Well folks I’ve been greeted with the news that Microsoft Windows Azure will be in 2 geo-replicated places here on Australian soil, coming ‘shortly’.

As an Azure MVP & from Breeze (a leading Microsoft Cloud Partner) perspective we invest heavily in cloud technologies.

What does this mean and why should I care? I hear you ask… good question and I asked the same.

As most of you know I have a passion for Integration, sticking all sorts of things together from small RFID devices, hand made hand-held devices, raspberry PIs through to high end ERP, Financials & many other types of systems. So before I get to the WHY aspect, let me briefly set the context.

There’s some great data coming out of Gartner a report which caught my eye - http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/news/2240173583/Gartner-Better-collaboration-for-new-era-of-application-integration came out with these:

• Integration Costs to rise by 33% by 2016, more than half of new system development costs will be spent on Integration
• By 2017, over two-thirds of all new integration flows will extend outside the enterprise firewall.

So Integration just took on a whole new face – successful integration is about using the right tools (in the toolbox) for the right task. Now we have a whole new drawer in our toolbox full of Azure goodies & widgets. This functionality is just too compelling to be ignored….

…and now that it’s on Australian soil I’d be thinking that just about every Data center service provider should be giving you cloud functionality.

Some quick cloud advantages:

• scale, provisioning and ease of use
  • Imagine being able to spin up a SharePoint site in the time it takes me to write this article.
    
  • Imagine being able to ask for an extra load balanced highly available Server/Service at the click of a button. Importantly – Imagine being able to give it back again at the end of the weekend/day/next hour.
    
    
• Not wait the typical 12 weeks for a new server to be provisioned, oh and dont mention filling out the right forms. Running an application on those machines and getting a firewall port opened….that’ll be another 2 weeks…and on it goes.
  
• The much beloved Enlightenment for many companies of achieving Single Sign-On – Imagine your customers being able to sign into your applications using their own Ids, Live Ids, + a bunch of other Ids without you needing to provision more services. You can house your identity accounts in Azure, locally or elsewhere – finally you don’t need a Quantum Analyst to setup Single Sign-on.
  
• My experiences in the last few weeks on client sites have been back in the world of old – classic encumbered infrastructure service providers wanting to claim everything, put the brakes on any new ideas and have meetings around such concepts of adding an extra 10gb disk space to existing servers. These guys should be ‘can do’ people – it’s all about choosing the right tool for the job.
  
• Microsoft have done a great job on the developer tooling front from the classic MS toolset through to Apple, PHP, Ruby, Phython etc. all being able to access, develop on, publish and deploy.
  
• We could even give a bunch of HDD drives to Olaf (our gun cyclist @ Breeze) to ride to the Azure Data Center and offload our data, while we wait for the NBN to never come to our area.
  
• There are some great options on the horizon coming down the track.
  

So let’s say we’re keen to explore – how hard/easy is it to get ‘my’ own environment & what does this mean.

The short answer is you get an Azure Footprint which could be running in a ‘Data Center’ in Sydney. Depending on what you’re playing with you could get:

- SQL Databases, Cloud Services, Scalable Mobile Device Services, Load balanced Websites/Services/Restful endpoints…and the list of ‘widgets’ goes on and on.

How do I interact with this environment:

Often the issue around alot of this is that because my beloved ‘servers’ are running somewhere else I’m concerned over how much control we get.

We enter into the Hybrid Integration space – where as you can imagine not *everything* is suited for the Cloud, there will be things you keep exactly as they are. So there will be many many scenarios where – we have something running locally as well as something running in Azure. Some options we have available are to make our servers ‘feel at home’:

• VPN connection – we can have several flavours of a VPN connection that connect our Azure Footprint to our local network. for e.g. local network is 10.10.x.x/16, Azure network 10.50.x.x/16. Full access to all the machines/services and other things you have running. CRON jobs, FTP, scripts, processes, linux boxes, samba shares, etc etc.. (I do realise the integration world is never as easy as we see it in the magazines)
  
• RDP Connections – standard level of service really from any Service provider.
  
• Remote PowerShell Access
  
• Azure Service Bus - Applications Level Web/WCF/Restful Services connectivity. An Application Service can run either locally or in the cloud and this feature allows your Service to be accessed through a consistent Endpoint within the cloud, but the calls are Relayed down to your Application Service. There’s a few different ways we can ‘relay’ but the public endpoint could house all the clients & their device requests, while your existing application infrastructure remains unchanged.
  
• SQL Azure Data Sync – sync data between clouds & local from your databases. So for many clients, come 8pm each day, their local database has all the Orders for the day as per normal, without the usual provisioning headaches as the business responds to new market opportunities to support smart devices.
  
• We even get pretty graphs….
  
  • But wait there’s more…..
  • These details are typical performance monitor counters + diagnostic information. We can use Azure Admin tools to import these regularly and import them into our typical tools.
  • System Center does exactly this – so our ‘dashboard’ of machines will list our local machines as well as our cloud machines. Your IT guys have visibility into what’s going on.

We’ve been using Singapore DCs or West Coast US with pretty good performance times across the infrastructure. 

What does having a local Windows Azure Data Center mean to me:

• Medical Industry – we have several medical clients allowing us to innovate around Cloud technologies using HL7 transports. Faster time to market and higher degrees of re-use.
• Cloud Lab Manager – www.cloudlabmanager.com can run locally for all training providers. Breeze has created an award winning cloud based application that will certainly benefit from this piece of great news.
• Creating a cloud based application is now feasible (this particular one was due to the sensitive nature of information it carried)
• And lastly I can house my MineCraft server – well it’s my 10 yr old sons and half the school I reckon.

So for you…

Ask yourself the question – are you getting all these features from where you currently host/run your hardware?

Lack of infrastructure and provisioning challenges shouldn’t be holding back new ideas & business movement. iPads, smartphones, anywhere, any time access should be the norm, not like we’re putting another person on the moon.

It’s all about using the right tool for the job

Enjoy folks as it’s certainly exciting times for us Aussies ahead!!

Microsoft’s Announcement

“Ding ding” after spending 4 rounds(hours) in the ring with this guy, I’m taking the gloves off and heading for the showers and salts.

I’m in the middle of some BizTalk work (which is nice for a change) and I’m ticking my tasks off.

I’ve got a REST receive port exposed from BizTalk via IIS and published through the WCF Publishing Wizard.

(there’s Operations mappings and extracting variables from the URL to Context Properties under the Configure – omitted for brevity)

Couple of shots of the WCF Service Publishing Wizard:

The issue here is that – once the Wizard completes you’ll get:

http://<servername>/coreapi/customer/Service1.svc as the URL to call.

The task was simple:

I wanted to call URLs such as

http://<servername>/coreapi/customer/123456789/enquire

http://<servername>/coreapi/customer/123456789/verify

etc. 

And not their equivalents of:

http://<servername>/coreapi/customer/Service1.svc/123456789/enquire

The Solution was to use IIS URL Rewrite which looks to be the Swiss Army knife that MacGuyver uses.. (but he only needs a paperclip to take out an entire train).

Lots of samples and numerous examples of solutions that work and people are high-fiving in about 5 mins of starting…alas not for me . The other point to note here also is that a URL Rewrite module exists for:

• Default Web Site
• Each IIS Application under the Root Website.

I wanted to keep things confined to just my IIS Application and not have to have requirements of changing the Default Web Site for instance.

The tricky part was to find out how IIS works and it’s matching.

Underneath CoreApi I have Customer as an Application as in

/coreapi/customer

**The part that URL Rewrite appears to do** (that floored me for a while)

It chunks the FULL REQUEST and passes just the part required to your app.

So take the full URL:

http://localhost/coreapi/customer/1234234/enquire

As you traverse down the IIS ‘Application tree’ the URL that is passed to each URL Rewrite in each underlying IIS Application is *different*, as in:

• /coreapi = ‘customer/1234234/enquire’
• /coreapi/customer = ‘1234234/enquire’

This was possibly the hardest piece to figure out. I’d setup failed request tracing in IIS and those logs, while I feel like I’m walking into the Engineering room of the century with all the logs, pages and info… I wasn’t seeing ‘URL Rewrite failed to apply your rule because …..’  - it just wasn’t appearing plain and simple.

URL Rewrite – the rules that won the show

1. Under /coreapi/customer in IIS Manager
2. Started off with a Blank Rule and setup the following:

So the RegEx Rule (at this level) simply states – if the Request begins with a number, then prepend ‘Service1.svc/’ to it.

The key is knowing what the URL being passed to URL Rewrite is at this level in the IIS Application/vdir tree.

What the web.config says at this level:

<rewrite>
           <rules>
               <rule name="CoreApi Rule" patternSyntax="ECMAScript">
                   <match url="([0-9].*)" />
                   <action type="Rewrite" url="Service1.svc/{R:1}" appendQueryString="false" logRewrittenUrl="true" />
               </rule>
           </rules>
       </rewrite>

I hope I’ve saved you a bit of time on your next endeavour.

After wrestling with this tonight for sometime I’ve finally cracked it. SP2013 RTMed and alot of the sample code fails due to the fact that you need to now add ‘..;odata=verbose’ onto pretty much every call to SharePoint.

Basically you get a series of errors such as:

MIME type could not be found that matches the content type of the response. Noneof the supportedtype(s) 'application/atom+xml;type=entry, application/atom+xml, application/json;odata=verbose

Previously alot of the sample code has

$.getJSON(….) as part of the call to the server – as mentioned we now need to add some custom header values of ‘odata=verbose’, so to save you hours of slogging on this, the getJSON call doesn’t allow custom header values. You need to use the $.ajax(…) for these calls.

READING FROM A LIST

function getCustomers() {
 

  // begin work to call across network
  var requestUri = _spPageContextInfo.webAbsoluteUrl +
                "/_api/Web/Lists/getByTitle('CustomersREST')/items/" +
                "?$select=Id,FirstName,Title,WorkPhone" +
                "&$orderby=Title,FirstName";
   
  var requestHeaders = {
      "accept": "application/json;odata=verbose"
  }
    // execute AJAX request
  $.ajax({
      url: requestUri,
      type: 'GET',
      dataType: 'json',
      headers: requestHeaders,
      success: onDataReturned,
      error: onError
  });
}

UPDATING A LIST ITEM

//Sample code to update a Customer List Item in a Customer List called ‘CustomersREST’

function updateCustomer(dialogResult, returnValue) {

  if (dialogResult == SP.UI.DialogResult.OK) {
    var Id = returnValue.Id;
    var FirstName = returnValue.FirstName;
    var LastName = returnValue.LastName;
    var WorkPhone = returnValue.WorkPhone;
    var etag = returnValue.etag;

    var requestUri = _spPageContextInfo.webAbsoluteUrl +
              "/_api/Web/Lists/getByTitle('CustomersREST')/items(" + Id + ")";

    var customerData = {
      __metadata: { "type": "SP.Data.CustomersRESTListItem" },
      Title: LastName,
      FirstName: FirstName,
      WorkPhone: WorkPhone
    };

    requestBody = JSON.stringify(customerData);

    var requestHeaders = {
        "accept": "application/json;odata=verbose",
        "X-RequestDigest": $("#__REQUESTDIGEST").val(),
        "X-HTTP-Method": "MERGE",
        "content-length": requestBody.length,
        "content-type" : "application/json;odata=verbose",
        "If-Match": etag
    }

    $.ajax({
      url: requestUri,
      type: "POST",
      contentType: "application/json;odata=verbose",
      headers: requestHeaders,
      data: requestBody,
      success: onSuccess,
      error: onError
    });

  }

}

While setting up a new SharePoint solution one of the requirements was to embed a Yammer Feed.

So I followed the help document only to have an unusual situation:

1) the feed wouldnt render in browse mode.

2) the feed WOULD render in Edit Mode.

The key to the situation was to declare a little more on the sample script Yammer gave – adding ‘text/javascript’

Here’s the working script – (one for the bat –utility belt)

*tested from Win8, Firefox *

<script data-app-id='hyB2pTvrL36Y50py8EWj6A' type='text/javascript' src='https://assets.yammer.com/platform/yam.js'></script>
<script type='text/javascript'>
yam.connect.embedFeed(
{ container: '#embedded-feed'
, network: 'yournetworkhere'
});
</script>
<div id='embedded-feed'></div>

Hi folks, I came across a very handy little tip the other day that works with *any* set of Batch Commands that you want to run sequentially.

Now before you jump out and tell me “Mick, what are you doing?! Powershell is where it’s at!”….yes yes I know. I’ve half the guys at the office telling me that too.

So onto the goodness on this one:

The key is

<cmd> && <cmd>
or
<cmd> & <cmd>

Hold the Phone - we have an UPDATE (from a commenter upon whom I owe a beer)

----- Update ----

Using a single ampersand achieves a similar result but with a slight difference:

* single (&): run command 1 then command 2
* double (&&): run command 1, and if it returns success then run command 2

So in your example, if the print spooler is already stopped then "net stop" will fail and "net start" will not be run. If you use a single ampersand instead, then "net start" will still be run.

------ End of Update -----

e.g.

net stop “Print Spooler” && net start “Print Spooler”

Hi guys, while planning for an Azure Based Event (ABE) coming soooon….or at least after Santa has come and gone & given me a birthday pressie, I was directed to a new site in the wings.

Coatsy and his DPE crew have been busy creating a site just for us.

One that accepts our slang and other Aussie quotes.

Register and it will notify you of all the events and other up and coming tidbits.

http://azure.msdeveloper.com.au/Default.aspx?at=blogs

+1 for the Aussie know how (Even if we speak US (English) :))

Stay tuned…and keep this on the bat-utility belt. “Holy Azure Batman….”

While on SharePoint 2013 training we came across all the different ways of calling SharePoint and it’s data through JavaScript, JQuery and all the bits.

It was all looking good until we needed to update sharepoint – e.g. a list, a list item etc.

The MS Course notes say – “if you’re in SharePoint you can get the Form Digest from the main SharePoint Form….”

What about if you’re running outside of SharePoint (a Provider App – they now call it, or Cloud Hosted…depending on who wrote the help article)

The answer in the notes is… go and make an old fashion call to Sites.asmx SOAP WebService…. from client side javascript this is going to be a feat.

….

The Answer – make a REST call to get the ‘Context Info’ first, then you’ll have the form digest and you’re done.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp142386(office.15).aspx#bk_synchronize (just at the top of this page)

To access this information, use the /contextinfo operator. For example:

http://server/web/doclib/forms/_api/contextinfo

To increase security against cross-site scripting attempts, the /contextinfo operator accepts only POST requests.

I recently ran into an interesting one while building some InfoPath forms for SP2010/2013 forms services.

I wanted to return some Rich Text (XHTML) fields back from a WCF WebService call.

I was at the point as a developer, where I couldn’t even say ‘Works on my machine…’.

The problem was – no matter what I tried, I would always have *plain text* and no ‘richness’ of the Rich Text. Didn’t work for me.

So I have:

1) a basic WCF Web service – running on my dev environment.

2) an InfoPath Form that makes the call and displays the results.

The WCF Service:

This is the field that I eventually want to return as RichText to InfoPath.

Here’s the Service Method code (which basically goes into a file and returns back a list of clauses) – just focus on the CONTENT = …GetXHTMLRichText(…)

InfoPath and Returning a RichTextField
2 things need to happen for this to work.

1. When InfoPath adds the WCF Service to the form, it needs to ‘detect’ the field correctly when it build the underlying schema.



You need (nb – ‘Content’ is my field name):
<xs:element minOccurs="0" name="Content" nillable="true">
                <xs:complexType mixed='true'>
                    <xs:sequence>
                        <xs:any minOccurs="0" processContents="lax" maxOccurs="unbounded" namespace="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"></xs:any>
                    </xs:sequence>
                </xs:complexType>

</xs:element>

Note the namespace on the ANY element above – this is the winner to tell InfoPath that this is a richtext field.

2. When returning data via this field (in my case the ‘Content’ field), it needs to be in a certain shape, as in:
<Content xmlns=http://yournamespace>
    <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Rich text here</div>
</Content>

Your rich text content needs to be ‘wrapped’ for InfoPath to play nicely with it.

This was the purpose of my GetXMLRichText method as

The gotcha:

When I pointed InfoPath at my webservice and added a service reference I was getting back a SimpleType for the field and not a ComplexType/Rich Text field.

The WCF Service WSDL was ‘almost there’ but not close enough:


The Content field described in a ComplexType which is almost there, but not quite.

It’s missing the <xs:complexType mixed=’true’>…<xs:any namespace=’http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml’ …/>. The rest were good.

The fix:

Cutting a long story short, the simplest way forward here was to simply edit the form components that InfoPath had built and correct the schema. Then reuse the form.

The form looks like this:

From the File->Publish->Export Source Files you can get to the source and edit the correct schema (XSD) file.

Close the form down in InfoPath (or you may even need to close InfoPath) to edit the Schema.

You may need to hunt through a few of them to find the right one. My file was GetKCCTerms12.xsd

Modify, save and close that file.

Right click on manifest.xsf –> Design to launch InfoPath and then select Save As to work with it as *.XSN form (*.xsn files are just CABs with all these files inside)

The final result as viewed from an InfoPath form – notice the bolding sent through.

Enjoy,

Mick.

With Hyper-V now available on Win8 it's more important than ever.

VOTE here: https://connect.microsoft.com/WindowsServerFeedback/feedback/details/390443/hyper-v-needs-usb-support

The more votes...the more importance this issue has.

Let's get it in there.

p.s. I'm aware of the 'workarounds' after having to plug 183 usb devices into a virtual environment. Hours I'll never get back

Hi folks, you've probably heard a fair bit about the make over of Azure into 'Azure 2.0' (the SDK is still 1.7)

There's some great new tools within VS.NET to manage your environment better, even a Service Bus 'explorer' which was much needed.

I've collected a few links to start with for you guys to read up on when you've got a moment:

Azure 2.0 Details on:

• Windows Azure Powershell Extension - http://cloud.github.com/downloads/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-tools/windowsazure-powershell.0.6.0.msi
• Command Line Tools Independent of WebPI - https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/downloads/
• Virtual Machines - FAQs etc - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj156003
• Windows Azure Virtual Network - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj156007
  • Get slides from my previous presentation here - Azure Virtual Network 2.0
• Windows Azure Media Services - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh973629
• Create and Deploying WebSite walk through - https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/services/web-sites/how-to-create-websites/
  • (like we need this one - seriously takes 3 minutes! - well done MS!)
• Azure Chalk Talk Videos - http://www.meetwindowsazure.com/DigitalChalkTalks
  • Azure Virtual Machines - Part I & Part II
  • Web Sites with ASP.NET (NB: SSL is not supported, but it will arrive when Win Server 2012)
  • Web Sites with node.js
  • Web Sites with OSS Apps & Web Matrix
  • Azure Cross Platform Command Line Tools
  • Cloud Services (aka perviously web+worker roles)
  • Apache Hadoop Based Services On Windows Azure
  • TFS Service Preview Intro
  • Azure Websites - Continuous Integration with TFS.
  • Azure SQL Databases Intro
  • Azure Storage Introduction

1. How to enumerate and get at each of your TPM Partners.
2. How to create Partners + Profiles within BizTalk 2010.

staticvoid Main(string[]
args) { //enumerate
all the TPM Profiles in BizTalk var builder =new SqlConnectionStringBuilder("DATA
SOURCE=localhost;Initial Catalog=BizTalkDB;"+"Integrated
Security=SSPI;MultipleActiveResultSets=True"); var tmpCtx = TpmContext.Create(builder);
Console.WriteLine("Connected
to BizTalk Global Parties"); var partners = tmpCtx.Partners;
Console.WriteLine("Number
of Parters:{0}", partners.Count()); Console.WriteLine("------------"); foreach (var
ptr in partners)
{ var profiles = ptr.GetBusinessProfiles();
Console.WriteLine("{0}
Business Profiles:{1}", ptr.Name, profiles.Count); foreach (var
profile in profiles)
{ Console.WriteLine("\tProfile:{0}",
profile.Name); } } tmpCtx.Dispose(); if (bCreateProfile)
{ createProfile("Breeze
Partner #"); } Console.WriteLine("Finished");
Console.ReadLine(); }

//
need to do this through a single threaded connection - no MARSprivatestaticvoid createProfile(string partnerName)
{ partnerName += DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyyMMdd-hhmmss") + (new Random().Next(0,
65535)); Console.WriteLine("Writing
a new Profile for {0}", partnerName); var builder =new SqlConnectionStringBuilder("DATA
SOURCE=localhost;Initial Catalog=BizTalkDB;Integrated Security=SSPI"); var
tmpCtx = TpmContext.Create(builder);
var ptr = tmpCtx.CreatePartner(partnerName);
var pname ="Breeze
Profile-#"+ DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyyMMdd-hhmmss") + (new Random().Next(0,
65535)); var bp = ptr.CreateBusinessProfile(pname);
bp.Description ="Created
from Code"; var pcol =new AS2ProtocolSettings("BreezeProtocolSettings");
bp.AddProtocolSettings(pcol); tmpCtx.SaveChanges(); tmpCtx.Dispose(); }

Easy but effective

<script type='text/javascript'>
var msg = "your big title goes here…";
msg = " ..... " + msg;pos = 0;
function scrollTitle() {
document.title = msg.substring(pos, msg.length) + msg.substring(0, pos); pos++;
if (pos > msg.length) pos = 0
window.setTimeout("scrollTitle()",300);
}
scrollTitle();
</script>

You know it’s a Friday when…who can spot the ‘yes/no/cancel’ buttons?

While wrestling with SharePoint 2007 SP2 today, I got a great error message.

“SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wiza” – Wizzzzzaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!
(this sits nicely with Shazza, Mappa, Timmy, Kimmy, and on it goes…”)

Now to sort the problem out…

Hi folks, I thought I’d share something that captivated me on this rainy Easter day and that was

Visual Studio Asynchronous Programming - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/vstudio/async
(you’ll need VS2010 + SP1 before you grab the CTP)
There’s a new improved compiler + an extended library for us.

Hands up who’s done async programming in either VB.NET or C#??? It’s a pain! Thread management, Main UI threads can only update certain objects, passing values between main + background threads, determining whether a thread has completed its tasks… and so on…

Basically all these ‘issues’ keep us from delving further into the world of asynchronous programming cause it very rapidly becomes complex just managing the two worlds – sync + async.

Today I was pleasantly surprised!!!

About a year ago I saw a great presentation on F# and I was amazed at how if they wanted to run a bit of code async it was simple an extra character as in:

set results = …..   <-sync

set results! = ….  <- run this async

(don’t quote me on the above, but it’s something like that – let’s call it pseudo code)

Why are we interested in this? – that’s always the first question to ask when investigating. Too many times we here ‘this is really cool’ and ‘check this cool software out’ etc… but the real reason of WHY do we want to go down this road is never answered.

On a ‘developers machine’ looking at 5 items, running a single test client – you’d have to say “works on my machine” and you’d have no need to async anything. True. Let’s move beyond our beloved developer box and think about UAT/PROD environments and what your code is doing.

What happens if 4 concurrent requests come along – how is your code going to perform? (As developers we’d be thinking …’it’s in the hands of IIS, not my issue’ :) )
(I recently was presented with a solution that ran across 20 odd servers, the answer to everything was get more hardware to make the app more performant, scalable etc – couldnt be the code.)

So as the requests start to build (don’t know an exact number but let’s say 100/sec), what is happening to your code? how often do we sit down with profiling tools on our code in this space? must be the disks..slow…and as always we have definitive proof works on my machine says the developer!

It’s not until we see our code running under load that we get an appreciation for where things could be improved and are causing grief for not only IIS but other systems as well.

Scalability, performance and scalability – single threaded app/service vs multi-threaded. Multi-threaded tend to win all the time.

Let me give you a couple of suggestions where this stuff is great:

1. As part of a WF/WCF/Class where you want to ‘push’ some processing into the background – critical things can be done upfront, and you can push some of the ‘other stuff’ into the background.
   
2. Take advantage of some of the great multi-core/multi-cpu Servers out there – single threaded tend to run on the same core on the same CPU (known as thread affinity)

Anyway enough jabbering from me and let’s see some of the hidden gems…

Async Programming Framework

Let me show you a couple of examples (from my set):

1. Fetching a webpage

Here I go off to twitter and search for all the BizTalk items.

Couple of things to notice
- …Async is added to the end of routines for convention, indicating that these are Async callable routines.
- not a single IAsyncResult to be seen, no StateObject and no Callback routines!
– line 104 the async keyword indicating that this routine itself can be called async if desired (more for the compiler)
- line 108 the await keyword is used in the Async framework to ‘wait for the async task to complete’  then move onto the next line.
- line 108 WebRequest.Create(…).GetResponseAsync – it’s the GetResponseAsync that is the async method, no …Begin or ..OnEnd calls! Just write it as you read it.
- line 109 We get a reference to the response stream (I should check for the existence of data etc – demo code, demo code :))
- line 112 …await stm.ReadAsync(…) – reads the response stream into a buffer on a background thread and we wait there until this completes (await keyword). By all means there’s many other ways to program this, as in we don’t need to wait, we could run this guy in the background quite happy and then check on him periodically.

That’s it! Not too tough at all, multi-threaded goodness right there. You can have blocking and non-blocking calls etc.

2. What about a Chunk of CPU based code

NO Async Example – as per normal, doing some cpu things.

Written in Async….

Points to notice:
- line 63 async Task<int[]> … to the Async framework the async methods are wrapped within a Task class. We must ‘wrap’ anything we return from our routines within a Task<..> – here I’m returning an int[]
-line 66 … = TaskEx.Run(…something to run in a background thread…). As we’re dealing with a block of code, there’s a Task Extension class that allows us to run that bit of code Async.
-line 79 await matrix – this line ensures that our async routine has indeed completed (or errored) before we move onto the next line.

Too easy if you’ve lived in the other world.

As always remember this is CTP so I wouldn’t go rolling out into Prod just yet. The perf numbers I get are pretty much identical to rolling all of this by hand with ThreadPool.QueueWorkItem(…) and IAsyncResult etc.

Well done MS!

Enjoy and here’s my VS.NET Sample Solutions – I had great fun! Oh – this is also applicable to Silverlight + WP7 apps :)

While looking into an authentication problem I discovered this ‘new’ header sent back from a SharePoint 2010 machine.

Health Score? hmmm… I thought, what’s the max and what’s the min values. Is this good/bad? or don’t care?

So SharePoint 2010 has several Throttling features it used such as Client Auto Back-off which predominately when triggered, prioritises HTTP requests – such as HTTP POSTS are non delayed or throttled, but HTTP GETs are and new HTTP connections are throttled.

Here is one MS page that barely describes the Header – could do with updating that one.

SharePoint 2010 determines the health of a server by initially looking at system counters.

Let’s dig further….

Upon Reflecting the classic Microsoft.SharePoint.dll, there’s a Microsoft.SharePoint.Diagnostics section which I thought would be a great place to start. I found a
SPWebFrontEndDiagnosticsPerformanceCounterProvider class (amongst others there’s a SPDatabaseServer class as well)

The line above collection[0] = …. refers to the following collection

So putting all this together, the performance counters are:

• WebAppPool - “SharePoint Foundation”
• Global Heap Size
• Native Heap Count
• Process ID
• OWSTimer & W3WP
• Private Bytes
• Processor (_total)
• Processor Time

It appears the main class behind all of this is
SPHttpThrottleSettings where it appears that the throttling setting is turned off in ‘Single-Server’ deployments.

Digging further I came across the big-daddy class of it all (I think) -

SPPerformanceInspector – notice the method IsInThrottling() and the other is 2 constants that describe the displayed Throttled messages.

I also noticed another method on this class SetupRegKeyHealthScore.
Where HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\14.0\WSS\ServerHealthScore is the actual value you want to assign.

A value of 0 is great, 10 is bad. Over 10 means the server will go into Throttling (letting your clients know as well).

There’s many other things here, but I’ve got to head swimming.

Hope we unraveled this mystery a little more.

Mick.

I recently came across a SharePoint Portal that previously was working a treat up until Christmas (just gone) and then the client got this on their Create Site Page:

So the good old “Parameter name: key” error…that old chestnut I thought (like I had any idea at that stage).
Null – is always an interesting thing. So something is going through a collection and not finding the value, not that they should have tested for the existence of the value first…but we’ll leave that for another story.

Why this was happening now? I haven’t got to the bottom of it, could be an update? security patch? SQL update? code somewhere? I find these things happen on the night before an important release date.

So after sheer luck of me just ‘doodling’ on the Create Site Page, this appears to have fixed it:

From the highlighted area – just simply fill in the empty(null) search box EVEN though we are Creating a Site here.

Go figure…

Do I add SharePoint to the Wonders of the World list?

I hope you’ve all been well over the break and enjoying the ‘thinking time’ – I’ve been keeping one ear to the ground and just on the lookout for new bits. Here’s one….

The BizTalk team have been busily working hard over the break and produced another issue of BizTalk at it’s best – BizTalk Hotrod.

http://biztalkhotrod.com/Documents/BizTalkHotrod11_Q4_2010.pdf

Specifically this issues talks about:

• Async communication with BizTalk across WCF-Duplex messaging.
• Calling SAP RFCs from BizTalk – all you need to know.

Guys – the biztalk hotrod mag set is some of the best technical biztalk discussions around, grab the previous issues and add them to your internal networks. A must.

Enjoy and talk to you soon.

Mick.

There I was the other day slowly building up a new bts project in VS.NET.

You know the way it goes, add some schemas, maybe maps and before long you have a couple of helper assemblies and maybe a custom pipeline component or 2.

The problem is that the C# Assemblies don't automatically get added to your BTS Application in the BTS Admin console.

Usually I'll drag down one of my mammoth powershell 'build all' scripts from a previous project and customise this for the current project. 2 days later I usually stick my head up to see which day it is, and typically as we developers do, build a ferrari for something that a skateboard would do.

So simply put - add the following line to your Post Build Events section on your project in VS.NET.

btstask AddResource -ApplicationName:"Micks Demo App" -Type:System.BizTalk:Assembly -Overwrite -Options:GacOnInstall,GacOnAdd -Source:"$(TargetPath)" -Destination:"%BTAD_InstallDir%\$(TargetFileName)"

Ahhh...too easy.

Enjoy only a few more sleeps till Santa!

Mick.

Here’s something that I hope to save a few hours to you – InfoPath Forms Services.

I recently ran into this dreaded error – "InfoPath Forms Services is not turned on” when trying to configure it from within SharePoint Central Administration –> General Application Settings.

Forms Services is part of SharePoint Enterprise Services (usually activated via a Farm/Web Application/Site Collection or Site feature) and it relies upon the State Service.

So on our intranet, we’re revamping some InfoPath forms that were working in SP2007 and a new SP2010 using the database detach/attach method saw the intranet up and running…almost…except for this InfoPath Forms Services.

Most posts on the web talk about simply not having the feature enabled for either a Site collection, and/or Central Admin (and various other red herrings in my case)
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1237956/infopath-forms-services-is-not-turned-on
http://mundeep.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/infopath-forms-services-is-not-turned-on/

Basically my source of truth was SharePoint Manager 2010 (great tool from CODEPLEX) which allows connections to SharePoint via the APIs as a standalone application (tip: make sure you launch it in ‘run in administrator’ mode).

From here I saw that on my install I was missingForms Services listed in the Farm’s Service Applications

I initially thought it was some permissions issue and that I couldn’t see the service under that account (even though I was farm admin), so I launched and checked under the installer account and got the same result.

My next questions were: How does Forms Services become missing? How do you manually install/enable it?

In this case, I had a classroom SharePoint 2010 VM easily available and looking at it through SharePoint Manager, low and behold the Forms Service service was there!! Listed.

The machine I was having trouble with was a standard clean install, that I didn’t automatically run the Configuration Wizard on – as I wanted to have control over the naming of DBs. That was pretty much the difference between the two machines.

So I tried a few things:

a) installing just the InfoPath Web Admin Feature - stsadm -o installfeature -name IPFSAdminWeb –force and then activating it with stsadm -o activatefeature -name IPFSAdminWeb -url http://sp2010:10000 –force (no luck, it just gave me the InfoPath config under the Central Admin)

b) reran the configuration wizard

c) repaired setup

d) tried to run just the InfoPath Forms Services MSI from the install source.

…all to no avail.

InfoPath Forms Services – now with ‘deeper’ integration with SharePoint 2010, an internal service but with no real apparent way of getting to it.

The Answer:
I got thinking and I decided to attempt a backup of the Service from my VM and restore just the Service to the intranet Farm.

- Perform a backup of just the configuration

Then from there I did a restore (more in hope than anything) such that this process would ‘inject’ the right settings into the Farm Database.

At this point anything with InfoPath Forms Services on it was a bonus.

In any rate, here’s the backup file in ZIP format from my VM, that you can use to restore if ever faced with a similar challenge :)

Olaf and I were cracking away on some SharePoint 2010 work which we thought should be simple…point SPMetal to the site and start LINQ-ing to our hearts content…..

with the one exception that we couldn’t select items from a list based on their Content Type.

By default SPMetal.exe doesn’t include these ‘system’ fields (apart from ID + Title – go figure) and the secret is to use an Override file.

The good oil is:http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee535056.aspx
(Here’s a good article on how .NET Types are mapped to SharePoint - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee536245.aspx)

The simple override/parameters file:

          <
          Web
           
          AccessModifier
          ="Internal" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/SharePoint/2009/spmetal">
  <ContentType Name="Item" Class="Item">
    <Column Name="ContentType" Member="ContentType" />
   
  </ContentType>
  
</Web>

The SPMetal Command Line

The VS.NET Code

 static void Main(string[]
args)

        {

            using (BreezeDataContext dc
= new BreezeDataContext("http://breezelocal"))

            {

                var myitems
= from i in dc.GetList<ContentListTraining>("My
Content List")

                              where i.ContentType
== "Training"

                              select i;

                var courses
= myitems.ToList<ContentListTraining>();


                Console.WriteLine("There
are {0} items",courses[0].Title);

                    


            }


            Console.ReadLine();

        }

I’m in the process of planning a SP2007 to SP2010 ‘migration’ moving over the content database and other web artifacts.

I was making sure all things were ticked off and available in the new SP2010 environment such as – additional external scripts, paths, externally accessible images, webparts + flash movie files.

Migrated over – fired up the browser and after some minor tweaking most things came over, except for the flash movies.

The flash movie was not being displayed.

So naturally you think – must be a path, permission, activeX, flash object declaration, upload or even a masterpage might need a tweak…

Fired up FireBug in firefox and went to work – we could access the *.swf file directly from within the browser, but when the Page loaded with the link in there… no go.

In fact we got a ‘304 not modified’ response within FireBug – which seems pretty normal if the flash player already has the movie locally and it’s just comparing the server version versus the local…but still no flash playing.

SharePoint 2010 Web Applications restrict ‘active’ content – aka Flash out of the box.

After some digging and a seemingly unrelated option appeared inWeb Application –> General Settings.
Browser File Handling - Default setting: STRICT

This was the culprit, setting this to permissive did the trick.

Wow! Have a great weekend folks!

As you know I’m a big fan of Virtual Box being able to run my x64 VMs on my Win7 machine. Yay!!

So armed with my trusted new Core i7/8 GB laptop – I figured the VMs will be cooking on this new kit…

After installing the lastest VirtualBox (3.2.0) I was away – only to notice the machines were running like a SLUG! (I actually have a cat that has the nick name ‘slug’ and this machine was slower than her)

After waiting a full 20mins (still booting - ‘loading windows files…’ etc) my machine Blue Screened for a millisecond and then rebooted.

So I rolled up my sleeves and started digging – could be the VHD, the bios, the machine, the 1000 and 1 settings…

Firstly I ran a command line command (from under the vbox install dir) -
VBoxManage setextradata VMNAME "VBoxInternal/PDM/HaltOnReset" 1

Finally I got a glimpse of the BSOD and it was an error “…STOP…7B…”

I twigged this is an error of “Inaccessible boot device….” which I’ve had several times when the SATA drivers couldn’t be loaded by the O/S during boot up.

Solution: (in my case)
I configured the Virtual Box VM with IDE Storage Controllers and NOT SATA ones for the bootup.(still connected to the same VHDs though)

Win2008/R2 boots up and I’m able to load the SATA drivers in and we’re away.

Back to BizTalk 2010 Beta playing…. :)

Here’s a handy set of commands when using in particular Virtual Machines with a ‘demo’ environment.

We certainly create images for my students to take away with them and the common question is:

“When will this OS expire?” or more likely on the 3rd day of a 5 day course I get the error popping up stating the OS has expired and will shutdown every 2hrs.

To know when the OS may expire from the command prompt:

c:\slmgr –xpr

To possibly EXTEND to trial period for the OS

c:\slmgr –rearm

(note – you can only get away with this a few times)

If this fails, you can always jump to MS and try and get a trial key off their site.

I got an email from David Marsh telling me about this new world from MS. Let me share a little…
Way back when…LOGO was one of the first languages I learnt as a kid.

Moving a turtle around on a page with commands such as PenUp, PenDown, RightTurn etc etc – pretty cool as a kid and then you could draw things (there was a big version of the Turtle that interfaced into an Apple II via a ribbon cable as wide as a 4 lane highway)

MS Dev Labs have released a great SmallBasic environment that is very simple to pickup (great for kids).
It’s got a very simple set of commands AND it outputs straight to Silverlight.


Pretty quick ways of building silverlight apps….nice!

Check out http://smallbasic.com –only if you have some free time

From time to time I check out on what’s happening in my favourite ‘moon lighting’ area – Silverlight.

Love the Silverlight potential – I’m a big fan.

So from http://silverlight.net – I found a Z-80 EMULATOR!!! (like what’s next an Apple II)

You hit the ‘Run’ button and far too many years has passed between me and my Computer Engineering Degree of Demorgans Theorem and Fast Fourier Transforms.

Great effort! (by someone whom had SOOO much time on their hands)

http://www.expertgig.com/slsample/sl_z80emu/SL_Z80emuTestPage.html

Many times in BizTalk land we work with Schemas that are nested and have several related Schemas that are Imported from URL locations etc.

When you include these schemas and deploy to Production, you find out that the BizTalk server doesn’t access the Internet directly. Hence all the schema Imports fail.

You’ll then go and try hand edit the Imports, downloading the referenced Schema and try and Mash up something that refers to local files and no URL based Schemas. It may or may not work…till the next update…

I recently came across a handy set of free tools that take all the pain out to do with Schemas –>

Xml Help Line

Which has Xml Schema Lightener, Xml Schema Flattener

Another very handy tool not to leave home without.

Enjoy.

There I was rebuilding a new VPC Image (which I'm running in Virtual Box) and the base VHD is a parent of 16GB.

For an install of Win2008, VS.NET 2010, SQL2008... it's pretty much game over with a full disk.

I spent the last 3 days shifting files around to clear space

So tonight I bit the bullet and Ghosted the partition over to a 200GB - much better :)

This issue I had was that the boot environment was different and 'in the good old days' we'd change the BOOT.INI and bobs your uncle.

Welcome to Vista and beyond...as you know we have the BCD Store
There's a very common tool (blogged about everywhere) called BCDEDIT.EXE which if GUIDs are your think and long command line options, you can 'manually' manage the Store (there's also a bunch of 3rd party apps that say 'lets do this from the UI' - I'm in recovery mode)

For the life of me I couldn't remember the tool I used last time this happened to me, which I said 'don't forget Mick'.

BOOTREC /rebuildbcd
Too easy...then if you can't sleep you could also crack onto BCDEDIT.EXE to 'customise' some aspect. (e.g. booting up off multiple logical CORES)
Bootrec
Bootrec
Bootrec

I will not forget Bootrec

1. upon first boot my hyper-v enabled VM booted straight up to the Login screen! Unbelievable I thought.
2. logged in and it found my NIC within 10 secs and was on the network within 20 secs (through NAT). If you've ever experienced a Hyper-V update where your Guests don't talk to the network anymore, until you put the new hyper-v additions on - you'll know the pain.
3. mouse/keyboard recognised.
4. I then thought - let me install the VirtualBox additions - can't hurt.
   
5. RDP support etc etc ...it's like shopping @ christmas - how good is this! yes I'll have that...and this...
   
   
   
   
   
   So back to Guy's immortal words - "it runs fast. Snappy, responsive etc"
   
   My SP2010B2 in 1.4GB RAM x64 VM runs fanstastic! - Fastest I've seen a VM run on my laptop for a long long time (unless it's WFW 3.11)
   

Guys – something that always gets me.
*** Update – I’m actually saying this is not good for a server ***

Q. Why when you install Win2K8/R2 out of the box settings have the POWER MODE=balanced???

I’m always amazed by this – there’s 101 other questions + answers you’re asked and you give. But nowhere does the system say (oh a server system mind you)

“BTW – you know the 8 Cores you have, you’re gonna use 2 of them at any one time…”

It’s a Server O/S not a desktop (Desktop I can totally understand – saving power, greener world etc etc) – server I don’t get.
(The flip side to that coin is - “if the server actually ran at a faster capacity – I’d be finished in 30 mins instead of 4hrs” –> therefore you save 3.30mins of green lush rainforest – or some nuclear radiation from entering the world)

I find this power setting is always one of those elusive settings on Server, upon first start up you get prompted for Roles, Features, Networking even IE Security Settings….but nothing about limping along.

You have been warned – you may think “What’s Mick on about”…did I tell you about the TWO production environments I recently visited and they thought I was a miracle worker…

I wonder is SCOM 2007 R2 reports that setting back to the main console??

A while back I created a script that restarts your BizTalk Hosts - pretty simple, here http://blogs.breezetraining.com.au/mickb/2006/10/04/SimpleScriptToRestartAllBizTalkServices.aspx
(also this script didn't pick up your service if it was previously stopped - limitation of the 'sc query' command)

Whilst on my travels last week I also ran into Oleg Lofman (MCS SharePoint Consultant) whom amongst other things (showed me a great travel game - http://www.travelpod.com/traveler-iq?ba96=7587) pointed me towards a tool called WIM2VHD.

Basically this tool allows you to go straight from a WIM file to VHD!! You can even specify an Answer file also. So no need to mount the ISO, go through the bootloader and copy all the files needed, then expand etc etc as part of the setup.

So seeing that Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 has a bunch of WIMs under the \Sources folder, you can simply go there and take your pick as to how extensive you want the base OS to be : Core…or something more!

Check it out:

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/wim2vhd

As you can see below, it’s a pretty extensive and detailed tool: (you can even apply hotfixes to the VHD during this process)

--- snip from the above page ---

Usage

Usage: WIM2VHD.WSF /wim:<wimPath> /sku:<sku>
[/vhd:<vhdPath>] [/size:<vhdSizeInMb>] [/disktype:<dynamic|fixed>]
[/unattend:<unattendXmlPath>] [/qfe:<qfe1,...,qfeN>]
[/ref:<ref1,...,refN] [/dbg:<args>] [/copylocal:<localFolder>]
[/passthru:<physicalDrive>] [/signdisk:<true|false>]
[/mergefolder:<folderToMerge>]
 
Required parameters:
 
  /wim:<wimPath>
 
    The path of the WIM file to use when creating the VHD.  For example:
    X:\sources\install.wim
 
    Where X: is the drive letter of your DVD ROM drive.
 
  /sku:<skuName>|<skuIndex>
 
    The SKU within the WIM to use when creating the VHD (e.g. "ServerStandard",
    "ServerDatacenterCore", "2", etc.).  This value can either be passed as a
    SKU name (typically the easiest method) or as a SKU index (which requires
    you to have manually inspected the WIM with a tool like IMAGEX.EXE).
 
Optional parameters:
 
  /vhd:<vhdPath>
 
    The path and name of the VHD to be created.  If a file with this name
    already exists, it will be overwritten.  If no VHD is specified, a VHD will
    be created in the current folder with a name in the following format:
    <Major>.<Minor>.<Build>.<Rev>.<Arch>.<Branch>.<Timestamp>.<SKU>.<Lang>.vhd
    ex:
       6.1.7100.0.x86fre.winmain_win7rc.090421-1700.Ultimate.en-us.vhd
 
    NOTE: If the language cannot be determined from the WIM, no <Lang> block
    will be included in the VHD name.
 
  /size:<vhdSizeInMb>
 
    For Fixed disks, this is the size in MB of the VHD that will be created.
    For Dynamic disks, this is the maximum size in MB that the VHD can grow to
    as additional space is required.
    If unspecified, a default value of 40960 MB (40 GB) will be used.
 
  /disktype:<Dynamic|Fixed>
 
    Specifies what kind of VHD should be created: Dynamic or Fixed.
    A Fixed disk allocates all of the necessary disk space for the VHD upon
    creation.  A Dynamic disk only allocates the space required by files in
    the VHD at any given time, and will grow as more space is required.
    The default value is Dynamic.
 
  /unattend:<unattendXmlPath>
 
    The path to an unattend.xml file that will be used to automate the OOBE
    portion of Windows setup the first time the VHD is booted.
 
  /qfe:<qfe1,...,qfeN>
 
    A comma-separated list of QFEs to apply to the VHD after the WIM is
    applied.  QFEs must be in the .MSU file format, which is the default
    QFE format for Windows 7.  They can also be provided in a .CAB format
    if you'd prefer to extract the .CABs from the .MSU files.
 
    To extract a CAB from an .MSU, use the following command:
 
    expand -f:win*.cab <.MSU file> <location to extract to>
 
  /ref:<ref1,...,refN>
 
    A comma-separated list of WIM pieces to apply to the VHD.
    A "WIM piece" is the result of a Split WIM, and typically has a .SWM
    file extension.  The first piece of the Split WIM should be specified with
    the /WIM switch. Subsequent pieces should be specified with /REF.
      ex: WIM2VHD.WSF /WIM:C:\split.swm /REF:C:\split2.swm,c:\split3.swm
 
    See IMAGEX.EXE /SPLIT /? for more information.
 
  /dbg:<protocol>,<port/channel/target>[,<baudrate>]
 
    Configures debugging in the OS on the VHD.
    examples:
      /dbg:serial,1,115200 - configures serial debugging on COM1 at 115200bps
      /dbg:1394,10 - configures 1394 debugging on channel 10
      /dbg:usb,debugging - configures USB debugging with the target DEBUGGING
 
  /copylocal:<localFolder>
 
    Copies all of the files necessary to run WIM2VHD.WSF to localFolder,
    eliminating the need to install the Windows AIK or OPK.  This does not
    include any WIM files, just the binaries that WIM2VHD.WSF depends on.
    After this operating completes, run WIM2VHD.WSF from localFolder.
    If this switch is specified, no VHD will be created.
 
  /passthru:<physicalDrive>
 
    Applies the WIM directly to the specified drive and makes it bootable.
    NOTE: The partition on the disk must be marked as ACTIVE in order to boot
    successfully. This action is NOT performed by WIM2VHD.WSF.
 
  /signdisk:<true|false>
 
    Specifies whether or not WIM2VHD.WSF should leave a signature on the VHD
    that indicates what version of WIM2VHD.WSF created the VHD, and the date
    of creation.  The signature will be located at <VHD>:\Windows\WIM2VHD.TXT.
    The default value is "true".
 
  /mergefolder:<folderToMerge>
 
    Copies the contents of folderToMerge to the root directory of the VHD.
    This includes all subfiles and subfolders.  Any files that already exist on
    the VHD will be overwritten.

This will certainly make my life easier when it comes to building VMs!!! Thanks Oleg for the tip.

Something that I’ve come across in recent years and it concerns me more and more…long running transactions.

For example let’s take an Insurance Company implementing a Claims Process.

The way it works is:

• Design Long Running Business Processes around BizTalk Orchestrations
  Sounds great on the surface and since BizTalk 2004, the techniques for implementing this were easier.
  Basically – the BizTalk Environment will look after ensuring state is maintained, waiting Orchestrations are managed and Correlations are in place for return messages, that may return seconds, minutes, weeks or months later.
  
  So in this case we’d implement a main claims process manager which is runs for the duration the claim is active in the system.
  
  A Claim comes in, enters the System and the Claims Process Manager initiates and we’re off and running.
  
  A common technique with long running processes is to forcibly suspend biztalk messages that are in error. At a later date someone looks into the BizTalk Admin Console (or via a WMI query) and ‘deals with’ the suspended messages.
  
  The benefit of these suspended messages is that they potentially can be resumed right where they left off and these messages are stored in the MsgBoxDB awaiting attention.

The reason why I don’t think this works:

• Messages are immutable – meaning that while they’re in the MsgBoxDB they can’t be changed (technically we *can* changed these messages as a hack, but it’s *not supported*). So if the message is incorrect and in the overall process, we might fix the problem and resubmit that message – we can’t do this from within the MessageBox. We have to export the message out and provide some ‘resubmit to biztalk’ port (usually a file port).
  
• BizTalk MessageBoxDB is keeping state of the system. In process Claims are part floating around as part of our system (we could also be a bank processing Loans etc etc). If we lose the MessageBoxDB this could spell even more trouble.
  
• Also system upgrade complexity moves up that extra notch, careful planning and various considerations need to be thought out. Pending Orchestrations have to be allowed to run through to completion; hydrated messages waiting to be sent through Ports, means that those ports must stay around until these messages are dealt with… and many other.
  
• Backup – despite the recent advancements in SQL Server 2008 (mirroring) we can’t take advantage of it in the BizTalk world.
  The supported Technique is to use Log Shipping – The recommended backup interval is 15 minutes so worse case your system is out 15 minutes in the case of a crash.
  
  This is not entirely true… on busy systems the actual log shipping process may take between 15-30 mins to backup. This means that during the time while log shipping backup is running, the system is not being backed up. So all in all your system could be running for 1hr (approx.) with no covering backup.
  
  This essentially is the state of your solution.
  

What Does Work….in my opinion.

• Manage the State of your System in another area, such as SQL or SharePoint.
• Where possible keep the Orchestrations short running.
• Upgrades are simplier
• System maintenance is simplier.
• Provide a MSMQ or File Inbound Port for ‘Resubmission into BizTalk’.
• Use Content Based Routing to establish mutually exclusive processes.

Food for thought folks, from what I’ve worked on and noticed out in the field.

Mick.

Hi guys, thought I’d let you know about the rfid operations guide Microsoft recently released.

Covers things like HA, RFID Mobile and best practices… yours truly was one of the authors so I’m happy to take any feedback you’ve got.

Enjoy – here’s a snippet of what to expect.

Welcome to the first edition of the Microsoft® BizTalk® Server RFID Operations Guide. We created this guide to be a valuable resource for anyone involved in the implementation and administration of a BizTalk Server RFID solution.

To download a copy of this guide in .chm or .docx form, go to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=158724.

  Which Versions of BizTalk Server RFID Does the Guide Cover?

This guide is primarily for the BizTalk Server RFID product that is released as part of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009. Even though most of the guidance applies to BizTalk Server RFID that was released as part of BizTalk Server 2006 R2, the guide uses the new platform changes wherever applicable.

  What’s in It?

This document applies to the operational readiness phase in the solution life cycle management of the project. The operational readiness phase precedes deployment to production. It consists of a set of tasks for ensuring a stable operating environment. It is targeted toward system administrators responsible for BizTalk Server RFID (server computers and RFID devices), DBAs responsible for the SQL servers used by BizTalk Server RFID, and developers involved with maintaining the infrastructure and solution. This document assumes that the BizTalk Server RFID solution has already been validated in a Pilot stage and is prepared for deployment to production.

Key portions of this guide are new; however, a considerable portion consists of documentation taken from BizTalk Server RFID Help, white papers, Knowledge Base articles, and other sources. It has been reviewed and evaluated by experts from the community of BizTalk Server IT professionals and members of the product development team, whom we gratefully acknowledge at the end of this topic. We believe that the information presented here will help BizTalk Server RFID users solve—and above all, avoid—many of the common problems that can occur while deploying and maintaining a BizTalk Server RFID installation.

  Interesting! Where Do I Start?

We organized the guide according to the functional aspects of planning, deploying, and managing a BizTalk Server RFID installation. You can therefore read it according to these functional aspects. If you are performing the following tasks, you can start with the related sections:

• Evaluating operational readiness. If you are focused on assessing and evaluating the operational readiness of a BizTalk Server RFID deployment, then start by reading the Operations Checklists section.
• Becoming operationally ready. To ensure that your BizTalk Server RFID infrastructure and applications become operationally ready, refer to the Planning the Environment for BizTalk Server RFID section.
• Managing the operational environment. Most of the topics in this operations guide assist you in managing and maintaining an operational BizTalk Server RFID environment. You will find best practices, key concepts, and procedures for maintaining an operational environment in Managing BizTalk Server RFID and Monitoring BizTalk Server RFID.

Author: Rama Ramani (Microsoft)

Editor: Mary Browning (Microsoft)

Contributors

• Mark Simms (Microsoft)
• Rohan Makhija (Microsoft)
• Ravi Vankamamidi (S3Edge)
• Clint Tennill (Xterprise)
• Damir Dobric, Andreas Erben (daenet)
• Mick Badran (Breeze, BizTalk Server MVP)

Reviewers

• Petr Kratochvil (Microsoft)
• Ewan Fairweather (Microsoft)
• Quoc Bui (Microsoft)
• Douglas Trimble (The Boeing Company)
• Robert Auston (Vail Resorts Management Company)
• Luke Rennells (Bank of America N.A.)

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 RFID Operations Guide

This was being sent around our office today that I thought I’d just have to share with you….

My first thought was ‘photoshop’….but one of the South African born Girls here swears black and blue that this is normal.

Everything about this picture is wrong…at any point the goat could say “forget this…I don’t have the right shoes on”
(he would probably bleat it out to his mates)

Just goes to show….we’re limited only by our own minds…

Thought for “Micks Day”

Hi folks,

Much more of the BTS09 material (documentation etc) is starting to appear in the masses from MS.

Grab it Here and there are a bunch of others you’ll love to get also.

BizTalk 2009 Posters

p.s. I’ve also added all the Install Guides and all the PDF posters within the ‘CSD Bits’ Mesh Folder.

Cheers,

Mick.

My good friend Chris Vidotto a once fearsome BTS warrior came up with the good oil on this.

The BPA tool now supports bts09, sql08 and win08 in one update, as well as all the previous environments.

The tool will go through and examine your environment in accordance to a predefined set of rules (shipped with BPA) and report back accordingly.

Grab it now… from HERE

Mick.

Hi folks – from a previous post where I fudged a DLP-RFID1 x64 driver, I’ve now tracked down ‘proper’ 64 bit version of the DLP-RFID1 Reader.

Here it is here -

1. From this page http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm download the CDM 2.04.16.exe which does the trick.

2. Double click on the above EXE to install the drivers (the EXE will detect your OS is x64) – the driver is then installed on the machine, but not auto assigned to your RFID1 device.

3. From Device Manager, right click on the DLP RFID1 Reader and select ‘Update Driver’, select ‘Browse on My Machine’ and ‘Select from a List’ (near where you say ‘have disk’).

4. From the Manufacturer list select ‘FTDI’ and select the very top Driver on the RHS (USB Serial Converter)

5. Unplug and replug your RFID1 Device – and viola! all good.

6. Run this Test app RFID1Demo.exe to make sure all is good from http://dlpdesign.com/rfrdr/ 

NOTE: On my machine I still have an unknown Serial device in Device Manager, but all works none the less.

Down at BizTalk 24*7 Saravana Kumar has been working hard to organise a whole collection of BizTalk articles from us in Cyberspace

He's done a great job!

Check it out - http://blogdoc.biztalk247.com/
and yours truly is here - Mick Badran

As I’m looking into sizing up systems currently for a project, the question that you always ask “Is my CPU choice any good?” “Should I go Dual Quad Core or Quad Dual Core?”… and the questions just keep on coming, even in your sleep sometimes :-)

I recently came across a gem of a site that gave me all my answers. There’s a bunch of other CPUs and options available also. Check it out.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=%5BDual+CPU%5D+Intel+Xeon+E5420+%40+2.50GHz

You want to know the ins and outs of WCF at a glance – then the mini-book is a winner.
(Just let this puppy fall out of your back pocket in the office and watch the guys instantly want to Sync up their Complete Series of Star Trek with you…)

Seriously – great guide, easy to flick through and welcome to another 8 million lines of code you thought you could live without :)

Thanks to the efforts of Cliff Simpkins and his team for their dedication on this.

6 Chapters + Code….are you man enough?

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=netfxsamples&DownloadId=4962

I just came across a great demonstration of a fantastic new piece of kit.

Siftables they're called (shot this month) that 'interact' and play with each other on a desk, table what ever.

CubeWorld guys was something I'd had my eye on for a while.....

 

Siftables takes it far beyond the next level, check it out for yourself.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_merrill_demos_siftables_the_smart_blocks.html

Hi folks,

Just in case you want to be able to get an excel spreadsheet listing all the possible errors or so, for monitoring and managing your production BizTalk environment (great for rules and monitoring from MOM for e.g.).

I came across this - http://blog.paul.somers.com/blog/_archives/2007/4/27/2909713.html

Written by fellow BizTalk MVP - thanks Paul!

“The product cannot be installed on this machine since it seems to be a domain controller”

What a start to 2009!!! – the above dreaded message when trying to (in this case) install BizTalk RFID on a DC.
For me – this happens quite a bit, as I’m building up a proof of concept, a demo, something to show and present with.

I always…always….forget to install BizTalk RFID bits before I promote to a DC (this technique can also cause security acct issues after the machine has been promoted to a DC – depends on how the authentication is setup etc)

NOTE: BTW – Installing BizTalk RFID on a DC is NOT SUPPORTED (had to put that one in their – keeps both sides happy)

For love or money I’ve bounced this question around for a while and come up empty, until…today!!! Niklas Engfelt a senior MS support engineer came to my rescue (he famously provided those thoughts from left field which were on the money! Big thank you Niklas)

He suggested grabbing Orca from the Platform SDK and having a browse through – I’d used HEX editors, disassembled files, attached process monitors during installs and looked through any config file with a fine tooth comb…but I’d never tried a MSI Editor.

The steps to Enlightenment: (changing the installer validation conditions)

1. Grab a download of Orca from here (I didn’t have the platform SDK currently installed and wasn’t about to install 1.2 GB worth either) and follow default install prompts.
2. If you haven’t done so already copy the RFID_x86 or RFID_x64 folders off the install media to a temp folder nearby (note: sometimes on Win2K8, the system prevents copied files from being accessed until an admin comes along and says ‘these are ok’ by going into File->Properties on each file. It’s weird I know, but I get it every now and then)
3. Locate the RFIDServices.msi under the RFID folder and you’re ready to go.
4. Launch Orca and open RFIDServices.msi to get something like:
5. 
   
6. Under the Tables Column select LaunchCondition and drop the 2nd Row as follows:
   
7. 
   
8. Drop the Row and Save the MSI file again.
   
9. Run Setup.exe as per normal.

Oh what a sweet day!

p.s. I’m sure you’d be able to employ this technique onto other MSI’s causing grief.

Mick

I've been getting this question quite alot recently, "BizTalk accessing SQL in another domain...", "SharePoint accessing Webservices via NTLM auth only in another domain..." etc.

Most of the time we can find a box to stick in a User Name/Password somewhere (e.g. File Adapter in BTS) that will more than likely solve the problem.

For the cases where you can't or there's some complicated RPC session (connect to \\server\IPC$ share) that's setup first (several MMC snap-ins for e.g.), then you're given access, "It's so much easier if we're all part of the same domain..." speech you give yourself over and over again....then I may have a technique to help you.

Basically we force our Windows to always use specific credentials when communicating with the remote machine X - on a per user by user basis.

It goes something like this:

(1) login to the local server in question under the acct that is needing access (e.g. svc_acct) - this is usually the 'Web App Pool identity' or the 'BizTalk Service Account' (generally NOT your day to day account)

(2) under control panel -> Stored User Names and Passwords (on Vista this is 'User Accounts')

(3) Then add the credentials to suit.

Viola - happy NTLM-ing & Merry Christmas.......

Mick.

If you've ever had VPCs that you just want to run and use, irrespective of the actual host time add/edit this little gem to the corresponding *.VMC file

<integration>
    <microsoft>
        <mouse>
            <allow type="boolean">true</allow>
        </mouse>
        <components>
            <host_time_sync>
                <enabled type="boolean">false</enabled>
            </host_time_sync>
        </components>

         ...... - other entries here......
    </microsoft>
</integration>

On the 8th of December 2008 - Microsoft announced general availability of BizTalk 2009 Beta.

Here's the details

Public beta of BizTalk Server 2009.  Available at https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=218

1.       This beta is community supported.  The TechNet forums will be the primary place for support - http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=1470&SiteID=17

2.       General availability of BizTalk Server 2009 is still scheduled for the first-half of 2009 - we don't have a further update at this time.

• Availability of BizTalk RFID Mobile for all new customers and current customers with SA
• ESB Guidance 2.0 will also be available - http://msdn.microsoft.com/esb
  

For more information go to:

• BizTalk Website: http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/
• BizTalk Server Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalk_server_team_blog/
• RFID Website: http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/rfid.aspx
• Steven Martin, Senior Director, Developer Platform Division blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/stevemar/default.aspx
  

Key Areas

BizTalk Server 2009 Beta:

• BizTalk RFID Mobile extends RFID to the mobility industry to demonstrate strong customer support with RFID intelligence on devices running on Win CE/Win Mobile enabling businesses to make decisions in real-time.

FAQ

Q: What did Microsoft announce today?

A: Today at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration (AADI) Summit, Microsoft Corp. announced the general availability of BizTalk RFID Mobile and BizTalk RFID Standards Pack, as well as the first public beta of BizTalk Server 2009 for download and an updated version of its architecture patterns and practices guidance, Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Guidance 2.0. Microsoft has made these investments in the BizTalk Server product family to enable customers to more efficiently connect applications and to provide customers with a clearer, actionable view into their day-to-day operations.

Q. When will the products be available?

A: The BizTalk Server 2009 public beta and ESB Guidance 2.0 CTP are available now at http://www.codeplex.com/esb for community feedback. The final products are slated to ship in the first half of CY09.  Evaluation versions of BizTalk RFID Mobile and the BizTalk RFID Standards Pack are available at http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/rfid-mobile.aspx and http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/rfid.aspx respectively.

Q: What new functionally will be delivered in BizTalk Server 2009?

A:  BizTalk Server 2009 supports the latest Microsoft platform technologies, including Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, SQL Server 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. These platform updates enable greater scalability and reliability, and many advances in the latest developer tools.

This BizTalk Server release will also deliver additional customer-requested capabilities around enterprise connectivity, including:

• New web service registry capabilities with support for UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration) version 3.0
• Enhanced service enablement of applications (through new and enhanced adapters for LOB applications, databases, and legacy/host systems)
• Enhanced service enablement of "edge" devices through BizTalk RFID Mobile
• Enhanced interoperability and connectivity support for industry protocols (like SWIFT, EDI, HL7 etc)
• SOA patterns and best practices guidance to assist our customer's implementations
  

You can find more details about BizTalk Server 2009 at http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/roadmap.aspx

Q: What is next for BizTalk Server after BizTalk Server 2009?

A:  The charter of BizTalk Server remains consistent - it allows the Microsoft application platform to connect  and interoperate with other kinds of systems - LOB systems, legacy systems, smart devices (RFID), and B2B integration (SWIFT, EDI, etc.).  This has been the focus of BizTalk Server since it was initially released back in 2000 and continues to be its charter going forward.

At this point it's too early to comment on the specific features that will be part of the BizTalk Server "7" release; however, you can find details about general priorities for BizTalk Server at http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/roadmap.aspx.  We're in the middle of early planning on BizTalk Server "7" and will have more information to share about the specific scope of that release.

Q: What is BizTalk RFID Mobile?

A: BizTalk RFID Mobile is an RFID platform for Windows Mobile and CE. BizTalk RFID Mobile consists of a runtime engine, tools, and components to develop, deploy, and manage RFID solutions on mobile devices.  In combination with BizTalk Server RFID, the mobility release provides a platform for real-time decision making.  BizTalk RFID Mobile extends management and event processing to mobile devices and allows communication between the server and mobile platforms.

Q. What is the price and licensing for BizTalk RFID Mobile?

A: BizTalk RFID Mobile is available to all BizTalk Server 2006 R2 customers with Software Assurance as well as new BizTalk Server 2006 R2 customers who purchase licenses with Software Assurance. Our customers and partners told us that mobile RFID offerings are used in conjunction with a server product.  As a result, we included BizTalk RFID Mobile with each edition of BizTalk so that our customers can achieve the benefits of RFID mobile solutions without incurring undue costs. For BizTalk Server customers with Software Assurance this is a great opportunity to adopt a new product that can deliver an economic value today. When BizTalk Server 2009 becomes generally available, the customers will be able to acquire BizTalk RFID Mobile without software assurance.

Q: Is BizTalk RFID Mobile dependant on BizTalk Server? Can't I just use a free solution that's available rather than use BizTalk Server?

A:  BizTalk RFID Mobile and BizTalk Server are better together.  Using BizTalk RFID Mobile and BizTalk Server in tandem you can capture data on a mobile device and then send the RFID data back to BizTalk Server for filtering and the application of business rules.  There is no need to rewrite complex event filtering and business rule logic on the device as that functionality is already provided by BizTalk Server.  We have taken a platform approach that will ensure that you can write your mobile applications once and run them on multiple devices in addition to local device management, store and forward, and SQL Sink capabilities, which reduce your TCO.

BizTalk RFID Mobile and BizTalk RFID Standards Pack are a standard part of all editions of BizTalk Server 2009.  Given the intense interest in these offerings from our existing and new customers we decided to make them available now to BizTalk Server 2006 R2 customers with software assurance as well as new BizTalk Server 2006 R2 customers who purchase licenses with Software Assurance.

Rather than charge a per device fee, we included BizTalk RFID Mobile with all editions of BizTalk because we wanted to make it easier for customers to adopt mobile RFID solutions.  RFID is a fundamental enabler for business processes and should not be viewed as an isolated silo, which is why we have included our fixed and mobile RFID offerings standard in all editions of BizTalk.

Q: What is ESB Guidance?

A: The Microsoft ESB Guidance (first released in November 2007) provides architectural guidance, patterns, practices, and a set of BizTalk Server R2 and .NET components to simplify the development of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) on the Microsoft platform and to allow Microsoft customers to extend their own messaging and integration solutions.  For additional information on the current 1.0 version please see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc487894.aspx.

We are announcing today the first public CTP release of the Microsoft ESB Guidance 2.0 for Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009. It incorporates many new and expanded features include the following:

• New samples:
• SSO Configuration provider for Enterprise Library 4.0
• Multiple Web Service Execution Sample
• Exception Handling Service Sample
  
• New ESB Web services:
• Generic Itinerary Services ( no itinerary header required)
• New core features:
• Alignment with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 ( Beta )
• ESB Configuration tool
• Centralized itinerary store
• Itinerary resolver components
• Itinerary forwarder pipeline component
• Itinerary selector pipeline component
• Itinerary designer
• Centralized configuration uses Enterprise Library 4.0 Configuration Block
• Centralized caching uses Enterprise Library 4.0 Caching Block
• Multiple service invocation using both messaging and orchestrations
• Itinerary BAM tracking
• Improved ESB Core engine and itinerary execution