Tuesday, June 19, 2007
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I've made the switch over to Microsoft Consulting Services from my previous employer, so my blog will be moving!
Please check out my new blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/neilth
Thursday, December 21, 2006
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In short, YES you should cluster the service if possible.
I have seen lots of posts on this and I think that some recent problems with SSO clustering (see my post here for fixes) may have caused people to shy away from it. If you are running SQL on a cluster, then you may as well tack on another clustered service and have that much more protection. If you are not running SQL in a cluster then clustering the Master Secret Server will probably not make much of a difference for you!
I recently resolved this issue for a client but I suspect that many people have it due to some incorrect documentation regarding the installation of a clustered Master Secret Server.
The Problem:
SSO Master Secret server fails to start after failing over to second cluster node.
Saturday, December 09, 2006
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Now that notepad is 20+ years old I guess Microsoft decided to beef it up a little. XML Notepad 2007 is the new kid on the block and it is a nice little tool. I will probably keep on using XmlSpy and the BizTalk Editor for schema creation, but I'll give a go at using XML Notepad to create those pesky instance documents for test submissions to my orchestrations.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
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BizTalk 2006 seems to have a deployment quirk that has been no small source of frustration for me. I don't know if this is widespread or if I just have a bad install but it seems that whenever I change a port (add a port or remove a port) I get an error similar to the following:
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
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I decided to whip up a quick prototype of FailedMessage subscription in BizTalk 2006 and I ended up hitting a couple of bumps in the road on my first shot. I'm the kind that does not stop and ask for directions, nor do I take the time to look at samples. I try to do it on my own, and failing that, I'll hit the blogs. All of that with a couple of trial and error sessions produced the following notes that I will use when trying this again:
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
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When trying to create a web reference to an existing web service you may see one or both of the following messages
Unabled to create web reference
Failed to create web rererence
If you see these messages (or similar messages), open up the source code (if you have it) from the service that you are trying to consume. Examine the attributes of the webmethods. See if there is a “Name” attribute on the methods, and remove it if there is. After you have done this you should be able to create
Friday, July 21, 2006
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Uncaught exception (see the 'inner exception' below) has suspended an instance of service ''.
The service instance will remain suspended until administratively resumed or terminated.
If resumed the instance will continue from its last persisted state and may re-throw the same unexpected exception.
InstanceId:
Shape name:
ShapeId:
Exception thrown from: segment -1, progress -1
Inner exception: Multi-part message 'Sql_response' has body part 'BodyPart
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
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This will be a semi-fictitious case study. In using MOM 2005 to recover an errant SQL port. This scenario is common and I've been asked about it a lot. This approach is the simple meat and potatoes process. There are lots of areas that could be polished up but that kind of thing can clutter up an article with too much detail.
Thursday, July 20, 2006
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I recently tried to validate a time input on an ASP.NET form and I didn't manage to find a good regular expression on the net for the times I was trying to validate. I call these “natural times” becaues it's the way that most north americans write time. (12 hr clock, with : and whitespace separators). This won't take UTC dates or 24 hr times that I know of but it works well (so far) with the .Tostring(”t”) short time representation of times.
As fate would have it, I'm going to be delving back into MOM 2005. I figure I may as well blog on it, so I've added it as another category. I'll be talking about MOM 2005 within the context of MOM monitoring BizTalk Server 2006. There are of course, many other applications but I'll start focused and try to be alot of use to a small group of people.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
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For those of you looking to get started with Team System, the price is almost certainly a barrier. Also, it is more complicated to setup because of all the plumbing in the background. If you have the MSDN subscription, there is actually a fully installed version of Visual Studio Team Suite (VSTS) on a virtual server. It comes in two pieces and takes a long time to download, but it's still faster than trying to set it up for yourself. For those of you without MSDN, sorry, you're stuck scroundin
Thursday, June 08, 2006
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I've been posting pretty consistently into the artices BizTalk / .NET/ VS etc. I'm adding one for the UIPAB (User Interface Application Block) from Microsoft. Wow! How can one component be so great and suck so bad at the same time? I'll see what I can do to help you out on that by posting my pain and corresponding medecine.
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
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All apologies for being so silent in July, but that's what happens with deadlines in early August. I'll be bloggin again shortly and I have a bunch of BizTalk related recommendations... hope you see you all back again soon and thanks for the patience.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
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After repeated attempts to distribute information to team members, junior programmers, colleagues and others....I've decided to simply to blog it all and let anyone who is interested (or those that I can compel :) read it on their own.