Afanaat.nl | Sander Schutten

From MSDN:

Welcome to the first edition of the Microsoft® BizTalk® Server Performance Optimizations Guide. We created this guide to provide in depth information for optimizing the performance of a BizTalk Server solution. Full end-to-end performance testing is frequently overlooked during enterprise application deployment. Knowing that Microsoft has built a scalable messaging infrastructure, many organizations that use BizTalk Server spend little or no time conducting performance testing of their own applications. BizTalk Server applications consist of many parts, which may include custom-built components as well as those provided by Microsoft. It is impossible for Microsoft to performance test every possible combination of these components. Therefore, fully and properly conducting a performance test of your application is a critical step of any deployment. The purpose of this guide is to consolidate and provide prescriptive guidance on the best practices and techniques that should be followed to optimize BizTalk Server performance.

Read more about it or get it.

From CodePlex:

BizUnit Designer is a GUI that allows rapid creation of BizUnit test cases which can be used for unit testing or system testing distributed applications. The easy to use drag and drop user interface has minimal learning curve which will get you up and running with test cases in a matter of minutes.

I’ve used BizUnit on a couple of projects (even non-BizTalk projects) and I think it’s very useful. The only thing bothering me was that I always had to edit the XML files directly (although not difficult). This designer somewhat helps you with this. Unfortunately are all the test steps very different from each-other that building a generic designer can only help a little. The UI could use some tweaks to make it easier to use. Anyway I think it’s a great initiative, although not perfect.

Get it here.

Somebody at the product team has really started a rush to push out these nice looking posters. Here is a rather new one:

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Database Infrastructure Poster
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=24662FB5-622C-4E7E-9E83-505D1F664C4D&displaylang=en

And as a service to those of you that haven’t seen anyone of these:

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Runtime Architecture Poster
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=8790E652-1DA5-4E80-88FE-B87606233DB4&displaylang=en

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Capabilities Poster
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=34F41573-C552-466F-B531-32CB09A57CDD&displaylang=en

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Scale-Out Configurations Poster
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=FF468298-64BE-4947-A086-F61584CAF995&displaylang=en

In this video, James Conard talks with John Shewchuk and Dennis Pilarinos about BizTalk Services.

In the simplest definition, BizTalk Services simplifies application connectivity by extending WCF and providing a set of hosted services. John and Dennis quickly explain BizTalk Services by discussing the challenges with building applications today. Dennis also shows four demos of BizTalk Services and then drops into Visual Studio along the way to show the programming model.

Check out the video here.

Just released (oh well, a couple of months ago), the long awaited BizTalk Server 2006 extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation SDK. Use WF modeling and host workflows in BizTalk Server. Note the BTS messaging activities in the image.

The new BizTalk Server edition will most likely sport the Workflow Designer instead of the plain old Orchestration Designer. This probably results into something that looks a lot like what you get with the extentions. With the extentions you won’t have to choose between either product at the start of a project, but you could use both instead.

Note that this release is not supported by Microsoft customer services and should be treated as an SDK sample. If you still want to use this on a project or just want to play with it, you can download it here.

�

Microsoft LoadGen 2007 generates message transmission loads to run performance and stress tests for your Microsoft BizTalk Server applications, and provides performance counters to monitor the performance of the infrastructure running BizTalk Server.

This tool is intended for developers and IT professionals to simulate load on a BizTalk Server. Using this tool, you can simulate load to instrument performance and stress against a BizTalk deployment. In addition, this tool may also be extended by developers to simulate load for custom transports. This tool should be used in a test environment only, and should not be used in a production environment. This tool is provided “as-is” and is not supported.

Get it here.

From the source:

This poster lists the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 capabilities bucketed in categories and is designed to provide both a high level and a detailed view of the capabilities and features that are included in the product. (When printed in full scale this poster size is: 35”x 32”)

Download the poster here.

If you’ve ever wanted or needed to parse Excel files using BizTalk, you can now. Some time ago FarPoint released a pipeline dissassembler component for BizTalk Server 2006 which is able to convert Excel files into XML. From their website:

Spread for BizTalk Server 2006 provides a complete solution for integrating Microsoft Excel data seamlessly into your BizTalk applications.

Spread includes a pipeline disassembler that parses Excel data (XLS, Excel 2007 XML, CSV, TXT) into XML, and a pipeline assembler that creates Excel (XLS, Excel 2007 XML) and PDF documents from XML data in BizTalk Applications.

Read more about Spread, download a trial or obtain a license here.

Remember that situation where you needed to convert a string representation of a DateTime to a valid DataTime using the BizTalk mapper? No? Well, I do. The parsing of the string as a DateTime is not the real problem here. Once you know how the string is formatted it is simply writing a way to parse it, either using substrings or using the DateTime.Parse method. Once you have a DateTime though, you need to format it to be valid according to the XSD spec. That’s exactly where DateTimes and the BizTalk mapper can give you a headache. Especially when you’re dealing with different locales under which BizTalk is running this can be quite cumbersome. There is however a good way of converting a string to a valid datetime and I’ll show you how in the following code sample:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

// We'll be using the W3cXsd2001class from the Metadata namespace
using System.Runtime.Remoting.Metadata;
 
// Parse a string as a DateTime. This could be a string coming
// from the source message.
DateTime myDateTime = DateTime.Parse("07/01/2008");
 
// This method returns the current DateTime into a xs:DateTime
string dateTimeString = W3cXsd2001.SoapDateTime.ToString( myDateTime );

Happy coding

Although the WCF adapter for BizTalk Server 2006 R2 has been released a while ago, I found that a coworker of mine had created a simple and short video explaining all the basics of using the WCF adapter. If you haven’t used the adapter before or just want to see how easy it is to use the adapter, go see the video here.