Vishal Mody

BizTalk Interview Questions for a senior level positions. Basically for a position in which one is involved in Designing and later develop the Solution himself.

1.         What is Biztalk Server? Since when are you working on BizTalk?

2.         What versions of Biztalk Server have you worked on?

3.         What is the difference between 2004, 2006 and 2006R2?

4.         Did you get chance to work on BizTalk 2009 version? If yes what difference you saw in it from R2 and what enhancements Microsoft has made in it?

5.         Tell me about BizTalk Server architecture?

6.         Tell me about any engagement which you rate top most while working as BizTalk developer and why?

7.         Most Imp: Tell about a project which was most challenging to you and how you overcame it?

8.         What do you hate about BizTalk Solution development and which you would like to improve in upcoming versions?

9.         How you do testing with your BizTalk Solutions and what tools or methods you use?

10.       How do you debug any errors occurring in BizTalk Solution?

11.       How do you debug an assembly used in Orchestration?

12.       Which way you find most efficient debugging Biztalk Solutions and why?

13.       Were you involved in designing BizTalk Solutions? If yes than what kinds of architecture you have designed?

14.       What design patterns you follow for designing solutions with BizTalk in it?

15.       What do you know about Itinerary based routing architecture?

16.       Did you ever got chance to work on ESB's? If yes, tell me more about it?

17.       Tell about BizTalk Solution development lifecycle?

18.       What kinds of Integrations you have done with BizTalk Server?

19.       What challenges you faced while designing and developing a Biztalk solution which involved multiple non MS platform technologies? How did you overcome them?

20.       What different kinds of Adapters you have worked on?

21.       Have you worked on SAP Adapters? Why did you opt using SAP adpaters instead of communicating with Web Services?

22.       Have you worked on Salesforce.com integration in any of your engagements? If than tell me more about it.

23.       What challenges you faced while working with Salesforce.com?

24.       Have you worked on EDI documents? What kind of EDI documents have you worked on?

25.       What different types of industries you have worked on? Which one you found most challenging and why?

26.       Were you involved in developing Custom components for BizTalk Solutions? If yes than what were those?

27.       Have you developed and used any Custom Pipeline Components? If yes than how did you develop them and later used in BizTalk Solution? Challenges you faced using custom pipeline components?

28.       What kind of environments you have worked on?

29.       Have you worked on environments containing multiple BizTalk box installed? If yes than what different kinds of configurations were there?

30.       Were you involved in administrating Biztalk solutions?

31.       Tell me how you deploy your BizTalk solutions? Do you use any tools or API's for deployment?

32.       How do you deploy your solution on multiple BizTalk boxes easily and efficiently? What issues have you faced doing that?

33.       Have you worked with Business Rules Engine? Tell me about the BRE architecture?

34.       How does a rule gets actually fired or processed in an orchestration?

35.       Have you worked with Business Rules apart from using them in Orchestrations?

36.       What are the different ways you can call a Business Rule in Orchestration? Which way you find most efficient and why?

37.       Have you worked with BAM? What is BAM and why did you use in your particular project?

38.       How did you develop a Biztalk solution with BAM in it?

39.       What deployment steps you apply to deploy BAM?

40.       Which are different BAM Databases? Have you manually deleted any BAM data? If yes than how?

41.       What is the easiest way to develop a schema from an given XML message?

42.       Have you worked on a architecture having WCF Services? If yes than tell me more about that architecture?

43.       How would you rate using Web Services over WCF Services in BizTalk solution? Why?

44.       Have you ever exposed you BizTalk Solution as a Service? How?

45.       Have you ever felt that using BizTalk at a place wasn’t a good option?

46.       What types of different capabilities of BizTalk Server you have worked on?

47.       What do you know about transactions in BizTalk Solutions? What is Atomic/Long Running transaction? When do you use them and when not?

48.       How do you handle your exceptions occurring in BizTalk Solutions? Do you follow any particular standard to handle exceptions?

49.       What are the most important things to keep in mind while designing BizTalk Solution Architecture?

50.       What size of architectures you have worked on and how many multiple Enterprise Systems were involved in it? How much time it took for you to design and develop it? What was the team structure for that engagement?

More of them are here.

Hi All,

Recently in my last client engagement I was involved in an Integration project which had Salesforce.com as one of the Enterprise System.

The company was using SFDC as their CRM system. Our team consisted of 3 members. One Salesforce.com guy, me as BizTalk/.Net guy and a core .Net/SQL guy. Our requirement was embed data flow in both direction i.e. from Salesforce.com and company db say “xxx” and from xxx to Salesforce.com. This was to be done in both real-time and scheduled or batch basis.

Initially we did lot of research about SFDC adapter available in market but we just found on company called Two Connect which had developed those adapters. We even spoke with many of the Salesforce.com guys working since years and if they have anytime involved in such a integration project.

Anyways, TwoConnect has pretty decent adapters but few factors due to which we did not use them.

One of them was their cost and was not fitting company budget.

Secondly, when I was in that project MS had released BizTalk 2009 version and the company had BizTalk 2006R2 version and that company may anytime upgrade to 09 version. Then what about the adapter compability with the newer server. May be there would be a patch out and they would tell us to install and all. I was the only BizTalk guy there and me being the contractor, the company did not want to go in such hassle so we did not opt using the TwoConnect  SFDC Adapter.

If I go in more details about the TwoConnect SFDC Adapter than it was very straight forward (“looking at their documentation and videos”), similar like you use a SQL Adapter, i.e. Add generated Items and wizard pops up and few configuration parameters, like which methods of the SFDC Apex API you need to call and stuff similar.

Now coming back to the architecture we opted: For the first scenario i.e. data coming from Salesforce.com to xxx (company db), we had a WCF Svc sitting in between xxx and BizTalk. So I consumed the WCF Svc and I had my receive and send ports exposed as Web Svc, which later on the Salesforce.com API consumes. There is huge internet cloud sitting in between  and lot of firewalls and IP configuration issues we came up. But eventually resolved.

HLD architecture : Salesforce.com - Apex API - BizTalk - WCF Svc - xxx

(Here Biztalk exposed as WS and Apex API consumes it, initially we had exposed it as a WCF Svc and later on found out that somehow the APEX Api does not like WCF so had to step down on Web Service.)

Next is for the data going from xxx to SFDC, this was a challenge as in order to communicate with SFDC Apex API lot of stuff had to be done dynamically. Also we had time and budget constraints. Simplest BizTalk design is having a master orchestration which talks with the API and later on calling other child orchestrations according to function performed i.e. either update, insert, delete, create etc. Here for the first time BizTalk talks with apex API and it responds back with a URL and BizTalk has to dynamically next time send actually data to this URL so some dynamic bindings we did. And for getting the data from xxx, there was a WCF Svc sitting there BizTalk talks with that svc which is pretty much straight forward.

HLD architecture: xxx – WCF Svc – BizTalk – Apex API – Salesforce.com

(Here BizTalk exposed as WCF Svc and the other WCF Svc talks with endpoint)

One the most quickest option to complete this integration is having 2 WCF svc’s or WS sitting around BizTalk and BizTalk acting just as a pipeline in between. Here we did not do any transformation nor applied any business rules or any other process on the data. Just a pure messaging solution.

So the architecture will be like: XXX – WCF Svc – BizTalk Server – WCF Svc – Apex API – Salesforce.com .

It was a challenge for the data going from xxx to SFDC but was fun though. That was my experience working with Salesforce.com

If you anyone has done integration with SFDC than I would love to hear their experiences.

Thanks,

Vishal Mody

Hello All,

I found the Pro BizTalk 2006 book really good and now since Microsoft have released the BizTalk 2009 version I was thinking that new books should come pretty soon.

And here it is. The Pro BizTalk 2009 will be soon in the market. Its by authors George Dunphy, Harold Campos, Stephen Kaufman, Peter Kelcey, Sergie Moukhnitishi, Davi Peterson.

Also the Book Pro Mapping in BizTalk 2009 looks good at first glance. I am reading that and I ll post hows that. The Pro Mapping is from Jim Dawson and John Wainwright.

Some how I like all the Pro's by APress. Even the Wrox ones are good. I have a account in http://skillport.books24x7.com which is online books database and almost all the new released BizTalk books are there. Once I am done with the Pro Mapping one I will be reading the Pro BAM in BizTalk Server 2009 by Jeff Sanders and Geoff Snowman.

Till than Happy BizTalking....!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks,

Vishal