3/30/2010 Challenges of supporting a high volume production BizTalk environment

Posted at: 3/30/2010 at 7:24 AM by saravana
It's one of the common scenarios, there is a sudden surge in your business and number of transactions increases drastically for a period of time. Modern business solutions are not standalone applications. In a SOA/BPM scenario there will be "n" number of layers (applications) work together to form a business solutions. So, during this sudden surge, if a single layer (application) malfunctions - its going to bring the whole end to end process in trouble. We were hit with... [More]
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2/23/2010 Microsoft BizTalk Server vNext (after 2009 R2) - Feature Request

Posted at: 2/23/2010 at 5:33 PM by saravana
I opened up a thread in StackOverflow for this, here is the link http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2320274/microsoft-biztalk-server-vnext-after-2009-r2-feature-request and here is the text "All, This post is not a question; it's more of asking for feed back and future request. The product team is always looking for feed back to facilitate the future direction of the product. Some of us as BizTalk Server MVP's/partners get that privilege to work with the product team closely to give our... [More]
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11/7/2008 BizTalk MAP : Suppress element in output, if its not present in input.

Posted at: 11/7/2008 at 1:45 PM by saravana
I have seen this question being asked in news group often. It's something very trivial to do in BizTalk map using the value mapping functoid, which returns the value of the second parameter if the value of the first parameter is true. Hope this picture will explain how to do it. Note: make sure the logical existence functoid is first parameter in Value Mapping functoid. Sometime based on how you dragged the labels, the order might be wrong. Nandri Saravana
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11/5/2008 Dealing with web services returning byte[] in BizTalk

Posted at: 11/5/2008 at 11:51 AM by saravana
Recently I saw some postings in the BizTalk newsgroup asking how we can handle web service operation that returns a byte[]. Even though it’s a trivial task, you need to be aware of certain things. Below is my simple web service operation, which returns a byte[]. For simplicity, I just got this one operation which can return either a simple string, or some form of xml or some binary data . When you invoke your web service from Internet explorer, you’ll get the result something similar to the ... [More]
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11/3/2008 Silverlight on top of BAM data

Posted at: 11/3/2008 at 5:36 PM by saravana
I always got some affection towards the UI and design technologies as a hobbyist. Even though I'm working as a full time BizTalk consultant for a while now, in each and every project I kind of introduced a web project for some sort of monitoring/configuration type of work. In my current project, I decided to use Silverlight on top of BAM database to create some cool management graphs. The below figure shows the screen shot of our services dashboard, giving all kind of information in ... [More]
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8/27/2008 Renaming your BizTalk machine

Posted at: 8/27/2008 at 6:04 PM by saravana
Anyone who been working on BizTalk server long enough will know renaming a BizTalk machine is not a trivial task. It always involves quite a bit of manual work, things like Un-configure the existing setting either using the UI or ConfigFramework /U switch Deleting the Databases manually, Re-Configuring it, which will raise tons of errors. It's never been a smooth procedure. Recently I had to go through this painful process, because due to corporate policy changes, they ren... [More]
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8/26/2008 Multiple Isolated Host (Host Instances) - Multiple Virtual directories - different adapters, what are the rules?

Posted at: 8/26/2008 at 3:02 PM by saravana
If your BizTalk solution is mainly relying on HTTP/SOAP adapter (we are still in BTS 2006 - no WCF yet), you'll soon see weird errors popping up due to BizTalk isolated host instances / IIS Application pool  configuration. The most common one you'll encounter is this The Messaging Engine could not find the receive location for URI:"/XXX_VirtualDirectory/Service.asmx".\ Please verify the receive location exists and is enabled. And the most important but annoy... [More]
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8/13/2008 How to encrypt sections within BtsNtsvc.exe.config file?

Posted at: 8/13/2008 at 7:35 AM by saravana
It’s one of the common requirements in some of the projects I've worked on to put some kind of configuration information in the BizTalk config file, things like appSettings, connectionString etc. Majority of the time it will be ok to leave the value in plain text inside the xml based config file (for example by using integrated authentication connection string instead of providing username/password), and designing in the way so that you don’t put sensitive information inside the config file. Bu... [More]
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8/11/2008 BizTalk Config file and 32bit-64bit host instances mixed server.

Posted at: 8/11/2008 at 11:34 AM by saravana
When you install 64 bit version of BizTalk sever, the application installation folder will have 2 BizTalk configuration files. 1. BtsNTSvc.exe.config, and 2. BtsNTSvc64.exe.config. Nowadays most of the production BizTalk servers will be running on 64 bit versions of software (Operating system, BizTalk, SQL etc). In majority of the situation you'll be only using the 64 bit in-process host instances on the server. In that case all your custom configuration should be placed in... [More]
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7/18/2008 How can I find the installed hotfixes on the server/workstation?

Posted at: 7/18/2008 at 9:47 AM by saravana
Looks like a silly question, but recently I struggled to find the installed hot fixes on our server. We install certain hotfixes on all of our BizTalk server. One of the critical ones is http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=943165 to solve the high CPU usage on a 64 bit machine. Like any other normal person I opened the "Control Panel\Add Remove Programs" and  to my surprise I didn't see any entry about the hotfixes (I can see one or two .NET framework related hot fixes, which... [More]
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