Michael Stephenson

Summarizing event log data from BizTalk 360

Michael Stephenson — Wed, 22 May 2013 01:20:30 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/05/21/152976.aspx

If you are using BizTalk 360 and want to get an overview of some of the events which have been occurring in your event log, the below is quite a handy little query which will summarize the different type of events so you can easily see the most common ones.

SELECT

EventId, Source, COUNT(1) AS [No Instances], Computer, Message

FROM

dbo.b360_ev_EventLogData

GROUP BY

EventId, Source, CONVERT(varchar(8), Timestamp, 112), Message, Computer

HAVING

(CONVERT(varchar(8), Timestamp, 112) = CONVERT(varchar(8), GETDATE(), 112))

ORDER BY [No Instances] DESC

You can add this to the custom sql query tool so its easily accessible to your team.

Another cause of Internal Error 2761 - BizTalk 2013

Michael Stephenson — Mon, 20 May 2013 21:45:49 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/05/20/152964.aspx

I had another occasion where I was getting the internal error 2761 error when trying to install BizTalk 2013.

This time it was not related to the "Run as Administrator" trap I fell into a couple of weeks ago. This time the cause was that I had not activated MS Office 2013. So before installing BizTalk 2013 remember to open and activate your install of Office 2013

Which kind of API service provider are you?

Michael Stephenson — Sun, 12 May 2013 20:50:13 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/05/12/152924.aspx

Ive been pondering this one for a while and been meaning to put something out there about it.

During some of the architecture discussions I've had with colleagues some of the examples that are often put out there in terms of a public API are google and twitter. They are often described as things like "internet scale", "open standards based", "easy to use" and a whole bunch of other good things.

One of the things which I always feel that is a little bit ignored is that these companies are very different in terms of their market forces to some of the companies I have worked with in the past. If you are twitter for example its very easy to say this is my API and you will consume it using my rules. If twitter want to change their API or retire an older version of it then the client either upgrades or stops working.

If you are a service provider like one of these guys then you have all of the power and its really easy to produce an API and make everyone do it the way that suits you. I would describe this as a "provider driven API".

A lot of the companies I have worked with are different. They work with partners and customers who have a lot of power and the balance of power in their interactions and relationship is either finely balanced or in favour of the service consumer. In these cases we often end up with different scenarios where you may have an API, but you also end up having to build adapters or gateways to your API so that different consumers can work with it. To give an example of this we planned to produced an API but we found that one of our biggest consumers would account for 70% of its usage and they could only support a SOAP web service API with basic security where as another consumer of it would be REST based. In this scenario you may produce your "preferred API" and then produce adapters to convert different consumers to this API. The power balance means that you cant necessarily influence the consumer to change the way they would talk to your API because they would use a competitor who would make it easy and cheaper for them. Thats just the nature of business. In these cases I find that its important to try to use good integration practices and to keep the adapters as simple as possible and to reuse the core services in your preferred API. This will keep your total cost of ownership lower. I also often suggest to the business that they look for ways to incentivise partners to use our preferred API as this brings our costs down so we should look to share that saving for the longer term benefits it would bring. We know this isnt always possible though. In this case I would describe your API strategy as being a "consumer driven API".

I think its important to recognise that there are differences between these approaches, and that while google, facebook, twitter or Windows Azures's API might be excellent and very easy to use, they may be in a different business paradigm to your company and while there are definitely good techniques and practices to aim for they may not be the best comparison to your own situation.

This subject is not something I have really researched too much online to see if there is much in the way of discussion on this subject but im bored sitting waiting for a flight in miami airport and thought id get this one off my chest!

Id love to hear what other people think, is this a valid problem space that lots of us face, and what kind of challenges do you have in your domain. Also do you think the terms "Consumer driven API" and "Provider driven API" are right. Ive come across the "Client driven contracts" pattern but I feel that this is only part of the challenge.

From my own experiences the one good practice I would recommend in the "consumer driven API" space is that you should try to avoid developing whole new API's for all of the different consumers. Create your main API and then develop gateways to it. The gateways should be as simple as possible and do little more than mapping and composing the data from the main API into these newer formats and dealing with the differences in things like security. Dont go replicating all of the logic if possible.

BizTalk 2013 Map Unit Testing Gotcha

Michael Stephenson — Mon, 06 May 2013 03:59:54 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/05/05/152868.aspx

Ive been trying to get the sample for the BizTalk Map unit testing scenario working. I kept getting the following error:

"Transformation Failure"

This was happening everytime I executed the test even though you could test the map fine in the Visual Studio IDE.

While troubleshooting this I also tried using code which would execute the map in C# outside of the BizTalk Unit Testing feature based on Tommaso's article. When I did this I was getting the following errors:

The type initializer for 'Microsoft.BizTalk.ScalableTransformation.BTSXslTransform' threw an exception.
The type initializer for 'Microsoft.BizTalk.CommonSettings.CBizTalkSettingsLookup' threw an exception.
Catastrophic failure (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8000FFFF (E_UNEXPECTED))

When I ran Tomasso's application it was able to execute the map successfully which lead me to believe that it must be something to do with the fact the code would be running inside of the MsTest execution environment.

Eventually I found a solution to this. I added a test settings file to my solution and referenced this in the TEST menu so it was the active test settings. When I did this running the test with the BizTalk Unit Testing feature and running the test using C# to execute the map both worked fine. I didnt need to modify any settings in the test settings file, I just left them as the defaults.

Im not quite sure of the exact cause of the problem but this fixed things for me. Its a shame the error messages in this case made things really painful to workout the root cause of the error.

Reminder to self - MSBUILD doesnt shutdown straightaway

Michael Stephenson — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:50:43 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/04/29/152820.aspx

Ive been bitten by this one a couple of times recently and want to remind myself for next time!

MsBuild doesnt shutdown after its been ran by default (performance improvements I expect). For integration development this is often a problem with bits being locked etc.

This can be turned off by adding the following environment variable:

Name: MSBUILDDISABLENODEREUSE

Value = 1

BizTalk 2013 Installation - Internal Error 2761

Michael Stephenson — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 08:03:44 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/04/23/152774.aspx

If you are installing BizTalk 2013 and get the error "Internal Error 2761"

Just check you remembered to right click and Run As Administrator on the BizTalk setup.exe

New project should I go BizTalk 2010 or BizTalk 2013?

Michael Stephenson — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 19:18:05 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/04/23/152772.aspx

I was recently working with a customer around the initiation of a new project and we had to make a decision about wether we should choose BizTalk 2010 or BizTalk 2013 for this project.

Obviously being a keen techy I was actively encouraging the choice of BizTalk 2013 but as any responsible architect knows its important to follow a structured decision making process to evaluate the pro's and con's of the different options and make a sensible decision for your organisation and to also have justification for that decision.

We use a lightweight architecture decision framework loosly based on the excellent Applied Architectures on the Microsoft Platform books framework.

The powerpoint slides on the link below shows you some of the things we considered when we made that decision which might help you.

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=983A58358C675769!5984&authkey=!AKy81v3edNVm0MY

Id love to hear any thoughts from people on this approach good or bad

Error during communication with Service Bus. Check the connection information, then retry

Michael Stephenson — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 09:09:03 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/04/22/152767.aspx

This week we came across the below error on in our project where we are using Windows Azure Service Bus Brokered Messaging.

Microsoft.ServiceBus.Messaging.MessagingCommunicationException: Error during communication with Service Bus. Check the connection information, then retry. ---> System.ServiceModel.CommunicationObjectFaultedException: Internal Server Error: The server did not provide a meaningful reply; this might be caused by a premature session shutdown..TrackingId:4990b52f-7588-4460-81eb-cbef7b103c11, Timestamp:4/22/2013 2:32:44 PM

We initially thought this was a networking issue, we had been having separate issues with our developer machines and networking and initially thought it was related to that. However on closer inspection you can see there is a tracking id in the error message which gives you a good clue you probably managed to make a call to the service bus.

We found the root cause of our problem was that we had put some logging in the code to log the message body before sending the message and when we had read the stream which contained the body and written it to the log file we hadnt set the position back to the start of the stream before sending the message.

Ive seen a few forum posts about this error which seemed to be related to other things but didnt see anyone have the above symptoms so sharing it incase it helps anyone else

Dont let your Shared Secret be visible in the browser

Michael Stephenson — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:01:24 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/04/21/152761.aspx

I came across a something the other day with WCF service I was hosting in IIS which was configured to use the relay bindings to listen to the Windows Azure Service Bus.

I had made an error in the configuration file and it popped up with the below error in the browser.

Server Error in '/Acme.Azure.ServiceBus.Connect' Application.

Configuration Error

Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: Invalid element in configuration. The extension name 'transportClientEndpointBehavior' is not registered in the collection at system.serviceModel/extensions/behaviorExtensions.

Source Error:

Line 159: <endpointBehaviors>

Line 160: <behavior name="BrokeredMessageService-Ws">

Line 161: <transportClientEndpointBehavior credentialType="SharedSecret">

Line 162: <clientCredentials>

Line 163: <sharedSecret issuerName="owner" issuerSecret="*** I have hidden the key but its displayed here***

As you can see from the bottom of the error message this displayed the shared secret key (obviously I have hidden it in this post).

Now we all know how from time to time a configuration error can happen, and although its unlikely if it did happen you dont want your key comprimised.

Fortunately there are a couple of ways you can probably handle this.

1. You can add a custom error page as described in the below link: (thanks to Jayu Katti on the Service Bus Team for this one)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5043339/web-config-isnt-showing-errors-remotely-even-with-customerrors-off-on-ubuntu

2. You can encrypt parts of the configuration file as discussed in the following PNP article. I havent tried this one yet but the assumption is if you can encrypt the appSettings and connectionStrings sections you can probably encrypt the whole of the system.servicemodel section

http://wcfsecurity.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=How%20do%20I%20encrypt%20sensitive%20data%20in%20WCF%20configuration%20file?

Anyway hope this helps a few people

Azure VM - The word or phrase you selected is not allowed

Michael Stephenson — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 23:11:50 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/03/24/152505.aspx

Just wanted to put a note out for anyone who gets caught out like I did on this one.

I was trying to create an azure VM and kept getting the below error message and Azure wouldnt even create my VM.

"The word or phrase you selected is not allowed"

I tried different combinations of all of the settings but with no luck!

It turns out that apparently there is a list of naughty words and common phishing terms which you are not allowed to use. The below forum posts talks about this but in relation to web and worker roles it also seems to apply to virtual machines.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsazuretroubleshooting/thread/bf567147-3921-41e6-baf4-c3b89f77705a

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsazuremanagement/thread/d4a5fc05-aedb-4dd2-b95f-b736f727a5fe

Just be a little careful over what you call things as you might not realise that your name contains one of these phrases at first glance and there is no list publicly available to check against.

Exposing your API via Windows Azure Service Bus Queues and Topics

Michael Stephenson — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 22:05:44 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/03/15/152427.aspx

Recently I wrote an article for UK MSDN Flash about using Windows Azure Service Bus Queues & Topics

Ive had some great feedback on this article from friends! Check it out below

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ukmsdn/archive/2013/03/11/guest-post-exposing-your-api-via-windows-azure-service-bus-queues-and-topics.aspx

Pondering Azure PAAS vs IAAS

Michael Stephenson — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 01:12:26 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/03/05/152331.aspx

I was having a chat with one of the guys in the office today and was wondering about the considerations you would make when deciding between a web/worker role and a VM in Azure.

To give an example we have a solution which runs some web services and ASP.net pages in a web role component which has 2 small instances and also some background processes which run in a worker role which has 2 small instances.

This configuration gives us enough scalability at this stage and gives us a basic high availability scenario.

The costs we would expect to see for this set up would be around $350 per month based on the Azure list prices (we actually have an enterprise agreement but for the sake of a simple example lets just go with the list prices).

If you consider this to a traditional model you might run these services on the same server if you werent in the cloud. EG host the web services in IIS and the worker role as a windows service. So we could potentially get away with just 2 servers in the above scenario because our 4 roles have spare capacity. If we transfer that to the cloud and considering hosting in IAAS instead we could use VM Roles and get away with 2 VM's and host like I described earlier as if they were on premise.

Now obviously VM is in preview at present so the costing is likely to change but the difference could be significant if the prices are similar between the roles when VM goes into general availability.

So coming back to my original thoughts which were along the lines of what considerations you would make and what would be the tipping point between deciding to choose between a VM role co-hosting multiple of your services versus a Web/Worker Role. I guess one of the most obvious considerations would be the cost of managing the server myself and patching etc. I think one of the others would be the auto-scaling benefits of the web/worker role which is probably a lot simpler than in the VM role in terms of application deployment.

Im quite interested to see what other people think in this area, particularly based on real-world examples

AppFx.ServiceBus – Scatter Gather

Michael Stephenson — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 00:13:43 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/02/16/152143.aspx

New Version AppFx.ServiceBus

Michael Stephenson — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 00:13:14 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/02/16/152142.aspx

Just released a new version of the AppFx.ServiceBus framework for Windows Azure Service Bus.

This includes:

- Performance optimisations

- Scatter Gather implementation changes

https://appfxservicebus.codeplex.com/releases/

BizTalk Message Archiving

Michael Stephenson — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 00:17:53 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/01/23/151921.aspx

Recently at the BizTalk Summit in London I was asked a question about Message Archiving from BizTalk and one of the most common solutions to this is the Message Archiving Pipeline Component which was written by my old friend Nick Heppleson.

After the summit I was pondering this archiving feature and wish that at the time I had mentioned Storsimple. Recently Id been speaking with Michael Royster from Microsoft in the UK and he had been telling me about the new acqusition Microsoft had made and how this solution combines on-premise storage with storage in Windows Azure which offers lots of opportunities.

The key thing here is that Storsimple is an appliance which you add to your data centre which offers up file storage but only certain data is kept on premise and the rest is kept in the cloud. The appliance handles the magic underneath that but your applications just see file shares on the network which they can communicate with.

Coming back to the archiving requirement if you have a customer who needs to archive a lot of messages and your worried about house keeping around this then you should certainly consider combining Message Archive Pipeline Component plus StorSimple to provide and excellent combined solution to this problem.

There is obviously a cost for StorSimple but you can reuse the applicance across other applications and use if for storage to help sharepoint and exchange implementations too or possibly back up archiving.

Anyway just a few thoughts that were lingering around my head on the train ride home last week. Heres some links if your interested:

http://www.storsimple.com/

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000008345

My Thoughts on the future of BizTalk - Post BizTalk Summit 2012

Michael Stephenson — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 00:43:52 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/01/08/151766.aspx

I thought I’d brain dump a few thoughts after the recent BizTalk summit and how some of the information will help shape solutions with the customers whom I work with.

BizTalk On-Premise

Traditionally for a Microsoft focused integration team BizTalk was often used as the platform for nearly all integration solutions and this was often taken to the degree where some companies would make enterprise architecture decisions that “all integration would be done in BizTalk”. As a product BizTalk often would allow you to do this because it has an extensive feature set which covers most of the core capabilities needed in an integration platform.

In recent years the Microsoft Integration Developer’s tool set has been extended with other products which have become more mature and now mean that BizTalk is not the only way to solve an integration with Microsoft technology and now the BizTalk product itself is expanding to include the IAAS and PAAS offerings which should change the solutions that we build in the future.

I believe that this will change the way that organisations use BizTalk as part of their integration platforms. I believe we will see fewer of those solve everything with BizTalk implementations and I believe we will see customers who have smaller BizTalk groups than we did in the past as they begin the embrace the use of other products along-side BizTalk.

I think BizTalk will also be used more to focus on the dirtier side of integration in the EAI space where you can use the many features of BizTalk and its adapter set to integrate into various line of business systems.

BizTalk IAAS

I think the benefits of the IAAS offering of BizTalk proposed in the next version of BizTalk will be particularly attractive to many organisations. This will probably fall into two categories. Firstly there will be those companies who are comfortable using the Windows Azure Service Bus and can bridge an on-premise and cloud instance of BizTalk using either the Service Bus Relay or Queue’s and Topics. This will allow them to use BizTalk in the cloud for things like burst or batch patterns and then use Service Bus to integrate messages into on premise applications. I can think of a number of customer scenarios where this option to process batch files in the cloud and to produce a queue of messages to process would be very attractive.

The second scenario would be for customers who embrace the networking capabilities of Windows Azure and connect their data centre to a Windows Azure data centre hosting their new BizTalk IAAS instance. This would allow for a greater use of the BizTalk feature set in the cloud and would mean you can integrate with applications exactly as you do now. This would be very attractive for many customers who might wish to minimize their on-premise infrastructure investment. One of the big benefits of the extended tool set which is available is that there are other alternatives for some of the traditional “as low as possible” latency solutions which opens up the option of moving some of all of your BizTalk investment off premise.

I would be surprised if in the future Microsoft didn’t offer pre-built templates for many of the different topologies BizTalk is often deployed in. This would be a massive win because it is often time consuming and expensive to get your BizTalk installation setup correctly and to prove it performs well. If this was a template, then all customers would be able to start with an environment that adheres to best practices rather than this being uncommon.

Customers using BizTalk IAAS will also have the ability to scale up and down their group on demand. When I think back to some customer scenarios where you need to scale for peak demand scenarios and then have a BizTalk environment which has plenty of capacity for large periods. These customers will eventually be able to automate scaling based on actual demand and predicted demand. The IAAS offering will also be likely to make the licensing scenarios simpler so that a customer can have multiple BizTalk groups whereas with traditional on-premise setups it might not be practical. I can think of one customer scenario where they have a weekend batch which requires the BizTalk group to require 4 BizTalk servers which are maxed out for the processing window of the batch, and then at other times this BizTalk group processes relatively low volume messaging. In this customers scenario it might be feasible to separate the BizTalk group into two groups. One small group of 2 BizTalk servers to provide highly available messaging but the batch stuff is on the 2^nd group. This group could then only be on for the duration of the batch window and turned off after. Perhaps the 2^nd group would utilize 6 BizTalk servers to process the batch and then be turned off the rest of the week.

Depending upon how Microsoft licenses the BizTalk IAAS offering, multiple group scenarios and part-time usage scenarios could be much more cost effective for customers that in the past.

I think it will also be interesting to see how BizTalk as an IAAS offering compares in its uptake to the way customers used to use BizTalk branch edition. In my experience I haven’t really come across any customers who have used branch edition and I always felt that its limitations meant that bigger customers would just get standard edition setups in their local offices. I would expect that companies who embrace the cloud may find BizTalk IAAS as an interesting alternative way of doing this.

BizTalk PAAS

The BizTalk PAAS offering also means that some of the traditional work done in an on-premise instance of BizTalk may be able to be done in the PAAS platform. The features available in the PAAS offering for BizTalk will initially be small by comparison with on-premise BizTalk so you will only be able to do a limited number of things, but over time this is bound to extend. I think its interesting that one of the key areas of focus is EDI and I believe that in recent years one of the key areas of growth for BizTalk was around EDI scenarios when BizTalk introduced a new version with some new EDI enhancements which other vendors had not already implemented. This is an example of where the time to market offered by the BizTalk PAAS platform could be a key element in the future. I would expect that other accelerators and industry vertical solutions would be areas where there is good value to be had in the PAAS platform, particularly if on-premise BizTalk plays well with the PAAS platform.

I think BizTalk PAAS will open up new opportunities which we have never had in the BizTalk space before. I think small organisations who would never have considered BizTalk or any of the other big integration vendors will now have the ability to develop structured integration solutions using the Microsoft platform. This will have the benefits that they will develop solutions which will have a better chance of being able to grow and scale as the organization grows. It will also help in acquisition scenarios when smaller organisations have built solutions on a platform rather than the spaghetti custom solutions im sure we have all come across before.

I think BizTalk PAAS will also help for B2B scenarios with regard to organisations passing data between each other in a secure way.

BizTalk for Large Organisations

I think that in larger organisations you will tend to see smaller BizTalk setups than usual but also potentially more organisations with more than one BizTalk group. These will still be some large organisations who do those massive BizTalk implementations with specialist requirements which occasionally come up but they will probably do more hybrid solutions using BizTalk plus other Microsoft integration technologies.

There are likely to be many organisations who will not really change much for many years, but at the same time there will be others who embrace some of the new opportunities.

I think in that the organisations who really take advantage of these changes you will find that they will have moved some of their existing BizTalk investment to the BizTalk IAAS offering because it offers cost savings. I would expect they will still keep some BizTalk on premise but its likely to be smaller scale and to have a few constraints around what kind of patterns are implemented on premise to ensure they need to be on premise.

I think the most effective larger organisations will be likely to use most of the newer Microsoft integration technologies for example:

- On-premise

o BizTalk

o Windows Server Service Bus

o Workflow Host

- Cloud

o BizTalk IAAS

o BizTalk PAAS

o Windows Azure Service Bus

These organisations will have a great platform which will allow them to use the best technology suited to each integration problem and hopefully the integration between the technologies in the platform will be very seamless.

BizTalk for Medium Sized Organisations

Medium sized organisations are bound to be interesting places to work. Typically you come across those who try to implement BizTalk but struggle for various reasons. They usually struggle around the ability to get skilled resources and to implement and manage a good infrastructure. I would expect that in the future BizTalk IAAS will be one of the attractive bits to these companies because it means some of the problem areas they typically face can be removed. I would also expect that the IAAS offering will help many organisations find BizTalk is more affordable if it moves towards a usage based cost model. These organisations may not have been able to afford a suitable BizTalk setup and implementation previously but when your deployment and management costs get smaller and you have the ability to pay based on CPU hour rather than the full cost up front then this becomes much more feasible for many companies.

There will still be medium sized organisations who do BizTalk just as they do now, but there will be many who can save money by considering the above and there will be those who have never had BizTalk before who suddenly become potential BizTalk users.

For some medium sized organisations they may find that they have BizTalk but don’t really need it. They would be the kind of organization where they implemented a BizTalk solution because it was previously Microsoft’s only real integration offering and it did most things pretty well. These organisations may find that they don’t necessarily need BizTalk anymore because there are other Microsoft technologies which do certain integration patterns slightly better or as well as BizTalk. For these customers they may find that they can get migrate their BizTalk investment to take advantage of other Microsoft technologies which meet their requirements better than BizTalk does but offer a better value for money solution. These organisations are typically ones where you might look at their BizTalk investment and feel it was overkill of the solution they were trying to achieve.

Medium sized companies are also more likely to consider BizTalk IAAS solutions because the risk profile around BizTalk projects will change significantly if the licensing becomes usage based. In the past a medium sized company would be taking a reasonable risk to purchase licenses for SQL and BizTalk during their project life cycle as an up-front cost. If the project failed to deliver its business value for some reason then they would still have purchased these licenses which would not be cheap. In a usage based scenario if the business project failed to deliver results then you can just turn off and remove the BizTalk virtual machines and stop paying for them. This would remove some of the barriers that would have previously been a blocker to companies considering a BizTalk project.

BizTalk for Small Organisations or Start-ups

Smaller organisations are one of the areas which I find most exciting. Often these companies will not consider BizTalk solutions because the cost to implement a solution makes it unfeasible. These companies are also some of the ones which can offer some of the most innovative opportunities. With the changes coming in the BizTalk space and the extended Microsoft integration platform including the other technologies discussed earlier, these types of company will be in a better position than ever to start using a structured integration platform with Microsoft from day one. This will create opportunities for Microsoft integration developers with companies who they have never worked with before.

Imagine small companies using an on-premise instance of Service Bus for Windows Server or BizTalk IAAS. They will be able to create solutions when the business is a company of less than 10 people which will be on infrastructure which could scale with the company when it grows into a company with thousands of employees. This scalability will allow them to take more iterative approaches to enhancing their integration platform rather than the typical distinct phases where a growing organisation makes periodic massive investments in IT projects because the organisation has outgrown their applications and integration solutions.

Conclusion

As I mentioned at the start of the article this has been a little bit of a brain dump of my thoughts following the BizTalk summit and Im hoping that I have articulated that I believe there some quite exciting opportunities ahead in the integration space around Microsoft technology and particularly with BizTalk.

I think one thing that did come to mind while I was at the BizTalk summit was the marketing story Microsoft used a couple of years ago with BizTalk which was “Better Together”. I believe this marketing story is still true and stronger than ever. I believe as architects using these technologies it is important to understand the capabilities of each and the overlaps and distinctions between them to help customers in the future leverage the right tool for the right job. There is a lot of talk around hybrid solutions but I think that in time people will appreciate that hybrid solutions do not just mean integrating on-premise with the cloud but also a hybrid integration solution can mean combining integration technologies that work together to deliver a solution regardless of where the technology execution is hosted.

I’m really looking to see what other people think and provoke some discussion around this

Interview with me on technet wiki

Michael Stephenson — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 00:29:45 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2012/11/20/151313.aspx

Incase who ever it is who reads my blog happens to want to know a little more about me, Steef-Jan prepared an interview with me in relation to technet wiki last week.

Its on the following link:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/wikininjas/archive/2012/11/19/interview-with-a-microsoft-integration-mvp-michael-stephenson.aspx

No endpoint listening at.........

Michael Stephenson — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 23:58:18 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2012/11/10/151222.aspx

I was having some very frustrating behaviour on our build server and while I found a number of articles online with similar error messages none of them helped me. I thought I would just explain this here incase if helps me or anyone else in future.

The error message we were getting is:

There was no endpoint listening at http://localhostStubs.ExternalApplication/SampleService.svc that could accept the message. This is often caused by an incorrect address or SOAP action. See InnerException, if present, for more details

Our scenario is as follows:

We have a solution where a WCF service application hosting the WCF routing service is listening to the Windows Azure Service Bus Relay. We have an acceptance test project in the solution which sends a message to the service bus which is then received by the WCF routing service and routed to SampleService.svc which is hosted in another IIS application on the same box. A response is flowed back through to the test.

In the tests there are 5 scenarios simulating a successful message, and various error conditions. On my developer machine it was working absolutely fine every time, and a clean build on my developer machine worked fine. On the build server however one or more of the tests would fail each time with the above error message. There didnt seem to be any pattern to which test would fail.

The solution was building on a Windows 2008 R2 machine with IIS 7 and AppFabric Server installed with auto-start configured for the IIS Application which would be listening to service bus.

After lots of searching online and looking at logs etc it turned out to be a simple solution to just restart the WAS service (Windows Process Activation Service) and the services it advised you to restart with it.

Hope this helps someone else

Azure Service Bus - Authorization failure

Michael Stephenson — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 21:23:35 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2012/10/26/151083.aspx

I fell into this trap earlier in the week with a mistake I made when configuring a service to send and listen on the azure service bus and I thought it would be worth a little note for future reference as I didnt find anything online about it. After configuring everything when I ran my code sample I was getting the below error.

WebHost failed to process a request.

Sender Information: System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment+HostingManager/28316044

Exception: System.ServiceModel.ServiceActivationException: The service '/-------/BrokeredMessageService.svc' cannot be activated due to an exception during compilation. The exception message is: Generic: There was an authorization failure. Make sure you have specified the correct SharedSecret, SimpleWebToken or Saml transport client credentials.. ---> Microsoft.ServiceBus.AuthorizationFailedException: Generic: There was an authorization failure. Make sure you have specified the correct SharedSecret, SimpleWebToken or Saml transport client credentials.

at Microsoft.ServiceBus.RelayedOnewayTcpClient.ConnectRequestReplyContext.Send(Message message, TimeSpan timeout, IDuplexChannel& channel)

at Microsoft.ServiceBus.RelayedOnewayTcpListener.RelayedOnewayTcpListenerClient.Connect(TimeSpan timeout)

at Microsoft.ServiceBus.RelayedOnewayTcpClient.EnsureConnected(TimeSpan timeout)

at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)

at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.RefcountedCommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)

at Microsoft.ServiceBus.RelayedOnewayChannelListener.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)

at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)

at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ChannelDispatcher.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)

at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)

at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostBase.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)

at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)

at Microsoft.ServiceBus.SocketConnectionTransportManager.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)

at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.TransportManager.Open(TimeSpan timeout, TransportChannelListener channelListener)

at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.TransportManagerContainer.Open(TimeSpan timeout, SelectTransportManagersCallback selectTransportManagerCallback)

at Microsoft.ServiceBus.SocketConnectionChannelListener`2.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)

at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)

at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ChannelDispatcher.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)

at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)

at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostBase.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)

at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)

at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment.HostingManager.ActivateService(String normalizedVirtualPath)

at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment.HostingManager.EnsureServiceAvailable(String normalizedVirtualPath)

--- End of inner exception stack trace ---

at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment.HostingManager.EnsureServiceAvailable(String normalizedVirtualPath)

at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment.EnsureServiceAvailableFast(String relativeVirtualPath)

Process Name: w3wp

Process ID: 8056

As recommended by the error message I checked everything about the application configuration and also the keys and eventually I found the problem.

When I set the permissions in the ACS rule group I had copied and pasted the claim name for net.windows.servicebus.action from the Azure portal and hadnt spotted the <space> character on the end of it like you sometimes pick up when copying text in the browser. This meant that the listen and send permissions were not setup correctly which is why (as you would expect) my two applications could not connect to the service bus.

So lesson learnt here, if you do copy and paste into the ACS rules just be careful you dont leave a space on the end of anything otherwise it will be difficult to spot that its configured incorrectly

UK Connected Systems User Group Oct 2012

Michael Stephenson — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 13:13:39 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2012/10/12/150972.aspx

Just a little note for the uk connected systems user group next wednesday.

We have a great pair of sessions lined up, would be great to see you there

http://ukcsugoct2012.eventbrite.com/

Service Bus random thought for the day

Michael Stephenson — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 15:16:17 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2012/10/11/150968.aspx

Its been really nice to see that over the last few weeks since we implemented our Dynamics CRM connecting via Azure Service Bus to backend line of business applications solution how much interest this has sparked within the rest of the organisation and other subsiduaries and how many people are coming up with ideas elsewhere on how they can leverage what we did and how simple it could be to connect their applications to the cloud.

Im currently working with one of these companies and its refreshing to see how much interest can be spread by a good success story.

Build & Deployment Guide for Service Bus Relay Project

Michael Stephenson — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 23:55:48 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2012/10/10/150957.aspx

Ive recently published a sample guide based on a real-world project where we implemented an on-premise WCF routing solution to connect SAAS applications to our on premise line of business applications.

The guide will discuss:

How we configured and setup the infrastructure
How we setup the on-premise server to listen to the service bus
What software we used
How we configured Windows Azure

This contains some useful contextual information around the reference scenario and hopefull this will be very useful to others undertaking similar projects.

The guide can be downloaded from:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/CSCWhitepapers/Acme+Service+Bus+Relay/CSC+Azure+Relay+Bridge+Build+and+Deployment+Guide+v1.0.docx

Ive also included this on the technet wiki page for Windows Azure Service Bus resources:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/13825.windows-azure-service-bus-resources.aspx

Resources for Service Bus Projects

Michael Stephenson — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 22:42:34 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2012/10/04/150905.aspx

Having recently been involves in the Windows Server Service Bus TAP and also working on a project using Azure Service Bus I thought it would be useful to bring together some of the excellent community resources which are available into the technet wiki to help people have a single place to access most of the material.

I thought something like the excellent job done with the BizTalk part of technet wiki would be ideal.

The links are below:

Azure Service Bus - http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/13825.windows-azure-service-bus-resources.aspx

Windows Server Service Bus - http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/13824.service-bus-for-windows-server-resources.aspx

If you come across any content which you think should be added please do so.

Cleaning your BizTalk Build Server

Michael Stephenson — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 12:20:03 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2012/09/15/150718.aspx

Just a little note for myself this one.

At one of my customers where it is still BizTalk 2006 one of the build servers is intermittently getting issues so I wanted to run a script periodically to clean things up a little. The below script is an example of how you can stop cruise control and all of the biztalk services, then clean the biztalk databases and reset the backup process and then click everything off again.

This should keep the server a little cleaner and reduce the number of builds that occasionally fail for adhoc environmental issues.

REM Server Clean Script

REM ===================

REM This script is ran to move the build server back to a clean state

echo Stop Cruise Control

net stop CCService

echo Stop IIS

iisreset /stop

echo Stop BizTalk Services

net stop BTSSvc$<Name of BizTalk Host>

echo Stop SSO

net stop ENTSSO

echo Stop SQL Job Agent

net stop SQLSERVERAGENT

echo Clean Message Box

sqlcmd -E -d BizTalkMsgBoxDB -Q "Exec bts_CleanupMsgbox"

sqlcmd -E -d BizTalkMsgBoxDB -Q "Exec bts_PurgeSubscriptions"

echo Clean Tracking Database

sqlcmd -E -d BizTalkDTADb -Q "Exec dtasp_CleanHMData"

echo Reset TDDS Stream Status

sqlcmd -E -d BizTalkDTADb -Q "Update TDDS_StreamStatus Set lastSeqNum = 0"

echo Force Full Backup

sqlcmd -E -d BizTalkMgmtDB -Q "Exec sp_ForceFullBackup"

echo Clean Backup Directory

del E:\BtsBackups\*.* /q

echo Start SSO

net start ENTSSO

echo Start SQL Job Agent

net start SQLSERVERAGENT

echo Start BizTalk Services

net start BTSSvc$<Name of BizTalk Host>

echo Start IIS

iisreset /start

echo Start Cruise Control

net start CCService

BDD section on BizTalk Technet Wiki

Michael Stephenson — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 20:55:04 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2012/07/13/150227.aspx

Ive just added a new section to the BizTalk area of the technet wiki containing all of the various content about BDD and BizTalk

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/12322.behaviour-driven-development-with-biztalk.aspx