Michael Stephenson

BizTalk Light and Easy Sample Code

Michael Stephenson — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:47:29 GMT

Ive had a few people ask recently about getting the source code for the BizTalk Light and Easy videos I did about testing and build.

The code is all on Codeplex where everyone should be able to easily get a copy.

http://biztalklaealm.codeplex.com/

Enjoy

Mike

SBUG Webcast - BPM & Intro to Global 360

Michael Stephenson — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:39:48 GMT

Hi All,

Following this evenings webcast the recording of the event is available from the following location:

https://www311.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp/view?id=Z9M8RH

We were interested on feedback of what we would like to see at a future SBUG session, the suggestions were as follows:

Getting more value from Sharepoint in a BPM solution

Integrating BPM and Biztalk

An industry sector case study

More about the persona based approach

Claims and case management

Nationwide case study?

Hands on where we can play around with Global 360 product and make some processes

If you would like to see any of the above or an alternative please drop me an email or use the forum post for feedback

http://sbug.org.uk/forums/p/178/266.aspx#266

Cheers

Mike

Microsoft UK Business Integration Roadshow

Michael Stephenson — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:32:41 GMT

Theres a really cool looking event coming up in the UK in early december.

There are also some great speakers

Check it out

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032430518&Culture=en-GB

Bizmonade Followup

Michael Stephenson — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:35:36 GMT

Ive been having a few discussions with Christos Karras and Jason Hyland about Bizmonade over the last few days as a followup to some thoughts and questions i posted about Bizmonade.

Christos has posted a response to some of my questions on the below link, and i must say i think his plan for Bizmonade looks really good and it should become an important tool in the biztalk development cycle.

Check out his response here : http://www.nootaikok.com/2009/10/more-about-bizmonade.html

SBUG Meeting on Tuesday

Michael Stephenson — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:52:13 GMT

Just a reminder about the SBUG webcast on tuesday

Global 360 will be introducing themselves and looking for feedback on what topic members would like to see them present at the next full SBUG meeting

All the details are here: http://sbugminihelloglobal360.eventbrite.com/

SBUG Webcast BizTalk Messagebox Viewer

Michael Stephenson — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:32:41 GMT

Thanks to Jean-Pierre for a good SBUG event today, as discussed in the meeting below is some followup information.

Video

The video from this session is available here:

https://www311.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp/view?id=M56GT6

Forum/Q&A

If anyone has a question about the video please add it to the below forum.

http://sbug.org.uk/forums/p/169/253.aspx#253

Resources

A number of useful links related to todays meeting:

Terminator Tool: http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalkcpr/pages/biztalk-terminator-download-install-info.aspx

Jean-Pierres Blog: http://blogs.technet.com/jpierauc/default.aspx

SBUG - Previous Content

Michael Stephenson — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:36:13 GMT

Just a reminder that previous content from SBUG meetings is available from skydrive

http://cid-40015ea59a1307c8.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/SBUG

This includes videos, presentations etc

SBUG Mini Meeting - Hello Global 360

Michael Stephenson — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:21:48 GMT

Global 360 are a new partner who have joined the user group and have contributed a few interesting ideas and suggestions for the user group.

The plan is at this short online meeting they will do a small introduction to who they are and what they do. From here we can suggest things that user group members would be interested in knowing more about and one of the Technical Architects from Global 360 will do a deep dive BPM session at a future SBUG event.

Signup for the meeting at: http://sbugminihelloglobal360.eventbrite.com/

SBUG Mini Meeting - BizTalk Messagebox Viewer

Michael Stephenson — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:16:47 GMT

Jean-Pierre Auconie from the Microsoft EMEA BizTalk Team and the creator of the BizTalk Messagebox Viewer tool will be joining us for a web cast for the UK SOA/BPM User Group on 13th Oct 2009.

For SBUG members to register for this event please refer to:

http://sbugminimessageboxviewer.eventbrite.com/

Northern Architecture Forum

Michael Stephenson — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 20:00:02 GMT

Just a little plug for the team at Black Marble.

On 3rd December they will be hosting the Northern Architecture Forum event.

If you work in the North of England this should be an excellent event to attend with some high quality people and some interesting discussions.

Look forward to seeing anyone there

Click here for details

SBUG Mocking Bird Video

Michael Stephenson — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:05:58 GMT

We recently held an SBUG Meeting where Santosh Benjamin provided a demo and discussion of the Mockingbird project which is available on Codeplex.

If you would like to see the video it is available at the following location.

https://www311.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp/view?id=4P68FR

BizTalk Build Generator - New Release for BizTalk 2009

Michael Stephenson — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 23:24:50 GMT

Just to let people know ive released a new version of the BizTalk Build Generator which can be used with BizTalk 2009 and also contains a few new features and addresses a couple of bits of feedback provided.

Details are on the following link:

http://biztalkmsbuildtool.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=31725

Configuration Manager - New Release

Michael Stephenson — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 22:35:17 GMT

Ive just released a new version of the configuration manager tool which I used in the BizTalk Light and Easy viewing video. This tool is used to help you manage the different settings needed for binding and configuration files across different environments and allows you to connect this with your build process.

The tool is available on codeplex at: http://configsettingstool.codeplex.com/

The light and easy video is at: http://blogs.breezetraining.com.au/mickb/2009/07/08/UnofficalLaunchOfTheBizTalk2009LightAndEasyWebCastSeries.aspx

SBUG Mini Meeting

Michael Stephenson — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 10:19:12 GMT

We have an upcoming mini meeting where Santosh Benjamin will demonstrate how to use Mocking Bird to help with Integration Testing.

This should only be a 30-45 min meeting and is open to all members via Live Meeting. Details below:

http://sbug.org.uk/forums/p/156/232.aspx#232

BizTalk Light & Easy

Michael Stephenson — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 22:35:24 GMT

Mick Badran has unofficially released the BizTalk 2009 Light and Easy Series of videos.

Check out the below link:

http://blogs.breezetraining.com.au/mickb/2009/07/08/UnofficalLaunchOfTheBizTalk2009LightAndEasyWebCastSeries.aspx

(Look out for my videos)

Solution file version issue when migrating your Build Script to BizTalk 2009

Michael Stephenson — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 23:20:10 GMT

Ive just been working on upgrading the build generator to support BizTalk 2009 projects. While doing this one of the things i wish to do is to change the compile step to use MsBuild rather than dev env.

I found a little issue which others who use MsBuild may come across when migrating custom scripts.

Previously for BizTalk 2006R2 scripts I used to use the below command:

<Exec Command='"$(DevEnvPath)" $(SolutionName) /Build $(ConfigurationName)' />

This would compile the whole solution using devenv.

I changed the script to the following:

<MSBuild Projects ="$(SolutionPath)" Properties="Configuration=$(ConfigurationName);" />

and also changed the property on the project to use ToolsVersion="3.5"

This is how I expected the build to need to be and it would mean our script would take advantage of using the MsBuild task inline. When I ran the script I get the following error:

"Solution file error MSB5014: File format version is not recognized. MSBuild can only read solution files between versions 7.0 and 9.0, inclusive"

My initial thoughts made me think this was more complicated than it actually was. I was looking at using the Exec command rather than the MsBuild task for the compile which I could get to work. Then suddenly the answer hit me.

The problem was that I forgot that the .cmd file I use to call the MsBuild file was configured to use the v2.0 version of MsBuild rather than 3.5. As soon as I corrected this it worked fine.

So if you have the above error remember to double check the original call to start your build script wether it be from TFS/Cruise Control or a custom file etc.

BizTalk 24*7

Michael Stephenson — Mon, 25 May 2009 15:20:24 GMT

Saravana has been doing lots of work on this site. Check it out its really cool!

http://www.biztalk247.com

SBUG Meeting next Tuesday

Michael Stephenson — Fri, 22 May 2009 04:08:19 GMT

Just a quick reminder for the SBUG meeting next Tuesday. We will be joined by:

- Tony Meleg from the Dublin Team doing an overview of Dublin following on from the TechEd Dublin sessions

- John Plummer from Microsoft UK hosting a Q&A session

Remember this is an in person meeting at Cardinal Place, but for those who cant make it in person we will also have live meeting available so you can still log in and join us.

The full event details are on the following page:

http://sbug20090526.eventbrite.com/

BizTalk Testing Guidance - Stub Of Dynamics AX

Michael Stephenson — Wed, 13 May 2009 21:57:49 GMT

Following on from my previous article, one of my old colleagues has written up an article about how a project he worked on was able to simulate the behaviour of Dynamics AX by using one of the approaches I described in my article about how to simulate external systems in testing.

Check out Charlies article here: http://geekswithblogs.net/charliemott/archive/2009/05/13/stub-of-dynamics-ax-for-biztalk-development-and-bizunit-testing.aspx

BizTalk Testing Guidance - Dealing with external systems/dependancies

Michael Stephenson — Tue, 12 May 2009 17:13:20 GMT

Article source: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson

When we are testing our BizTalk solution one of the biggest challenges is how we deal with the dependency on external systems. Some of the common scenarios I have come across are as follows:

We will be integrating with some web services but there are no test instances of these services we can use
We will integrate with a LOB application but there is either no test instance of the LOB system of using the LOB application will make it difficult to perform a lot of our testing
We are working on a larger project and the system we will be integrating with does not yet exist or is in early development and is changing a lot
I'm working with a B2B partner and they can not support my testing

These problems are typical on most projects and are one of the common excuses for poor testing and a resulting low quality solution. In this article I will discuss some of the approaches we take to dealing with these problems.

Probably one of the key things here is that if you are working with BizTalk or some kind of services solution you will hopefully be thinking carefully about a contract first approach. By using a contract first approach you will understand the messages you will be passing between you and external systems and at least how your solution will react to different messages it receives. With this understanding you should be able to use various techniques to simulate how an external system will work in your solution.

Obviously there is a trade off because you don't want to recreate the whole external application but if you can mimic the communication protocol and replicate some of the messaging exchanges that will be involved in some of your testing scenarios then you can make significant improvements in the testing you can do.

Use a Mocking Framework

For completeness I will mention the use of mocking frameworks such as Rhino Mocks. While these frameworks are good and offer a lot of value in the testing of some aspects of BizTalk solutions I think when it comes to BizUnit style testing of an end to end process they don't really help you.

I usually use something like Rhino Mocks to test a custom .net component, pipeline component or possibly a custom adapter. I have mentioned these in previous posts in the testing series.

I will later in this article discuss a community project called BizMock which I feel is slightly different to NMock and Rhino Mocks.

Creating a Stub

One of the simplest ways you can replicate the external system is by creating a simple stub of that system. One of the most common ways to do this if it is a web services enabled application is to create a Visual studio web services project in your solution and then add some web services and web methods that match the external web service. I generate a server side stub of the web service and then add some logic to the generated method to make it meet the test cases. Often the stub will implement some logic to return different responses based on a parameter in the inbound request message or do a different action.

I will provide a couple of follow-up articles to show how we normally create stubs for asmx web services and WCF services.

I have made a list of what I think are some of the main good and bad points about this approach:

Good Points	Not so good points
Its an easy way to simulate an external system providing the same contract and communication protocol	If the contracts are changing regularly then the stub will usually need to change regularly
It is easy to stub things which have a web service or WCF interface	You need to write more code and could end up doing lots of stubs
It fits well with a contract first approach	Some systems can be difficult to stub
The stub can implement simple logic to support your test cases. Eg if a request contains a certain parameter value then you will return a certain response
You can deal with a lot of different types of external system
The stub can be part of your code base
Works well with BizUnit testing

I have an example of a situation where a stub approach really made our life easier. In a project we were developing a web service façade on top of the API for the Cognos Reporting system. The intention was to provide a flexible service which applications could call to execute a report in Cognos and the service would encapsulate all of the logic required to execute the report.

The Cognos API is a large assembly which allows you to do a lot of different things against Cognos. One of these things is to execute a report. The report execution is slightly complex and to get good coverage of our code was going to be slightly difficult. One of the challenges was that we would need an instance of Cognos to be able to connect to. This would be a pain as there were a lot of Cognos projects going on and getting on of their boxes with a set of suitable test reports which they could maintain wouldn't really work because as soon as there is a conflict between team priorities someone is going to be affected by this coupling.

We considered having a local instance of Cognos to support our development/build/test effort but straightaway this requires our team to have a Cognos skill set.

With a little bit of investigation we worked out that the Cognos API used to send HTTP traffic between itself and the Cognos server so we were able to capture some of this traffic and to use this to simulate the HTTP calls so we could then create a .net Web Application which used an aspx page to receive and send the appropriate messages to allow the Cognos client side API to work. The benefits of this stub were:

We didn't need to depend on a Cognos installation for all of our development effort
We were able to test parts of the code which we couldn't without working out how to break Cognos from our test case
We didn't need to create any test reports
We didn't need any Cognos skill

This was probably one of the more extreme cases of stubbing out an application. We had initially depended on a Cognos instance but we found that our Continuous Integration builds would constantly break because someone deleted our reports etc.

Using Mocking Bird

Mocking Bird is a codeplex project that was introduced to me by Santosh Benjamin. It is something I haven't used in anger but it's been on my radar for a while. Basically the project provides a pattern to allow you to implement stubs to simulate external systems. This project can simulate traditional web services and WCF services.

I think it will save you some of the effort of creating and maintaining the stubs discussed above.

Santosh has some good articles about Mocking Bird and I would recommend looking into it. Probably the one key area where it will not help is if your external application is not supported by WCF/Web services. In this scenario you can just drop back to the above stub approach and code something to simulate that system.

For more info refer to: http://www.codeplex.com/mockingbird

Using Alternative Bindings

I was providing some advice to a project once and they were doing some integration with Dynamics AX (I think). Anyway for whatever reason they could not integrate with web services and were using the BizTalk AIF Adapter for Dynamics AX. One of the dependencies of the adapter was that you needed a build and ready deployment of Dynamics AX for the adapter to work with.

On the project at the same time that the BizTalk team were developing an EAI solution, a Dynamics team were also working hard on the Dynamics part of the project. This means that this coupling would cause problems with the BizTalk team not being able to test against Dynamics and it being difficult to stub out the LOB application due to the complexity of the adapter.

One of the advantages of BizTalk is that because you have loose coupling between an orchestration and any ports it uses the BizTalk team in this scenario were able to change their approach to testing in their development environment and use different bindings to change the communication protocol to talk to a stub which was created to simulate the behaviour of Dynamics but it would use a different communication mechanism.

By looking at the message exchange patterns the BizTalk team were able to use File ports to simulate 1 way communications and WCF ports to simulate 2 way communication patterns. This means that in the development tests the team could use BizUnit to effecticely test the solution with these bindings and focus on the logic in their orchestrations and other components.

The one big risk with this approach is that you are not actually testing connectivity to the LOB application and some of the vendor specific situations may result in problems being faced later in testing. There isn't much you can do about this but you have certainly ensured you are doing an effective job at testing your own code.

I think this model would also be suitable for off-shoring situations where your off shore resource may not have access to the LOB applications to help with testing.

In summary this approach basically uses a different type of port in the bindings for different test environments.

Using BizMock

I came across BizMock a few weeks ago and it seems like a really interesting community project that could be a valuable resource for those who develop BizTalk solutions. I asked one of my team to have a look at BizMock and to try to replicate some of our existing BizUnit tests with BizMock to see what it could offer us.

Unfortunately we were getting the same error that has already been logged on the BizMock issue tracker so we haven't been able to complete a full comparison yet. BizMock is a very new Codeplex project in its alpha release so being we can live with this, but the ideas that the project offers are very interesting.

The below blog article provides a good overview of what BizMock will offer.

http://blogs.msdn.com/pierreml/archive/2009/02/13/bizmock.aspx

My opinion on BizMock is that I would use it in situations where I have a lot of complex logic in an orchestration which I need to test and external dependencies make this difficult. BizMock looks to be aimed at testing orchestrations rather than an end to end process so it has a clear differentiator to BizUnit. BizMock also offers schema and map testing capabilities but with the enhancements in BizTalk 2009 I'm not sure what value they would offer.

Once there is a more stable release of BizMock I would use it to compliment the tests I currently do in BizUnit. I think managing another set of bindings to configure the BizMock ports is something which I don't particularly want to do so the trade off of BizMock vs Stubs is just work saved in 1 area to be spent in another. I think the real benefit of BizMock is in being able to concentrate on those test scenarios which are difficult to perform or require lots of manipulation of a stub.

I think in the feature list in the above lined article it discusses the benefits of the tests being written in code vs in xml. Remember in the most recent version of BizUnit you can also write tests in C#, but to be honest I think I actually prefer them in XML where they are much clearer and easier to follow and have a more structured approach and you don't have to worry about some developer who is no longer around who had a coding style that no one can follow.

I'm looking forward to a resolution to the problem logged on Codeplex so we can look into BizMock in more detail after which I will update this section.

More info is available on: http://www.codeplex.com/bizmock

Summary

Hopefully in this article you got a good feeling for some of the approaches that are available to help you with some of the common yet challenging aspects of BizTalk testing. The things I've discussed here are primarily focused around the development cycle where you are trying to perform automated testing as part of a continuous integration approach.

In general my comments were that Stubs are a good way to help you test your solution and deal with the parts of your project that have dependencies to external systems. When you have very tight coupling to an external system you are helped by BizTalk in that you can use a different type of port to reduce this coupling to do some testing with a trade off that you take on some risk of adapter specific implications.

I think Mocking Bird and BizMocks offer some interesting new ideas on how to look at these problems.

One thing that I haven't mentioned is that in addition to this focused development testing it is also very important to get your real systems together on a regular basis and perform some integration testing. Ideally this would be automated but it can be effective even if its just getting a couple of developers from the different teams together on a regular basis. You will always get some problems this is why integration is usually such a pain but with these approaches we are making our best effort to catch problems early and mitigate as much risk as possible.

BizTalk RFID Workshop Review

Michael Stephenson — Fri, 01 May 2009 01:13:55 GMT

Earlier this week I attended the RFID workshop held at Microsoft's Reading Offices. I thought Id write up some notes and thoughts I'd made about the event.

Content/Trainer

The course was based on the course developed by the guys at Breeze (http://breeze.net/default.aspx). The material itself is excellently written and is easy to follow. It also has some nice little bits of humour which mean it is not the common/boring material you get on some courses. The material itself lets you build and enhance an RFID solution through out the course of the labs and there are about 10 labs and the course was very hands on.

The trainer for our course was Jeff Johnson from Microsoft in the UK and he delivered the course very well and was able to add lots of additional information based on experiences from work he had done.

The course itself was a 2 day workshop and was free.

Freebies

There were some excellent freebies on this course:

A copy of the BizTalk 2009 RFID book
A USB RFID reader/writer
A small bag of RFID tags
A BizTalk VPC (2006 R2) with everything on to do additional study away from the course

Attendees

The attendees for the workshop gave us an excellent mix of BizTalk people who had done little or no RFID work and RFID specialists who hadn't done much with BizTalk.

This resulted in lots of discussion and interesting points based on peoples differing experiences. It was also good to see some people from the UK SBUG user group there.

My Random Thoughts based on what I learnt on the course

I think the first thing to say is that I have wanted to look into the RFID aspects of BizTalk for quite a while, but the combination of me not having any RFID work in the pipeline and my expectation that it would be quite a steep learning curve and that I didn't have the hardware I would need to play around with it had put me off doing this for a long time. It just kept getting reprioritised.

Jeff had actually contacted me to promote the workshop to our user group members and I thought it was a good time to do some training and being free it ment I would only lose the cost of the days off work.

To my surprise RFID work with BizTalk is sooooo much easier than I expected, so much so that I had to question if it was appropriate to call it BizTalk being so easy.

I don't really want to go into too much discussion about the aspects of RFID but some things which I feel will catch people's interest to look more into this might be:

Traditionally RFID work had the typical complications of working with hardware vendors. You needed different API's for each vendors readers etc. BizTalk RFID abstracts this and gives you a standardised API which allows you to communicate with any supported vendor. You could really see the benefits of this and you can code directly against this API from .net applications if required
BizTalk RFID is actually a separate module to the main BizTalk installation. The course really discussed setting up RFID on "edge" servers which would be configured to work with a set of readers. You could then send your events to a central hub BizTalk installation to interact with LOB applications if required
Following on from the above comment it really looks like you would use RFID with the branch edition of BizTalk on your edge server. This significantly reduces the cost of setting up solutions and also if I remember correctly you don't need a hub BizTalk enterprise edition server if you don't need one. This allows customers who may use other vendors for their integration technologies to still take advantage of BizTalk RFID as a low cost solution to work with their current products, it also offers SME companies a cheap option and as they grow it gives them the option to bring "proper" BizTalk into the picture later.
BizTalk RFID doesn't require the traditional BizTalk skill set. There is some configuration requirements to configure your devices and RFID processes, but when it comes to custom processes the components are written in .net code in a similar way to BizTalk pipelines and pipeline components (but much simpler!!)
The RFID module gives you an execution environment for processing your RFID events and you can have multiple processes which will pick up the same events depending on how you configure your bindings from devices to processes.
The configuration/administration side of things is quite BizTalk like but with out any of the SQL Server requirements
There are some testing things that come with RFID which allow you to test your processes without having to have an RFID reader

I'm sure that there is a whole lot of other stuff that I should say but just doesn't come to mind at the moment.

In terms of recommending the course I would say that it is a very good course and it has really excited me about the possibilities of doing BizTalk RFID solutions.

I have invested 2 days of time and I'm coming away with a good understanding of this and I think with very little effort I can setup a pretty powerful demo to show my customers.

I believe Microsoft might be running this workshop again in the Autumn or if you are outside the UK I'm sure Breeze can advise you how to do this course.

Poor visual studio integration

Michael Stephenson — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 03:36:27 GMT

<Rant>

I came across the worst example of visual studio source control integration ever today. I was checking in some work and added the comment about the check in in the pending checkins box. I then pressed check in.

We use MKS source control (unfortunately) which then preceeded to display 75 confirmation boxes confirming that I was sure i wanted to check in and that I wanted to use the comment I had supplied in Visual Studio.

Note to anyone doing Visual Studio source control integration:

1. Integration into visual studio means that as a developer I dont really want to know much if anything about the source control system under the hood

2. Yes means yes. When I confirm that I want to check in dont ask me over and over again.

</Rant>

How BizTalk handled some strange FTP behaviour

Michael Stephenson — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 05:05:47 GMT

We had a little problem a few days ago when we were reviewing the testing of a B2B solution implemented with BizTalk.

This implementation was basically the collection of a file via FTP and then a splitter pattern which would break up a batch and cascade updates to appropriate systems. The file which was recieved was a moderately complex file containing multiple rows containing different types of positional records.

We had implemented this as per the specification and were moving from testing this internally to test it with the business partner. One of our limitations was that we could not do integration testing as early as we would like due to some external constraints.

Our internal tests were fine, but during integration testing we found some unexpected behaviour from the partners FTP service. A summary of this behaviour is:

The server would store multiple files with the exact same file name. If the partner uploaded 2 files we could see them as seperate instances with seperate file creation dates, but they would both have the same name.
When we executed a GET command on a file it would get the file and then mark it as collected and prevent us from downloading the file again. To be able to get a file if transmittion had failed we need the partner to make the file available again
We are unable to delete files from the server
If 2 files with the same name can be seen on the remote server, if we execute a get it will actually merge the files together to give us one file locally containing all of the date from both remote files. The data positions the content of the files in date order

We experienced a little problem and became aware of this unexpected behaviour and our first thoughts were that we would need to do some custom coding to deal with this. On closer inspection our problem seemed to be something else and BizTalk was actually dealing with this FTP behaviour in a way that worked well for us. Our setup basically had the FTP adapter polling the remote server when files were downloaded they were streamed through a custom pipeline which contained the FFDasm pipeline component which used a schema based on the partners message specification.

The way BizTalk was dealing with this additional FTP requirements was as follows:

It didnt matter that BizTalk couldnt delete the file from the remote server because once the file was downloaded it was no longer available anyway.
When 2 or more files were merged together when downloaded the FFDasm component was recognising this and actually still broke the message up correctly. If 2 files were downloaded and merged together we would actually get 2 disassembled messsages in the messagebox which had been handled correctly by FFDasm

I guess in hindsight this kind of makes sense, but it was nice to come across a situation where something like this happens and you done end up having to pull together some hack to workaround it.

In terms of the partners FTP service we didnt get confirmation on the vendor specific setup but based on some googling (sorry I mean Live searching) I believe that the it could be based on a VAX file system where you can have multiple versions of a file and the FTP service could be either HP/UX Enterprise Secure FTP or possible an offering from Sterling

BizTalk Blog Docs

Michael Stephenson — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 04:01:33 GMT

Saravana Kumar has just published the BizTalk Blog Docs site on BizTalk 24/7.

This is a really cool looking new resource which aggregated some of the popular blog articles and presents them in a structured format which is similar to the MSDN Library

http://blogdoc.biztalk247.com/default.aspx

My profile on BizTalk Blog Docs is: http://blogdoc.biztalk247.com/michael-stephenson

BizUnit Step to Query HAT

Michael Stephenson — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 23:11:46 GMT

I was just refactoring an orchestration today and to help me test it I wanted to query HAT to ensure the orchestration had completed successfully, BizUnit doesn't have a build in step to do this so I created my own which is easy to do thanks to the extensibility of BizUnit. I guess I could probably have used one of the BizUnit database steps and written some fiddly SQL to do this, but a new task would make this fairly reusable.

The xml to use my step is below:

</TestSetup>

<OrchestrationName>MyOrchestration</OrchestrationName>

<FailIfMore>false</FailIfMore>

<HATConnectionString>server=.;database=biztalkdtadb;integrated security=sspi;</HATConnectionString>

</TestStep>

</TestExecution>

</TestCleanup>

</TestCase>

Some key points to this XML are:

The DurationToCheckSeconds is as it says a period of time that HAT will be checked for to see if your orchestration has completed
The ExpectedNoOrchestrations allows you to indicate how many instances you expect to find from this query
OrchestrationName is the name of the orchestration you are looking for
FailIfLess allows you to indicate if an exception should be thrown by the step if it finds less than the expected number of orchestrations
FailIfMore allows you to indicate if an exception should be thrown by the step if it finds more than the expected number of orchestrations
HATConnectionString is the connection to the HAT database

In my step I will execute a query which will check for instances which started after the start of my BizUnit test (the step gets this from the BizUnit context).

In the example above im basically saying that I want to find atleast 1 instance of my orchestration completing since my test began.

As we all know HAT data sometimes takes a little while to be available. In my step depending on how you configure the settings above it will not necessarily wait the whole duration to check before confirming that the test was ok. For example In my usage above it lets me confirm that at least 1 instance is in HAT since my test begun, but I don't want to wait for ages ensuring that only 1 instance is there. Because my tests all run serially I can assume that so long as I find 1 instance then my test is good and I can continue as soon as I find it.

The code for the BizUnit step is available to download at the following link:

http://www.box.net/shared/647eo262x3

HTH

Mike