Saravana Kumar

MVP Year #3

saravana.kumar.nospam@nospam.biztalk247.co.uk (saravana) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:00:00 +0100

I was really excited to see the email with subject line "Congratulations 2009 Microsoft MVP". This is my 3rd consecutive year as BizTalk Server MVP. I feel honoured to receive this award year after year. I would like to thank those unknown faces behind the scene who nominated me for this year. The value you get out of this program is enormous. Things like regular interaction by product group meetings, annual MVP summit which gets you closer to the dev's and architects behind the product(s), knowing the road map of the product(s), attending Software design reviews etc etc.

Apart from all these things, there is an enormous pleasure when someone drops a comment in my blog or web site saying it helped them solve so and so problem. When some unknown people recognise you in conferences and user group meetings and prize your work.

Simply its great!!

Saravana.

BizTalk 247 blogDoc Update #8

saravana.kumar.nospam@nospam.biztalk247.co.uk (saravana) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 08:42:05 +0100

Update #8 for http://blogdoc.biztalk247.com Contributors: 99, Articles Count: 907

Articles Updated:

Clint Huffman

Clint Huffman's Windows Performance Blog

Microsoft BizTalk Server Explained in Simple Terms

BizTalk Server/Getting Started

Helpful PowerShell One-Liners

BizTalk Server/Development/Power Shell

Microsoft BizTalk Database Tips for Microsoft SQL Server DBA's

BizTalk Server/Database

BizTalk Artifact Duration Aggregations

BizTalk Server/Performance

How to use the PAL Tool for BizTalk Performance Analysis

BizTalk Server/Performance

Some Cool Perf Analysis Tool I Recently Discovered

BizTalk Server/Performance

The Need for a Performance Analysis of Logs Tool

BizTalk Server/Performance

BizTalk Admin Console Fails with DTC Failures

BizTalk Server/Administration

Richard Hallgren

Gobbledygooks by Richard Hallgren

Running MSBuild scripts from Visual Studio

BizTalk Server/Development/Developer Tools/Visual Studio

Tips and tricks on BizTalk generated SOAP Web Services

BizTalk Server/Development/Tips

How the extend a custom Xslt in BizTalk using EXSLT and the Mvp.Xml project

BizTalk Server/Development/Maps

Handle the "bodyTypeAssemblyQualifiedName" SOAP Adapter bug in MSBuild as a RegEx ninja

BizTalk Server/Development/WebService

Efficient grouping and debatching of big files using BizTalk 2006

BizTalk Server/Development/Large Message

Removing XML namespaces - revisit

BizTalk Server/Development/Encoding

BAM ate my XML declaration!

BizTalk Server/Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)

Better performance in batch imports to SQL Server using BizTalk

BizTalk Server/Performance

Using BizUnitExtensions to poke around in some XML

BizTalk Server/Testing/BizUnit

Ashish Mehndi

A BULL's view of LIFE and TECHNOLOGY

Using BizTalk Oracle Adapter - NativeSQL

BizTalk Server/Development/Adapters/Enterprise Adapters (SAP, Oracle etc)

Conceptual Diagram of Dynamics AX and BizTalk Integration

BizTalk Server/Related Technologies/Microsoft Dynamics AX

Microsoft BizTalk Server and Microsoft Dynamics AX Integration - Part 1 - Configuring Microsoft Dynamics AX ? Application Integration Framework (AIF) for Integration with BizTalk

BizTalk Server/Related Technologies/Microsoft Dynamics AX

Microsoft BizTalk Server and Microsoft Dynamics AX Integration - Part 2 - Send Data from BizTalk to Dynamics AX

BizTalk Server/Related Technologies/Microsoft Dynamics AX

Microsoft BizTalk Server and Microsoft Dynamics AX Integration - Part 4.1 - Error Handling with BizTalk Administration

BizTalk Server/Related Technologies/Microsoft Dynamics AX

SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009 - Book Review

saravana.kumar.nospam@nospam.biztalk247.co.uk (saravana) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 05:27:00 +0100

I was contacted by [PACKT] publishing to give a reviews of the book SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009, in order to do so they also send me a free copy of the book. Instead of glimpsing through the book and writing a brief review within couple of days, I took nearly 2 months till I completed reading the whole book, before writing this review. This review is purely based on my experience reading the book and not influenced by any external factors.

Reader Level:
In my opinion this book will be suitable for novice BizTalk user to Advanced BizTalk user.

Rating:
My overall rating for this book will be 3.5 out of 5.

First of all the title of the book itself is so appealing, Richard picked up two hot topics (SOA + BizTalk) and made an interesting title. This is the first book released with the heading BizTalk Server 2009, hence it will be obvious from the readers they expect new stuff from BizTalk 2009 explained in the book.

Chapter 1: BizTalk Introduction:
Users with basic understanding of BizTalk Server can skip this chapter. You need an introduction to the book, it will be hard to jump into advanced topic without setting the base.

Chapter 2 and 3 : BizTalk Server and WCF:
Users with basic understanding of BizTalk Server and WCF (if you have consumed/published WCF services in BizTalk), can skip these chapters.

SOA is an architectural style, its all about the way people build software rather than they go and buy something off the shelf. Even though SOA can be build without any Web Services, often people relate SOA with web services and majority of the times web services acts as key building blocks/foundations in order to take the enterprise SOA ready.

When we are talking about web services in Microsoft stack, it maps directly to the usage of Windows communication Foundation (WCF) as a single unified development platform for building distributed applications.

Usage of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) inside BizTalk was brought main stream from BizTalk Server 2006 R2. Unfortunately there are no books published specially for "R2" and hence none of the available BizTalk books explained anything about WCF. Readers purely relied on bunch of online articles, blog posts and product documentation to learn and understand BizTalk and WCF. Richard broken that barrier by dedicating 2 chapters of the book talking purely about BizTalk and WCF. He also explains the Asynchronous messaging pattern, WCF and BizTalk in Chapter 6 of the book. The chapters provides a well guided tour of WCF-BizTalk.

Chapter 9 - WCF SQL Adapter, Chapter 10 - UDDI Service, Chapter 11 - ESB Guidance 2.0:
In my opinion these chapters are more like stand alone articles rather than a chapters in the book. They are isolated on their own rights and explain the topic. Chapter 9 explains all about WCF SQL Adapter, this is the best piece of content I've seen for WCF SQL Adapter. Chapter 10, introduces readers to UDDI Service V3 and explains how you can set it up and start consuming it. Chapter 11, introduces readers to the ESB Guidance 2.0 (renamed to ESB Toolkit 2.0 after the release of the book). It explains the basics of Error handling framework, itineraries, various web services that comes as part of the tool kit. Chapter 9 and 10 gives a quick start to UDDI and ESB Toolkit. I personally reverted back to these chapters, when the ESB Toolkit 2.0 was released to get started.

Readers can jump into these chapters directly, without reading any part of the book, which is good in a way. If in case you don?t have the book you can read these chapters online

New SOA Capabilities in BizTalk Server 2009: WCF SQL Server Adapter

New SOA Capabilities in BizTalk Server 2009: UDDI Services

Chapters 4 to 8:
These chapters are the key ones explaining the relationship between BizTalk Server and SOA principles. In these chapters Richard explains some of the key SOA concepts like Canonical Schemas, message exchange patterns, schema/end point versioning, loose coupling, abstraction, etc. Advanced BizTalk users might feel some of the basic concepts of BizTalk server architecture like Publish/Subscribe, supports for schemas, rules engine, direct binding ports in Orchestration service consumption/publishing etc are directly mapped to SOA concepts and reading those pages more of a refresher rather than something new. But the writing does the justice to the book title, linking SOA concepts and BizTalk concepts.

Chapters 12:
In this short chapter, Richard glimpsed through Dublin, .NET Services and Oslo giving users some hint about, what's coming out of Connected Systems division at Microsoft.

Conclusion:
SOA and BizTalk are two complicated subjects, if I say everything related to these topics are explained in this 375 page book, then its not fair. In fact I'm currently reading the book Web Service Contract - Design and Versioning (http://www.soabooks.com/book.asp?book=soa_web_service&page=overview) 800+ pages book dedicated purely for contracts. Richard had put his fair share introducing readers to some of the core SOA principles, explaining some of the new stuff in BizTalk 2009 and creating a link between some of the well known concepts in BizTalk Server to SOA principles. Overall this book is a good read, some of the advanced BizTalk users may find some of the chapters more of a refreshing read rather than learning something new. I need to praise the way Richard had composed this book, if you enjoyed reading his blog, you'll enjoy reading this book as well.

Nandri!
Saravana

Windows 7 - Download status straight on your taskbar button

saravana.kumar.nospam@nospam.biztalk247.co.uk (saravana) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 19:10:00 +0100

This is neat! while downloading some large content this morning I've noticed the following scene in my taskbar : Download status showing directly on the taskbar button.

BizTalk 247 blogDoc Update #7

saravana.kumar.nospam@nospam.biztalk247.co.uk (saravana) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:27:00 +0100

It's almost 2 months since Update #6, that's mainly due to the release of revamped http://www.biztalk247.com. Let me re-instantiate the series with our own EDI hero Eric Stott.

Update #7 for http://blogdoc.biztalk247.com Contributors: 97, Articles Count: 885

Articles Updated:

Eric Stott

Event Log Monitor

BizTalk Server/Development/Developer Tools/Community Tools

BizTalk Message to System.String in BizTalk Server 2006

BizTalk Server/Development/Tips

BizTalk FTP/FTPS (FTP over SSL or FTP-SSL) Adapter

BizTalk Server/Development/Adapters/FILE, FTP

Retrieving error information from HIPAA accelerator

BizTalk Server/Development/Adapters/Enterprise Adapters (SAP, Oracle etc)

Replace any String or Character Pipeline Component - Regex Version

BizTalk Server/Development/Pipelines, Pipeline Components

Error details: Unable to read the stream produced by the pipeline. Details: Cannot find definition for the input: {Record, Element, or Attribute}

BizTalk Server/Development/Maps

Extract the iteration from a repeating loop designated by a certain qualifier

BizTalk Server/Development/Maps

Extracting data from a sub loop - two ways to accomplish the task

BizTalk Server/Development/Maps

Hierarchical Level Numbering in BizTalk Map

BizTalk Server/Development/Maps

Order Elements Even if They Aren't Present

BizTalk Server/Development/Maps

Preserve Order while mapping

BizTalk Server/Development/Maps

Connecting to Sybase via Scripting Functoid using a VB.NET Class

BizTalk Server/Development/Functoids

AS2 pipeline components can?t run under 64 bit mode