Saravana Kumar

BizTalk360 - Version 3.2.36 released

saravana — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 07:28:22 +0000

London, 7th Feb 2012. We are happy to announce the immediate availability of version 3.2. We have been working on this version for the past 6 months. We branched off couple of months prior to our earlier 2.5 release to work on this version. We released our first public beta on 1st of December 2011. We were planning to go live on 1st week of January, but delayed it by 5 weeks to squeeze in few more features along with this release. Here are the top features added to this release

DOWNLOAD LINK : http://www.biztalk360.com/Content/Download.aspx

1. Tracking Data

Now users can query tracking data directly from BizTalk360, you can query Tracked service instances and Tracked message events. It comes with a rich query building capabilities as shown below. BizTalk360 also allows to restrict users from accessing tracking data, thanks to it's fine grained authorization module. User can also view the tracked message content and context properties. User's can be restricted from viewing tracked message content.

2. Graphical Message Flow viewer

This is one of the most anticipated feature for this release, for the first time user can visualize the message flow within your environment. The legend shows incoming message, message with subscription, and outgoing message. Users can rearrange the drawing, zoom in-out, select the link to get clear message flow in complex scenarios. Detailed article, Read More information

3. Throttling Analyser

Another exciting feature for this release, throttling analyser ease to understand the throttling behaviour in the BizTalk environment, user don't need to have any deep BizTalk knowledge to understand throttling. Users can get near real time visibility of throttling conditions in the environment and plan for capacity and SLA's. Last 7 days worth of throttling data preserved for history. Read More information. Watch these videos: 1. Understand Throttling, 2. Throttling Analyser

4. SMS/Text alert capability

BizTalk360 now comes with inbuilt SMS/Text message capability. We built our own SMS gateway deployed in Windows Azure (High Availability with multiple instances), so that users don't need to worry about 3rd party integrations. Easy to configure. Note: Pricing yet to be decided, paid customers get free service until 30th April 2012. Read more information

5. Tracking Manager

Tracking manager allows user to view all the artifacts tracking setting for an application in one single view, it helps to visualize the tracking configuration. Tracking got certain level of performance impact, so it's important to turn off unnecessary ones

6. Advanced Event Viewer Enhancements

We enhanced the advanced event viewer for security and performance reasons (to address this issue). Now the super user can configure the logs and sources required to be collected, rather than collecting the complete list. This improves performance and also adds security benefit by not showing everything in the server to support people.

7. Performance/Stability/MSI improvements

We worked hard on improving the performance of BizTalk360, we introduced aspect oriented programming techniques to cache information that doesn't change frequently (ex: topology, database settings, server settings, license verification, user access policies etc.). We also improved the stability of BizTalk360, we addressed all the customer related bugs in this release. We also made huge improvements to the MSI package. The MSI package now understands database versioning and supports upgrades from previous versions (3.1 beta onwards).

We hope you enjoy using all these features and provide better support/monitoring capabilities to your own organisation or customers. If you got any queries please feel free to contact us via http://www.biztalk360.com/Content/Contact.aspx

Nandri!
Saravana Kumar
Founder/CTO - BizTalk360

http://www.biztalk360.com | http://support.biztalk360.com
@biztalk360 | http://facebook.com/biztalk360 | http://getsatisfaction.com/biztalk360

BizTalk360 - We are hiring - Looking for 2 outgoing BizTalk developers in India

saravana — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 05:35:15 +0000

Last month we setup our India development/support centre based in Coimbatore, Tamilnadu, India. The main aim of the team in India is to focus primarily on testing and supporting BizTalk360. Now we wanted to expand that operation with future development/R&D work for BizTalk360. We are looking for 2 experienced BizTalk developers in India to join our team.

About the job:

As with all jobs at a small startup, the basic criteria is you must be prepared to do variety of things. We promise you'll learn lot of things, which you typically don't learn in big corporate environments. We need help in three areas (at least at this stage)

1. Maintain, support and improve BizTalk360: BizTalk360 is used by customers world wide covering wide geographic area, so we are looking for someone who are happy to talk to customers, understand their problems and willing to help them.

2. Work on future R&D of BizTalk360: From time to time we either get ideas from our existing customers, community or our own ideas in the pipeline. You must be capable of converting those ideas into nice little modules within BizTalk360.

3. Automate the regression testing tasks: We wanted to fully automate and enhance our regressing testing capability. At the moment we got some automated and some manually, it basically delays the release cycle.

About you:

This is a job for multi-talented person: You need to be a BizTalk expert, a tech support, a developer, a tester, a document writer and sometimes sales/marketing guy all at once.

You must have worked minimum 5 years in .NET, C#. 2 years in BizTalk
You like to work in a challenging startup rather than a boring corporate world.
You have real world experience as a BizTalk developer
You know what most of these terms mean: WCF, Adapter, Pipeline, Schema, Orchestration, BAM, Tracking, Team foundation server, MSBuild, Unit testing, Host, Host instance, SSL?.you get the idea
If you are familiar with front-end technologies like asp.net, Silverlight, HTML5 it's a bonus
You stand out among your peers for your communication skills. Past experiences speaking in public, writing blogs/articles, doing direct customer support are a BIG plus
You are looking for a job that will let you use ALL of your talents and develop new ones
You are self motivated and set you own schedule. Basically you don't need a manager to tell what you need to do.
You have an unquenchable thirst for learning
You are not scared by this list: you know that you can rise to the occasion and fill the gaps if given the chance and time
You are willing to work in Coimbatore.

What we can do for you:

For the right candidate we are prepared to pay above average market rates. We are also working on a profit sharing program for the employees. We guarantee you to give a environment where you can learn and grow. You also will get a chance to work with some of the industry leaders in BizTalk. We promise to train and groom you.

IMPORTANT: if you've read so far and are thinking: this isn't for me, please think for a moment about someone else you know who'd be perfect for this job and pass them this link! Even if you're not totally sure, we'd be super-grateful if you could send out an email or two.

How to apply:

Simply send us your CV to contact@biztalk360.com with subject: CV: Your Name and a small note saying why we should hire you?

Nandri!

Saravana Kumar

BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns Book Review

saravana — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:15:30 +0000

Patterns and Practices are very critical in any software development project. Problems tend to recur, and we tend to solve them time and time again. Over time we tend to address these problems in a more and more elegant way. Understanding the common patterns and solutions that's already been widely in the industry greatly increases the chances of success for any solution.

That's exactly what Dan Rosanova attempted to address in his book BizTalk Serve 2010 patterns. He is a good friend of mine from the MVP community and I can safely attest he is a knowledgeable guy when it comes to BizTalk Server.

In this book Dan provided a thorough introduction to Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010, covering breadth of the product in the first half of the book. In the second half of the book Dan has taken a real world scenario and embarked on the process of adapting BizTalk Server 2010 with interesting patterns and best practices.

The book also covers the breadth of the BizTalk solution life cycle right from defining Visual Studio solution structure to disaster recovery and administration. Various topologies, clustering options, etc are covered.

As the heading suggests various patterns like convoys, zombies, parallel processing, broker pattern etc are explained in detail. I'll highly recommend this book for anyone starting to look into BizTalk Server. A success of the product will depend on the level of documentation and resources available. In that sense, it really exciting time to be in BizTalk world with the list of books that's came in 2011

and the line up for 2012.

-Saravana

BizTalk360 - 3 great features added to the upcoming 3.1 version

saravana — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 06:26:44 +0000

We released version 3.1 beta on 1st of December 2011. Two of the main functionalities we introduced in the beta were

Graphical Message Flow Viewer, and
SMS/Text alerting capability

in addition to the various minor improvements and bug fixes. Since then we been focusing on 3 super cool features silently. As always we are super excited to show the world what they are.

Throttling analyser
Tracking manager
Enhanced Advanced event viewer

Note: RTM version number will be 3.2. Estimated release date 31st of January

Throttling analyser:

Throttling is one of the cool at the same time complicated technical bit in BizTalk Server. Majority of the time, people struggle to understand what throttling is and how it's working. You really need to have a deep technical understanding of BizTalk internals to understand throttling. Even experienced BizTalk people struggle to constantly keep up with the values of throttling state on top of their head (ex: 4-process memory, 5- system memory, 10 - user override etc.). BizTalk360 throttling analyser helps to resolve this issue by giving visual representation of the throttling condition in a near real time basis. We'll shortly be releasing a demo video, stay tuned to see the full capabilities.

Tracking Manager

One of important aspect of a middleware platform like BizTalk server is it's ability to track information flowing through the system. Tracking comes with a performance cost and it's important you choose your tracking strategy correctly. In some instances we have seen customers switching off tracking completely at environment level for performance. BizTalk360 tracking manager gives you a visual representation of your tracking configuration at application level as shown below. This helps administrators to visualize the tracking configuration easily.

Advanced Event Viewer (AEV)

BizTalk360 AEV collects all the event log information in the BizTalk environment and persist in the BizTalk360 SQL database (zero configuration required). This give the ability for the user to query it from a central console. AEV was in BizTalk360 from day1, based on various customer feedbacks we enhanced it completely in the upcoming release. In previous version, AEV monitoring service blindly collected all the event log information, which resulted in lot of unnecessary data and unusual database growth issue. In the new release, super user can configure which logs and event sources to collect. This increases performance, at the same time security. You can eliminate certain confidential event not displayed to your support staff.

If you are interested to get your hands on, please drop us an email at contact@biztalk360.com

Nandri!

Saravana Kumar

http://www.biztalk360.com | http://support.biztalk360.com
@biztalk360 | http://facebook.com/biztalk360 | http://getsatisfaction.com/biztalk360

BizTalk360 - 2011 Recap

saravana — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 03:46:09 +0000

2011 was an exciting year for us here at BizTalk360. We have grown from initial version to fully matured product with customers in 5 countries. Let's a take time machine of 2011 for BizTalk360

December 2010 - Just few days before new year we have shown the very first version of the product to our close MVP friends Yossi Dahan and Michael Stephenson in Pizza Express in Richmond London. At this point we have already spent 10 months building BizTalk360.

March 2011 - MVP Summit. We demonstrated the polished version of the product to wider audience and to the Microsoft BizTalk product team in Seattle, Microsoft Campus. Opened private beta.

May 2011 - First public CTP. We released the first public CTP of BizTalk360 available for general public. Product demonstrated in London Connected Systems User group

June 2011 -

BizTalk360 introduced to audience of Sweden BizTalk User group meeting, where Kent Weare and Richard Seroter presented a session to promote their new book Microsoft BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration

Capabilities of BizTalk360 presented to Dutch BizTalk User group meeting in Almere, Netherlands
Demonstrated the capabilities of BizTalk360 accessing on-premise BizTalk environment using AppFabric Service Bus

July 2011 - V1 Go live. The first version of the product went live on 3rd of July.

August 2011 -

Version 2.1 released with monitoring/alerting capabilities
Our blog readers count crossed 6,000 readers. Given the niche market for BizTalk server with around 10,000 customers world wide, we are honoured to achieve this number after 7 years hard work.
We received the cheque for our first customer from Hong Kong.

September 2011 - We presented BizTalk360 to Danish BizTalk user group in Copenhagen, Denmark.

October 2011 -

Version 2.5 released, covering some of the core capabilities like Role based security, Message Box Viewer Integration, Knowledgebase repository, Improved monitoring/notification etc
We presented a hour long session to around 80 people (sold out) in Stockholm, A Lap Around BizTalk 360.
5 hours one-to-one chat with Charles Young. It was a great pleasure to meet Charles Young and have a energetic talk over coffee for 5 hours.

November 2011 -

Introduction of BizTalk360 Graphical Message Flow viewer functionality.
Announcement of Version 3.1 (BETA), main functionalities including Graphical Message Flow viewer, SMS/Text capabilities, Tracking Data Queries, MSI improvements and bug fixes

December 2011 -

BizTalk360 attains "Works with Windows Server 2008 R2" batch from Microsoft Platform ready program
We presented a live meeting session to Phoenix Connected Systems User group about BizTalk360.
We got customers across 5 countries including USA, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Hong Kong.
Our blog readers count crossed 7,000 readers
Kovai limited qualified to receive Microsoft Silver partner for ISV (Independent Software Vendor)
Of course we had a splendid 2 weeks holiday between 15 December to 2nd January, to re-energise ourselves for the next phase.

We are super excited with our aggressive plans for 2012, there are more exciting things to happen this year. The first thing will be go live of version 3.1 in January.

Thanks to all our supporters, MVP friend, Customers who truly helped us to shape BizTalk360.

Try it for free and see the power of BizTalk360 yourself www.biztalk360.com

Nandri!
Saravana Kumar
Join us on @biztalk360 | http://facebook.com/biztalk360 | http://getsatisfaction.com/biztalk360

BizTalk360 Database Growth - how to control it

saravana — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 20:38:19 +0000

Some of our customers reported, the size of the BizTalk360 database grows steadily in a complex environment. The main reason for this is due to the collection of event viewer data for our advanced event viewer module. In the current release, we don't have any filter and we collect all the data from various logs. This just adds up very quickly. Few options to resolve the issue

1. Set the data purging policy to low value

Go to Settings>BizTalk360 Health>Data Purging, and se the Event Log Data value to something very low like 1 day.

2. Disable just the EventLog collection sub-service

If the above options didn't solve your problem, you can disable just the eventlog collection sub-service.

BizTalk360 is designed in a way to turn on/off each sub-service. You don't need to stop the whole monitoring service. Please follow the steps to stop the eventlog service

1. Check the records in the b360_ev_EventLogData table, it must be large number like million records

2. If that's the case, truncate the table completely. using the script

TRUNCATE TABLE b360_ev_EventLogData

3. Issue the following script, so event log data collection sub-service will be stopped.

UPDATE dbo.b360_mon_Service SET IsPaused = 'true' WHERE InfotrackServiceType = 'EventLogActivity'

As part of our January release, we will be issuing a permanent fix for this issue. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Nandri!

Saravana Kumar

Easy solution to handle Visual Studio - Out of memory issue with XAML files

saravana — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 06:56:42 +0000

BizTalk360 has grown into a considerable size project, we got over 50 project in a single solution. Number of projects is not a big issue, but some of the XAML files are resource intensive and we know for sure as soon as we start working on certain areas, Visual Studio will work only for 15-20 mins before throwing the out of memory issue and we need to restart it.

Even if you got a 64 bit machine, with plenty of RAM you'll still encounter this issue, because Visual Studio is still 32 bit application. There are few articles around which discusses this problem and also a famous hack solution here.

We don't want to screw up our development environment, last thing we want is rebuilding a PC with very little spare time we got. So we hesitated to do anything that will make the environment unstable.

This is the approach we follow, very simple but very effective

The out of memory issue happens because of the XAML designer, it tries to render each and every change you make in the XAML (ex: changing the width of the grid, or type text for TextBlock etc, etc). In our case the XAML designer is not adding much value, since the data is not available and most of the controls are going to be blank and won't represent the real UI state.

So the fix is, don't use XAML editor/Designer. Right-click the XAML file, select "Open with", and choose XML Editor. Also, select "Set Default". That's it. You'll have much better development experience, especially if your project is large.

Nandri!

Saravana Kumar

Missing BizTalk Performance Counters

saravana — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:12:14 +0000

It's one of the common problems I have seen recently : All of a sudden some of the BizTalk performance counters disappear from the list. Here are the checklist of things you can do

1. Make sure the host instances are running. If they are not running some of the host related counters wont show up in the list

In some place the performance counter could be corrupted, there are 2 useful documents I found that fixes this issue

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/biztalkperformance/archive/2007/09/30/how-to-manually-recreate-missing-biztalk-performance-counters.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/biztalkcpr/archive/2010/06/23/have-you-manually-recreated-the-biztalk-performance-counter-using-the-following-link-but-some-of-the-counters-were-still-missing.aspx

If you still experience the problem, try running the following command

C:\Windows\system32>lodctr /r

That basically rebuild the perf registry strings and info from scratch based on the current registry settings and backup INI files.

Nandri!

Saravana Kumar

BizTalk Server 2010 R2 announcement, my thoughts and more compelling reasons customers should buy BizTalk360

saravana — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 05:34:04 +0000

Yesterday Microsoft publicly announced the plans for BizTalk Server vNext, which is going to be BizTalk Server 2010 R2. When Microsoft postfix "R2" on top of existing version, most of the times it implies platform alignment and more of evolutionary changes to the product. Things like Windows, SQL, Visual Studio alignment, performance improvements, rollup of all the bug fixes, and some future alignments like cloud etc.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/biztalk_server_team_blog/archive/2011/12/08/biztalk-server-2010-r2.aspx

Platform Support

Improved B2B

Ready for the Cloud

New Platforms and Infrastructure

Windows Server 8*
SQL Server 2012*

Increased Developer and IT Productivity

Visual Studio 11* and Windows 8* to develop solutions
In-place migration from BizTalk Server 2010

Extended Platform Integration

DB2 client connectivity to SQL Server,
conversion of commands to T-SQL,
migration of packages to stored procedures
Adapter connectivity to new data sources, including IBM Informix V11 and IBM IMS/DB V11

Agile Alignment to Industry Standards

Regular updates to schemas, accelerators certifications and adapters. Highlights include:
Healthcare: HIPPA 5010 extensions: 2777CA, 999, HL7 2.5.1
Finance: SWIFT SRG 2011 support, SWIFT SRG 2012, SWIFTNet 7.0 (new messaging platform)

Improved Performance and Scalability

HL7 MLLP adapter performance improvements
Better performance with ordered send ports
Enhanced scale out configuration with multiple hosts
Expanded adapter options for faster batch processing

Extend on-premises solutions to the cloud

Easily extend your on-premises BizTalk Server solution to the cloud in a secure manner
Tighter integration of on-premises BizTalk Server applications with Windows Azure Service Bus

Improved Licensing

Adjustments to licensing that are geared towards cloud hosting, including:
Purchase from a hoster on a monthly basis (SPLA)
Register your existing license with a hoster (License Mobility)

If you notice the above table carefully there is no mention of any improvements on the BizTalk Server Administration/Monitoring/Operation side of things. We can't see any overlap in terms of functionalities we are concentrating here at BizTalk360.

We clearly understand from Microsoft point of view they got so many big things to worry about. Cloud is the one important area where they need to focus at the moment. They wanted to make it as seamless as possible for on-premise-cloud integration story. They also need to worry about mandatory swifts like Windows 8, SQL 2012, Visual Studio 2011. Whether they like it or not, they are forced to implement those changes. Another areas is industry standard alignment like HIPAA, HL7, SWIFT etc, that's a constantly improving area and with the 2 years (roughly) release cycle, they need to use the opportunity to bring them inline.

Licensing changes for me looks like more dramatic, they are heading towards subscription based model. It's advantage both for customers and for Microsoft. From customer point of view they can reduce the huge upfront investment, from Microsoft point of view they got a predictable constant revenue stream.

Why customers should buy BizTalk360:

Microsoft announced, the release date for BizTalk 2010 R2 will be 6 months after the release of Windows Server 8. There is no public official release date for Windows Server 8, we predict it could be Q2 of 2012. So BTS 2010 R2 is likely to hit the shelves by end of 2012 if things goes as planned.

Here at BizTalk360 we are solely focused on one important task "A world class support/monitoring/operations tool for BizTalk Server", we don't have too much pressure like Microsoft to cover up the ground on areas outside this boundary.

We got exciting plans for 2012, as we blogged before, we don't work on a long term road map. We feel that's our strength, we can be more agile and bring more frequent updates (3-4 months cycle) to the product from constant customer feedback. Being small and focused on one specific problem area helps us to keep that goal alive.

Our next big release is on Jan 2012, which includes some of the cool functionalities like graphical message flow viewer, sms/text alerting capabilities etc. We are also working on one big area functionality for the January release, public announcement will be made just after Christmas.

We already know what's going to come for our vNext, i.e April 2012 (version 3.5). We also commit ourselves to support BizTalk Server 2010 R2, 3-4 months after it's release.

BizTalk360 will bring lot of value for existing BizTalk Server customers and any future customers, take a look at the product tour for yourselves and see what we have done.

Nandri!

Saravana Kumar

Watch BizTalk360 v3.1 in action (webcast), we are giving away 3 free QA licenses

saravana — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 19:44:54 +0000

We recently released the availability of public beta of BizTalk360 version 3.1 (due to be released in Jan 2012). We constantly present BizTalk360 to various user groups mainly across Europe. But this time we are presenting a virtual online presentation to Phoenix Connected System User Group (http://pcsug.org ). Since this is going to be an online webcast, we discussed this with Rick G. Garibay (MVP Connected Systems and GM, Connected Systems Practice at Neudesic) and decided to make it open for public.

How can I attend?

Live meeting details will be updated on this blog post, as well as on the PCSUG events page http://pcsug.org/Home/Events 15 mins before the event.

Who should attend?

If you are using Microsoft BizTalk server in your organisation for your integration needs, then we believe this session will be useful for you to understand the value BizTalk360 can bring to increase the efficiency of your day-to-day operation.

Timing:

December 7th, 2011 - 6:00 - 7:00 PM (Phoenix, Arizona Time Zone), i.e +7hr GMT (8th December, 1:00 to 2:00 AM). It's bit crazy, but that's our commitment :-). The best way to know your local time is via http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/

Free QA Licenses:

We are going to give away 3 free QA Enterprise licenses, worth $1324 each. Here are your chances to win the free license

Follow us on twitter,
Follow us on facebook,
Become a member of our LinkedIn group
Tweet/Retweet this message "Watch @BizTalk360 v3.1 in action (webcast), we are giving away 3 free QA licenses http://bizta.lk/rHZ3G2" Tweet (Please don't spam, tweet only once)
Finally, attend the webcast

For each activity above one entry will be added in your name to the winning pool. ex: If you do all 5 activities, you increased your chances of winning by 5 times.

NOTE:

One license definitely goes to PCSUG in person attendee, and 2 licenses will be open to all based on above rules.
Existing members (twitter, facebook, LinkedIn) will also be included for the raffle, since this is the first time we are giving away free licenses.

Winners will be announced on 8th December 10AM GMT, we'll blog about the process we used to pickup the winner.

Nandri!

Saravana Kumar