Wednesday, November 03, 2010
This may well be already known but it took us a little while to figure out.
When using the BizTalk FTP adapter to write files to a Unix FTP server you may have to ensure the recipient of those files has the right to read/delete them.
When you ftp files, the master ftp configuration file determines the permissions that those files will have. You can set the permissions yourself by using a version of the umask command in the Before Put property of your FTP send port.
e.g. site umask 000
This will give everyone permission to do anything with the files. Other numerical values will have different effects (see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umask).
Equally of course, anyone writing files for you to pick up will likely have to do the same.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Udi Dahan presented at the UK Connected Systems User Group last night. He discussed High Availability and pointed out that people often think this is purely an infrastructure challenge. However, the implications of system crashes, errors and resulting data loss need to be considered and managed by software developers. In addition a system should remain both highly reliable (backwardly compatible) and available during deployments and upgrades. The argument is that you cannot be considered highly available if your system is always down every time you upgrade.
For our recent BizTalk 2009 upgrade we made use of our Business Continuity servers (note the name, rather than calling them Disaster Recovery servers ) to ensure our clients could continue to operate while we upgraded the Production BizTalk servers. Then we failed back to the newly built 2009 environment and rebuilt the BC servers. Of course, in the event of an actual disaster there was a window where either one or the other set were not available to take over – however, our Staging machines were already primed to switch to production settings, having been used for testing the upgrade in the first place.
While not perfect (the failover between environments was not automatic and without some minimal outage) planning the upgrade in this way meant BizTalk was online during the rebuild and upgrade project, we didn’t have to rush things to get back on-line and planning meant we were ready to be as available as we could be in the event of an actual disaster.
Monday, January 25, 2010
We’ve been upgrading our BTS 2006 R2 projects to Visual Studio 2008 while using Visual SourceSafe 2005. We all started to get this annoying error pop-up when checking files in and out.
Unexpected error encountered. It is recommended that you restart the application as soon as possible.
Error: Not implemented
File: vsee\pkgs\vssprovider\csolutionnodebase.cpp
Line number: 2111
There is a workaround available thanks to Stephen Burdeau
In the VSS "Check Out for Edit" or "Check In" dialog, change from the default "Tree View" to "Flat View". To do this, click the corresponding toolbar button on the dialog.
Monday, January 04, 2010
Before Christmas I was looking at ways to send different email alerts from a single rule in SCOM (rather than creating different alert rules for each type of informational message I wanted sent out). I explored Custom Alert Fields - using Custom Alert Field 1 to hold some general text about the error and some support instructions.
I then configured two subscriptions to the same alerts - one using the alert information and full detail I specified in the alert description (for 3rd line support/developers) and the other using Custom Alert Field 1 for the general support team.
However, I seem to have found a limitation. While the GUI allows you to input more than 256 characters into a Custom Alert Field, when you use the field in an email, the text is truncated to the first 256 characters. Until I can find any other answers to this, I've amended my text to less than this limit.
I could of course use other custom fields if I really needed to go beyond the display limit although I assume each one will cut off at 256 when used.
Friday, December 11, 2009
MOSS doesn't offer this out the box and of course many people would like to have it. Here's a quick and dirty javascript change which will offer this functionality. You'll have to forgive any inelegance in my coding, I'm a bit rusty ;)
You need to edit the search.js file and add the following:
A trim function
function trim(s)
{
var l=0; var r=s.length -1;
while(l < s.length && s.substr(l,1) == ' ')
{ l++; }
while(r > l && s.substr(r,1) == ' ')
{ r-=1; }
return s.substring(l, r+1);
}
and then insert the following into the GoSearch function
return false;
}
else return;
}
// start of added block
var searchWords = trim(k);
var testURL = '';
// the target url we need to test comes from different places depending on the source page
try
{
testURL = document.forms[0].elements[DDId].value;
}
catch(e)
{
testURL = Url;
}
var searchURL = testURL;
// only make changes if this is a people search
if(searchURL.indexOf('peopleresults.aspx') != -1)
{
// if there is a value and it doesn't contain : (which is the case if named properties are already being searched)
if((searchWords.indexOf(':') == -1) && searchWords != '')
{
// lastname only
if(searchWords.indexOf('*') == 0)
{
k = 'lastname:' + trim(searchWords.replace(/\*/g, ''));
}
// do we have more than one value (there is a space break)?
// if so, use the first value for the first name and the rest for the last name
else
{
searchWords = searchWords.replace(/\*/g, '');
var wordBreak = searchWords.indexOf(' ');
if(wordBreak != -1)
{
k = 'firstname:' + searchWords.substr(0, wordBreak) + " lastname:" + trim(searchWords.substr(wordBreak+1));
}
else
{
k = 'firstname:' + searchWords;
}
}
}
}
// end of added block
var sch = '?k=' + encodeURIComponent(k);
if(null != HdQId){
This should allow the following functionality:
1) To search on a first name, simply type the name or the start of it and run the search.
e.g. matt or ma
2) To search for a last name, put a * in front of your search text
e.g. *gilbert or *gil
3) To search full name enter both first and last names (again these can be partial names)
e.g. matt gilbert, or matt g or even m g
This all assumes you have not made any other changes to search or pages which will stop this working. It should work for out-the-box MOSS. You'll have to watch that any updates don't touch the search.js file of course as you might lose the changes.
We've implemented this and added those search tips (1-3 above) onto the peoplesearch page and our customer people directory page.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
A couple of posts back, I described an issue we had with emails not being downloaded by the BizTalk POP3 adapter. I'm happy to say that after working with Microsoft, a hotfix has been created for this which I tested yesterday. It'll take a few weeks for the KB article to be written up but I'll post details as soon as I have them. This fixes the "The POP3 adapter received a response line from a server that contains more than 512 characters" issue.
EDIT... some good news. It looks like the fix will find its way into BTS 2006 R2 SP1. The KB number will be 975826
EDIT 2: Here's the kb link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975826/en-us
Monday, July 06, 2009
System Center Operations Manager R2 is now available: http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/operationsmanager/en/us/whats-new.aspx
While there a whole load on new features, we are really only just starting out on our SCOM journey here and the biggest plus point for me and my current custom Management Pack (for the BizTalk environment) is the ability to subscribe to specific alerts. This will hopefully make it so much easier for me to target particular events to user and support groups and also change the detail of the notifications they receive; something which has caused me pain to date.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
We have a ticketing application deployed to BizTalk which helps automate the workflow around customer updates and the sending of emails. One of the functions the application performs is to handle returned emails (out of office and non-delivery) and update the ticket with that information. However, the implementation has caused us some issues.
Right now, emails sent from the application are sent from the support mail account. In order to get any returned emails, all emails arriving in the support mailbox are copied to a second mailbox which BizTalk polls. Rules called from within an orchestration built to process these returned mails determine if an email is an Out of Office message or a NDR and if so, updates the originating ticket. If the email is neither of these, the message is discarded.
This has historically caused many issues. All spam and non-ticket related email hitting the support mailbox is copied and processed by BizTalk. On top of that, many messages cause decoding errors (S/MIME or MIME type problems for example) and the POP adapter itself can even bomb due to an error receiving badly formatted messages (causing a bottleneck until the offending email is cleared out the mailbox). Others have had this error too ("The POP3 adapter received a response line from a server that contains more than 512 characters" http://www.biztalkgurus.com/forums/t/5992.aspx). Running some stats on the emails BizTalk was having to process, we figured that less than 1% of the messages we were getting were the OOO or NDR ones we were interested in.
I have proposed we move where the rules are executed and put them into the support mailbox itself. Instead of having a blanket copy-all rule to the secondary mailbox, we should only copy over OOO and NDR messages. The rules will execute in an environment designed and optimized for handling and routing emails (Exchange) and processing and errors will be dramatically reduced on the BizTalk server. Being able to change rules without recompiling code is great but being able to move where they are executed is nice too.
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
Thanks to Solidsoft for running a great day at Microsoft last week. Topics covered were BizTalk, SharePoint and using them to build successful SOA and BPM solutions.
Being responsible for BizTalk and also having had SharePoint land on my plate recently, the day gave me some good ideas about where to take these platforms.
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
Here is a really useful consolidation of blog posts: http://blogdoc.biztalk247.com/
It might save searching around for some answers :)