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.

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:

• http://www.biztalk360.com/
• http://www.facebook.com/biztalk360
• http://twitter.com/biztalk360

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eliasen

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

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.

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eliasen

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:

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eliasen

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

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eliasen

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

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eliasen

Hi all

So, today my boss confirmed that I can go to the event held by the Swedish BizTalk User Group. See the details of the event here: http://bugs20100908-widget.eventbrite.com/. The event says it’s a BizTalk 2010 launch party… but whether BizTalk 2010 will be out there… I don’t know.

I am really looking forward to hearing what Richard Seroter, Ewan Fairweather and Stephen W. Thomas have to say. I have preordered their book, both paper and ebook editions. Hopefully I will receive at least one of them before September 8’th where the event starts.

Also, this will actually be the first time I will meet Johan Hedberg and Mikael Håkansson, who are two of my Swedish colleagues who are both BizTalk MVPs.

Anyway, flight and hotel are booked. Look for me there!

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eliasen

Hi all

I am trying out BizTalk 2010 beta, and just discovered a small glitch, will I will describe here and then email a link to the blog post to Microsoft to let them know about it.

I have a very simple solution:

I have a C# project which is a helper class, which I will be using from my orchestration in another project.

The project structure is as you can see here:

The helper class only has one class with one method which looks like this:

   1: private const string XPATH = "Some XPath expression";

   2: public static void ChangeXmlDocument(XmlDocument xmldoc)

   3: {

   4:     xmldoc.SelectSingleNode(XPATH).InnerText = "New value!";

   5: }

So it just changes the value of an element in the XML that is given to it as a parameter.

The second project only contains a schema:

and an orchestration:

The orchestration just picks up a message and then calls the helper class with the message as a parameter.

So, the deployment properties are set on the BizTalk project, so I right click it and choose to deploy it. It deploys fine.

I then entered BizTalk Server Administration, and created a new receive port and a receive location for it. I enabled the receive location and I bind the receive port to the Orchestrations receive port.

When enlisting the orchestration, I get this error:

Error message (For the benefit of search engines):

Could not enlist orchestration ‘strong name of orchestration’. Could not load file or assembly ‘Strong name of helper class’  or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. (Microsoft.BizTalk.ExplorerOM)

So I am thinking that the error is because I forgot to GAC the helper class and the administration console wants to alert me to this. Not sure I like that, but ok – I’ll GAC it. That didn’t help, though.

So I thought: Maybe a refresh of the administration console, so I right clicked on the application with the orchestration and chose “Refresh”. That didn’t help.

Then I thought: I’ll right click the “Applications” node in Administration console and chose “Refresh”. That didn’t help either.

Then I tried to chose “Refresh” on the BizTalk Group node in Administration Console. That didn’t help either.

So, as it turns out, there are two options to fix this error.

1. Restart BizTalk Server Administration Console
2. Add the helper class as a resource in Administration Console

Neither should be necessary, I think…

Hope this helps someone.

You can find my solution here:

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eliasen