At the moment I’m working with a customer who also is using BizTalk Server 2006. This post blogs about why moving to BizTalk Server 2009 R2. Not all the reasons apply to the customer I’m working with, but a lot does: like pricing, WCF, also ESB, easy usage of BAM (2009 will also suit), but most important: end-of-life mainstream support. Another reason not mentioned is implementing a new architecture. When your organization is at the start of implementing a new architecture, why not use the latest technology? (as an answer on my own question: pricing 
/ business case). What also a problem can be to migrate: all old interfaces must be migrated to a new environment, build, tested and deployed, without interfering the ongoing business. So all interfaces must work as they did before. Another good reason for developers is that they can work with the latest technology, so that they don’t stay in an old environment and are triggered to renew and keep in touch with new development.
Category Archives: BPI
Reference: Reasons for moving from BizTalk Server 2006 to BizTalk Server 2009 R2
Reference ‘“Route Failed Messages” routes the wrong message – really?’
The BizTalk Team Blog blogged about routing wrong messages. A detailed description of the BizTalk process is described when a message can’t be processed (no subscriber). Techniques used: “Route Failed Messages”, “SuspendMessageOnRoutingFailure” and “Recoverable Interchange”. See the complete post here.
Reference “BizTalk: Compensation Model”
Respect for Leonid Ganeline for writing a great detailed article on the compensation model within BizTalk Server. You can read it here.
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 SP1
Microsoft published SP1 for BizTalk Server 2006 R2. You can find it here.
From the Microsoft site:
Better reliability, performance, and scale for the following key features:
- Throttling and dehydration of orchestrations.
- Archiving and purging operations.
- BAM alerts and archiving.
- HIPAA.
- Reduced memory consumption in scenarios using scripting functoids.
- Improvement in the bts_FindSubscription stored proc, resulting in faster execution and lower CPU utilization.
Better management and deployment experiences:
- Performance and user experience improvements of key scenarios.
- WCF configuration management.
- Significant improvement in deployment time for send ports using a map.
Improved support:
- X12 and EDIFACT updates.
- Increased footprint of supported FTP servers and locale.
- XMLDocument message types in orchestrations.
- Configurable timeout for Basic HTTP.
- WCF adaptor now suspends messages instead of terminating when the host instance is stopped.
- Configurable transaction timeout for WCF Adaptors.
- Mapping of inline schema for SQL Adaptor now allows for using $ characters as part of the updategram.
- The SQL Adaptor now supports calling from a BizTalk Server dynamic send port. The following properties can be set on the call to the dynamic port:
Connection string (all the SQL connection properties)
Document Target Namespace
Response Document Root Element- Ability to disable generation of Routing Failure Report.
- Fixes to some issues that used to cause high CPU usage by BizTalk Server hosts due to certain .NET updates.
- Ability to use multiple certificates for signing outbound messages.
- Message Pack 2009.
- Message property tracking with BAM for all messages in the interchange, irrespective of the usage of pipeline or mapping.
- Integrated tracing to help in debugging EDI specific issues. This improvement is aimed at reducing the time taken for diagnosing and isolating an EDI problem.
New Features:
- For WCF-Custom and WCF-CustomIsolated Adapters, the ability to look up custom bindings from locations other than machine.config.
- Support for using multiple certificates to sign outgoing AS2 messages.
“The type System.Xml.XmlDocument may not be used in this context”
We received this message. It was clear it had to do something with the SOAP call and the message type was not set. This can have several reasons: schemas not deployed correctly, target namespace wrong, root name wrong, etc. The SOAP adapter must be able to find the corresponding schema for serializing. In our case we forgot to enter the proxy assembly, type name and the method to use (created a new two-way send port instead of a one-way send port). This proxy assembly holds knowledge on the schema to use.
Error message:
General exception soap Microsoft.XLANGs.Core.XlangSoapException: An error occurred while processing the message, refer to the details section for more information
Message ID: {8E2E044D-EA52-4006-9F1C-32A25DC2A2AC}
Instance ID: {5FCED1F3-8D45-430C-B45F-A77E7D0E46CE}
Error Description: SoapException: Server was unable to process request. —> There was an error generating the XML document. —> The type System.Xml.XmlDocument may not be used in this context.
at Microsoft.BizTalk.XLANGs.BTXEngine.BTXPortBase.VerifyTransport(Envelope env, Int32 operationId, Context ctx)
at Microsoft.XLANGs.Core.Subscription.Receive(Segment s, Context ctx, Envelope& env, Boolean topOnly)
at Microsoft.XLANGs.Core.PortBase.GetMessageId(Subscription subscription, Segment currentSegment, Context cxt, Envelope& env, CachedObject location)
at DTAOrderMessaging.ProcessOrder.segment2(StopConditions stopOn)
at Microsoft.XLANGs.Core.SegmentScheduler.RunASegment(Segment s, StopConditions stopCond, Exception& exp)
Proxy configuration:
Question raised on my site: does BizTalk hold history/information on changed configuration items with a timestamp and user?
Or must we dive in the SQL logs, or must we capture it our self? (didn’t do any investigation on this part)
Extending a BizTalk ESB Toolkit On-Ramp into the Cloud: a demo by Brian Loesgen
Brian Loesgen created a great demo on the Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus. This demo showed also some features (combinations) of Business Rule Engine, ESB Toolkit, InfoPath and SharePoint.
You can find the video here.
Installing BizTalk Server 2009 on Windows 7
Normally I’m developing on a Windows Server system. But within our company we are moving as developers to Windows 7, because we segregate our duties to some other disciplines (like testing and building packages). I still like working on a server machine, because I will run into problems which also can occur in a production environment. On a Windows 7 machine I have to trust my colleagues that they will test everything (sorry guys 
). Note: I wouldn’t have a problem when our integration test server machine was part of the daily build (so automated integration tests). Nice discussion. Leave some comments on how you feel about this.
Back to installing BizTalk Server 2009 on Windows 7. The setup runs smoothly, BUT if you want to use the BAM portal then it is possible that you receive the next screen:
In my case it had to do with my 64-bit system. The BAM portal runs in 32 bit mode. To make this work do the following:
Enable IIS 6 compatibility mode via Windows features (Control Panel –> Programs and Features).
Start a command prompt as an Administrator:
Execute the next command: cscript.exe c:\Inetpub\AdminScripts\adsutil.vbs set W3SVC/AppPools/Enable32BitAppOnWin64 1
Continue the BizTalk Server 2009 Configuration tool. Now you can select the BAM Portal Web Site (default or another one).
Best wishes for 2010 and happy BizTalk-ing!!!
BTUG Netherlands: 19th of January
The next BTUG is on the 19th of January in Amstelveen. They have made an interesting agenda:
Wouter Krooy – BizTalk 2009 + ESBT 2.0 in an event driven architecture
Martin Rienstra – Making orchestrations robust
Dick Dijkstra – live SAP-demo
Patrick Wellink – Best practices in the BizTalk Software Factory from Logica
Presentation about Healthcare and BizTalk Accelerator for HL7 (EN)
I placed an English version of this presentation on this site. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions or remarks. Click here.
Cheers Gerben
