BizTorque.net

New BizTalk Server Roadmap released!

Mark Burch — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 00:12:51 GMT

http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/roadmap.aspx

One noteworthy change: BizTalk Server 2006 R3 renamed to BizTalk Server 2009.

Tech Ed Session - Slide Deck

Mark Burch — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 05:16:24 GMT

Thanks to everyone who came to my Tech Ed session. It was nice to see some old and new people.

As promised I've uploaded my slide deck for your reference. There are a few good links in there.

Also remember to do your evals because its important to me (and my manager :-) )

Heres the link on skydrive. (let me know if you have any issues accessing it)

http://cid-bf8cac8e45bd5d95.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/biztorque/Getting%20your%20BizTalk%20Infrastructure%20right%20-%202.pptx

Come and see my Sydney Tech.Ed 2008 session on BizTalk

Mark Burch — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 06:12:59 GMT

For any of my readers attending Tech.Ed at the moment make sure you catch my session.

The session is called "Getting Your BizTalk Infrastructure Right" and I'm going to run though all the important bits and pieces you need to know to make your BizTalk servers run smoothly.

Friday 11:45 in room G07.

See you there!

The BizTalk R2 SCOM MP is available

Mark Burch — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 06:34:20 GMT

This isn't exactly new news, as it shipped four months ago, but even when I knew it was there it wasn't exactly easily discoverable on the interwebs.

Here is the download link.

Microsoft Biztalk Server 2006 Management Pack for SC Operations Manager 2007

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=389fcb89-f4cf-46d7-bc6e-57830d234f91&DisplayLang=en

This blog post will hopefully help it get into the big index in the sky.

BizTalk Ranger has a new blog

Mark Burch — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 04:11:14 GMT

Paolo Salvatori, BizTalk Ranger from Europe has just launched a new blog. He does a lot of ground breaking work so it will be a good blog to keep an eye on if you're interested in advanced techniques for BizTalk designs and development.

http://blogs.msdn.com/paolos/

ASP.Net DefaultButton fires wrong button when tab is used to focus a button

Mark Burch — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 05:16:37 GMT

My loyal BizTalk readers :) may be surprised to know I'm pretty handy with writing code as well. As such I've been working on a ASP.Net site recently and had to deal with this weird situation.

If you have a webpage with two buttons 'Ok' and 'Cancel' say, and you set default button like this:

Page.Form.DefaultButton = btnOk.UniqueID;

Now lets say you're doing the right thing in regards to accessibility and paying attention to how your page behaves without the mouse and you tab to the Cancel button and hit the enter key, what do you expect to happen?

You would expect the Cancel button event to fire right? Well actually it doesn't. Even though the Cancel button has the focus, it is the DefaultButton event that fires and therefore it is the Ok button that executes. The exact wrong thing you would want to happen.

DefaultButton is implemented using a javascript method called "WebForm_FireDefaultButton". To fix the issue I've just described the solution was to add a javascript file to the page (in my case it was the Master page) that overloads that method. In a nutshell this overloaded method checks to see if the the focus is on a button and if it was the enter key which was pressed. If those two things are true, the FireDefaultButton is ignored. This is the script that we used:

// In the case where a defaultbutton is programmatically set button A the user tabs the focus to button B and hits the enter key, button A will fire. This is the workaround.

if (typeof(WebForm_FireDefaultButton) != 'undefined' )

var origFireDefaultButton = WebForm_FireDefaultButton;

WebForm_FireDefaultButton = function(event, target) {

if (event.keyCode == 13) {

var src = event.srcElement || event.target;

// Don't call original function if focus is on a button

if (src &&

(src.tagName.toLowerCase() == "input") &&

(src.type.toLowerCase() == "submit" || src.type.toLowerCase() == "button")) {

return true;

}

return origFireDefaultButton(event, target);

}

As you can see, fortunately, the script is very lightweight and won't therefore cause much of a performance drag.

How to: After disassembling a message, how to know when to exit a processing loop when all messages have been received

Mark Burch — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 07:27:10 GMT

This question and response came up on a forum. I've never seen this referenced before so I thought it was worth blogging.

Problem:

BizTalk is receiving a flat file (can contain up to a million records) and doing a disassemble in a pipeline using a flat file schema. The individual messages are processed by a sequential convoy (Singleton) based on a correlation. The orchestration receives the message in a loop that follows the correlation set from the receive port where receive location split the flat file into smaller messages.

To specify a proper exit criteria to exit the loop and stop the convoy I need to know the number of messages in the flat file. But since I am using the default flat file disassembler, I have no clue how many messages are in the file.

Solution:

There’s a property promoted in the last of the disassembled messages in an interchange: BTS.LastInterchangeMessage = true. This tells you the last message in the interchange and in conjunction with BTS.InterchangeSequenceNumber you can tell the total number of messages in the interchange (in case you get them out of order).

BizTalk Server Operations Guide live!

Mark Burch — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 02:29:36 GMT

One of the areas that has historically been weak in the BizTalk world has been the operations piece. Well not any more. The BizTalk product group has, at the urging from people such as yours truly, put together a very comprehensive operations guide. BizTalk administrators now have a guide which contains pretty much everything they could need in one document. Its good stuff!!

The BizTalk Server Operations guide is now available for download in DOCX, CHM, and PDF file formats at the following locations:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/a/d/aad035e6-e03b-4bea-ad9a-fa1ff8d10ca0/BTS06R2_OpReadiness.docx
http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/a/d/aad035e6-e03b-4bea-ad9a-fa1ff8d10ca0/BTS06R2_OpReadiness.exe
http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/a/d/aad035e6-e03b-4bea-ad9a-fa1ff8d10ca0/BTS06R2_OpReadiness.pdf

The Lego Legacy

Mark Burch — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 08:39:52 GMT

If you're a nerd/geek like me, you will have noticed that the lego brick just had its 50th birthday. I think we should all take a moment now to commemorate such a profoundly important invention.

Let me explain. If you do a snap poll of all the people you know who build software, you will discover a very high correlation between the hours spent playing with lego as a child and their abilities with software. Why is this? Because lego requires you to assemble and disassemble larger objects from smaller objects. It requires you to be able to envision in your minds eye what could be created, and then also think about how to implement it. It teaches you to think about each individual component while simultaneously thinking about the whole. It also requires an ability to hold complicated geo-spatial models in your head and then perform creative variations and run 'what if' scenarios on those models. The same parts of the brain that use you to do this with lego, are the parts we use when building software. These are all foundational mental skills required to be a good software developer.

So imagine if all the software people in world didn't grow up playing with lego?? Where would the software industry be now? Some less extreme variation on the scenario in the movie Idiocracy perhaps?

Lego is just one of those little things that we take for granted - like s-bends in plumbing. (Have you ever stopped to wonder just exactly how significantly the s-bend improves the quality of your life? You should)

So lets all take a sentimental moment to think about the impact the humble lego brick has had on our lives. (Or if you somehow missed on growing up playing with lego, you could commemorate the s-bend.)

BizTalk Administration: State of the Union

Mark Burch — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 14:45:29 GMT

Its a funny old thing writing a blog. You never quite know which posts people will care about and which they wont. Well except maybe the blog posts you write to get some miscellaneous topic off your chest -- those ones you know people won't care for. Where was I? Ah yes, so I was doing some blog maintenance and I got to looking at my stats, as feeble as they are, and it seems that this post on what makes a good BizTalk administrator is by far and away the most popular post. It also bounces between rank 3-6 on "The Google" for the term "BizTalk Administrator". Interesting eh? Seems like it had the desired effect. Company's have cottoned onto the idea that a BizTalk Administrator is a necessity analogous to a DBA.

A quick look around the intertubes shows quite a few mentions of the word "BizTalk adminstrator" and I see quite a few jobs ads for it. You could say my job here is done. So all those newly minted BizTalk Administrators out there owe me a debt of gratitude. I take paypal.

That wasn't really a state of the union address was it? That was a little trick I played on you. See I like to use subjects that make you think its going to be interesting and then waste your time by rambling on and on about increasing boring stuff. Say, did you hear the one about the man and a dog who go into a bar? Or maybe it was church. So a man and a dog go into a church and the bartender says to the man, "he can't come in here", then the dog says to the priest behind the bar, "why not"? Then the nun says ...wait I forgot the punchline. You really should have stopped reading already.