Scripting Perfmon We have a test team in India that I would like to run some load and performance testing. They have access to the required test server and load tools but limited experience using tools such as perfmon. I have previously only used Perfmon to take a real-time view of performance counters, or used the ui to configure logging to a data file for later evaluation. In this particular case I didn't have access to the test server to enable me to manually configure the logging, and I know ......

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I encountered a problem a few days ago with files not being picked from a receive location. The configuration was very simple, a two node group with a file receive location pointing at a share on a windows 2003 server in a different domain. The volume of files being dropped for collection by BizTalk wasn't high - about ten per minute. The behaviour was; files collected very slowly - say one file every five minutes. If I re-started the host instance then all the remaining files would be collected ......

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I'm currently preparing to deliver Microsoft Course 2934A - Deploying and Managing Business Process and Integration Solutions Using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006. So far, I've been impressed with the content, it's well structured and I think the topic selection has been good. One benefit of delivering a course is that you're bound to run through every lab before-hand, there's nothing worse that the trainer getting stuck on a lab! This is turn encourages reading on a topic that you may otherwise skip, ......

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I know it's never a good idea to try and "rush" a build but I did just that the other day and fell victim to unexpected behaviour on the part of the BizTalk admin console. A critical defect had been found in a BizTalk map and a new release had to be deployed ASAP. Ordinarily all of our BizTalk builds are run through a script - nothing fancy (yet!), just using batch files and BTSTask. However, because I only needed to deploy one of the BizTalk apps in a single MSI I chose to right-click and select ......

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I have a simple batch file that executes BTSTask ImportBindings on a previously exported binding file. There don't seem to be any errors thrown. The send / receive ports and orchestrations are created ok. The problem is that the orchestrations are not bound and the hosts are not set. When importing the same binding file through BizTalk Admin Console it goes in no problem. My colleague (thanks Brad) found the answer to this - it relates to the <Filter> node in the binding file. I think the problem ......

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Had a strange problem this morning. I'd installed a BizTalk hotfix for the BizTalk Map TFS issue. All seemed to be ok until I tried opening an orchestration - VS displayed the plain text rather than the orchestration designer. When I right-clicked the odx file and selected 'open with', there was no option to select 'BizTalk Orchestration Designer'. To fix the problem I ran a repair from the BizTalk installation DVD. www.biztalkers.co.uk ......

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I've inherited a BizTalk 2006 applicaton that uses serveral SOAP ports to request data from a 3rd party web service. The web service is secured by "basic" authentication - username / password. After making a few enhancements to the application I deployed to an integration test server which has access to the 3rd party web service. The BizTalk app was unable to retrieve the data and I soon realised that I had forgotten to set the username / password on the SOAP send ports. I wanted the make deployment ......

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I started testing a BizTalk application today which calls a 3rd party service, passing a couple of datetime parameters, to retrieve a dataset which is then persisted to a SQL Server database. This application had been running well in production for a while but enhancements were required to make use of web methods recently made available by the 3rd party. After making the changes I tested the BTS application on my dev box, calling a stubbed web service installed locally. I then deployed the BizTalk ......

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I started developing a new BizTalk application today which must call an existing web service. Unfortunately I didn't have access to the web service from my test environment so I had to create a test stub. The web service method I needed accepted a string and returned an object containing an int and a bool. My first step was to examine the wsdl of the existing web service to get a good idea of the type my stub should be returning. Because the input / output parameters were simple it was only ten minutes ......

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I have a biztalk map which uses a custom XSLT file rather than the graphical mapper. This map makes use of methods held in a custom dll, accessing via a custom extension XML file. I created this map a while ago, came back to it today (on a new vm) and found that I was unable to run a successful test - right click the btm in solution explorer and hit 'test map'. On trying this I was presented with a lengthy error message - the important bit being: Value cannot be null. Parameter name: extension My ......

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