March 2010 Entries

Pekka from Frends gave me the opportunity to have a look at the beta-version of their Helium 2.0.

For all of you, who don't know the tool:

Helium is a web-application that collects management-data from BizTalk which you usually have to tediously collect yourself, like performance-data (throttling, throughput (like completed Orchestrations/hour), other perfomance-counters) and data about the state of BTS-Applications and presents the data in clearly structured diagrams and overviews which (often) even allow drill-down. 

Installing Helium 2 was quite easy. It comes as an msi-file which creates the web-application on IIS. Aditionally a windows-service is deployt which acts as an agent for sending alert-e-mails and collecting data. What I missed during installation was a link to the created web-app at the end, but the link can be found under Program Files/Frends...

On the start-page Helium shows two sections:

• An overview about the BTS-Apps (Running?, suspended messages?)
• Basic perfomance-data

You can drill-down into the BTS-Apps further, to see ReceiveLocations, Orchestrations and SendPorts. And then a very nice feature can be activated: You can set a monitor to each of the ports and/or orchestrations and have an e-mail sent when a threshold of executions/day or hour is not met. I think this is a great idea. The following screeshot shows the configuration of this option.

Conclusion:

Helium is a useful monitoring  tool for BTS-operations that might save a lot of time for collecting data, writing a tool yourself or documentation for the operations-staff where to find the data.

Pros:

• Simple installation
• Most important data for BTS-operations in one place
• Monitor for alerts, if throughput is not met
• Nice Web-UI
• Reasonable price

Cons:

• Additional Perormance-counters cannot be added

Im am not sure when the final version is to be shipped, but you can see that on Frend's homepage soon, I guess...

A trial version is available here

A WCF Service I provided took a very simple data contract as parameter (containing one string and one int...) and had a very simple task to do. A .NET 3.5 client was created using the VS2008 feature "Add Service Reference". Everything worked as expected.

Then a slight change came in: The client was expected to run on machines with .NET 2.0 only. So we set the Target  Framework to .NET 2.0, removed the references to System.ServiceModel, System.Runtime.Serialization and the ServiceReference and created a new Reference to the Service using the old "Add Web Reference" . A matter of 2 minutes.

 When testing, the int value in the data contract arriving at the WCF Service suddenly was 0, instead of 38 as we expected.

What happened? When generating an old  Web Reference on a WCF data contract an additional boolean field for each value-type field is created called [Fieldname]Specified (e.g. AgeSpecified) which defaults to "false". WCF inspects these boolean fields to determine if a value was provided for the value-type field. If the "Specified"-field is "false", WCF translates that to using the default-value of the value-type field. For int this is 0.

So we had to insert  setting the "Specified"-field  for the int-value to "true" and everything was fine again. That was what we forgot after setting the Framework-version to 2.0...