This post is for those of you who are administrators rather then developers, and don’t keep track of the latest downloads around BizTalk. Microsoft has, at the same time that they released a revised version of the developer centric tutorials, released BizTalk Server 2006 Adminstration Tutorials. The administration tutorials are planned to become two, although at the moment only one is available. The first part is setting up the environment, in this case a slightly altered version of what is available in the multi-server scenario of the installation guides adding on an ISA Server to be able to create the environment separate from your corporate network. The tutorials also describes how to setup this environment using Virtual Server 2005 R2 (although physical hardware is also mentioned) and goes much more in depth to make it a compelling learning experience, as opposed to the install guide that can sometimes be hard to follow for a first timer. The first tutorial weighs in at 138 pages (double the size of the install guide), not counting the supporting documents. The second part is supposed to feature common administrative exercises based on the environment setup in part 1. If your are to familiarize youself with BizTalk Server 2006 as an administrator, from what I’ve seen, I’d recommend these tutorials.
Blog
My first blogging landmark passed
I’ve read alot of posts on how to interpret and evaluate your blogs statistics, most lately Scott Hanselmans post entitled 7 Blogging Statistics Rules – There is a life after page views so I realise and agree that how many people has visited your blog isn’t everything. I’ve had ClustrMaps from the start and that’s what I’m using as measurement in this case. ClustrMaps definition of visits are hits from unique ip adresses during a 24 hour period. I think it’s a good definition as oppsed to hits or something else. The landmark I’ve passed is probably small and insignificant to all of you veteran bloggers out there. Still, I can’t help but to feel a little happy that I’ve passed 1000 visitors. And I’m just getting started… To celebrate the event I put the feeburner subscriber count up on the blog, although I feel a bit silly doing it since some of the blogs I myself read have 27000, and I have 27. I don’t have a wide enough subject to get a really wide reach, and that isn’t the goal. I don’t need alot of subscribers, I just need the right ones. And hopefully my posts can help or amuse someone out there. Have a nice weekend all.
BizTalk Server 2006 R3
Official news about the next release of BizTalk Server has been released on Steve Martins blog here with follow ups on the BizTalk Server Team Blog here and of course followed by other comments around the connected systems blogosphere. It’s been expected and anticipated. This is not an Oslo release, and it’s not a new product, and it’s not a service pack, but it’s an R3. I’m not quite sure what the difference is when compared to a service pack, but according to Steve
“Because this release build on existing bits, the name of this release will be BizTalk Server 2006 R3. Refreshing the bits (instead of applying a large Service Pack) provides for the best update experience.“
What’s interesting around this release is not the fact that it will support the new wave of products and technologies being SQL 2008, Windows Server 2008, .NET 3,5 and Visual Studio 2008, although I’ve been told this in itself is not a small thing and I’m exhited about that as well, but the fact that they are choosing to bring in a couple of additional features. Among those are BizTalk RFID Mobile, an UDDI based Registry (no doubt inspired by the ESB Guidance) and additional LOB adapters and talk about service enabling and delivering SOA pattern and practices as part of the product. For me it’s a clear expression of the desire to make BizTalk a more attractive SOA plattform.
The official date for release is planned for Q1 2009, with a CTP expected later this year following the release of SQL Server 2008 in Q3 2008. There are however already TAP programs available for BizTalk Server as well as some of the other features by themselves. I wish I hade a customer ready to run with it today…
Note to those who comment – captcha enabled
Due to an ever increasing amount of spam I installed the (Ajax enabled) captcha control for CommunityServer 2007 written by Brendan Tompkins today. The installation documentation was clear enough, kinda. It still took me a little bit to get it working. At first, however I configured it, it just wouldn’t show up. I couldn’t understand what I was doing wrong – double checking my configuration I was sure I hade it down right. As I went to review the source code I noticed what caused the issue. It had an if (!Page.Request.IsAuthenticated) in there causing me, an authenticated user, to never see the captcha. At that point all I had to do was logout, and there it was. So now when you comment on posts on any of the blogs on this site, you have to fill out the captcha (if you haven’t created an account and logged in – but who does that?). Also note that I moderate all anonymous comments, so they wont ger published until I say so – usually within a day.
As I sidenote, I experienced something when trying to download the file that I haven’t experienced before. When downloading with IE the file came down corrupt. Someone tipped about using a simple downloader named WGET. When using that the file got down correctly and I was able to open it ok. Strange thing…
Pure Messaging Acknowledgements – Follow up
This post is a follow up to my previous post Delivery Notifications outside Orchestrations – a pure Messaging approach. The sole reason for this is to provide a downloadable demo and a walkthrough of that. The demo features a solution with one pipeline component and one passthrough pipeline using the component. It also contains a bindings file to configure the ports needed. Like I said in my first post, there really isn’t much to it, but here it is…and this is how you get it running:
Build Blogical.Shared.PipelineComponents.
Copy Blogical.Shared.PipelineComponents.dll to <biztalk_install_dir>Pipeline Components and add it to the GAC.
Build and Deploy Blogical.Shared.Pipelines. By default it deploys to the BizTalk Application AckRequired.
Open the BizTalk Adminitration Console and import the AckRequired.Bindings.xml file in the solutions root folder. This will give you one receive port with one receive location
and two send ports.
Configure the FILE adapter settings on the ports.
Drop a file for the AckRequired Receive Port.
Notice the file that goes out through the send port and the ACK that goes out through the other send port.
For more information read the original post and explore (what little there is) of the sample.
Be Logical - Notes from Johan Hedberg 