Walter Michel

BizTalk Standard verses Enterprise

Walter Michel — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 17:32:46 GMT

When determining infrastructure requirements for a client often the question of whether to use BizTalk Standard or BizTalk Enterprise comes up. If the client is a small enterprise with limited redundancy and scaling needs the Standard Edition of BizTalk should work fine. If the client requires any redundancy or scaling then Enterprise is almost certainly necessary.

In other words if your requirements dictate that you require more than one BizTalk server you will need the Enterprise Edition of BizTalk since "BizTalk Server 2010 ENT is the only edition that supports using more than one computer to share a BizTalk Server 2010 load." As per the BizTalk Pricing and Licensing FAQ at http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/pricing-licensing-faq.aspx

WPC Services

Walter Michel — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:54:16 GMT

I started this week at WPC Services. They specialize in providing business and technical consulting services for healthcare organizations. Initially I'll be doing systems integration architecture.

Orchestration Designer Crash

Walter Michel — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 18:00:20 GMT

I recently encountered a troubling problem while creating a BizTalk 2006 R2 solution. Everything was working fine until I tried to open the Orchestration Designer to edit one of the orchestrations I had been working of for a couple of days. Visual Studio crashed immediately. I tried a few things, but I could not open any orchestration without Visual Studio crashing (no errors in event log, no dialog, nothing...). I finally fixed it by backing up and deleting my Visual Studio profile. The profile information is stored in a folder. This folder is located in C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0. I don't know what got messed up in the profile. Clearly some sort of VS/BizTalk bug.

Orchestration Breakpoints Lock Assemblies

Walter Michel — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 03:36:12 GMT

When using orchestration breakpoints, make sure you clear them all when you want to build and redeploy the solution. Any existing orchestration breakpoints will make it impossible to unload the associated assemblies from the GAC. As long as there are any breakpoints in an orchestration the updated assemblies will not be used.

This is really a bug and should be addressed.

WCF Bad Message

Walter Michel — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 22:33:53 GMT

When creating a web service using the WCF-BasicHttp adapter, make sure that you adjust the “Maximum received message size” binding configuration to jive with the size of the message you expect to hit the service. If a request is made to the web service that contains a payload that is larger than this setting, an HTTP 400 (Bad Message) error will be generated. The default maximum size is 64K, which seems a bit small.