.

I will be speaking about transactions in orchestrations.

Find the official invitation here: http://www.dbug.dk/files/dbug%20maj%202011.pdf

Thanks

--
eliasen

Tags:

BizTalk 2010 | DBUG

Next DBUG Event

by eliasen 11. januar 2011 12:57

Hi all

Just to let you all know that the next Danish BizTalk User Group event will take place on January 19’th 2011. You can find the invitation at http://www.dbug.dk/files/biztalk%20brugergruppe%20januar%202011.pdf

Cheers

--
eliasen

Tags:

DBUG

About the author

Jan Eliasen is 37 years old, divorced and has 2 sons, Andreas (July 2004) and Emil (July 2006).

Jan has a masters degree in computer science and is currently employed at Logica Denmark as an IT architect.

Jan is a 6 times Microsoft MVP in BizTalk Server (not currently an MVP) and proud co-author of the BizTalk 2010 Unleashed book.

BizTalk Server 2010 Unleashed


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6 times: July 2004, July 2008, July 2009, July 2010, July 2011, and July 2012. Not currently an MVP.

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