U3's Couch

Microsoft is preparing a major release of BizTalk Server that will take advantage of functionality added to the company’s application platform stack since BizTalk Server 2003 R2 shipped.BizTalk Server 2009 will become generally available in the first half of 2009, said Burley Kawasaki, director of product management in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft, and a Community Technology Preview will be release before the end of this year.Application platform support will be extended to the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and Windows Server 2008. BizTalk Server will take advantage of failover clustering features from Windows Server and will support Hyper-V, Microsoft’s hypervisor.Integration with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server adds ALM functions such as automated builds, bug tracking, source controls and multi-party development. The underlying BizTalk project system for Visual Studio will also be improved, the company says.The new features require Visual Studio 2008, said Kawasaki. “A lot of integration[s] we are doing builds on top of 2008 wave,” he added. What’s more, BizTalk will have out-of-the-box Business Activity Monitoring capabilities with SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services, as well as supporting Unified Dimensional Model cubes and real-time aggregations that are used in Microsoft’s PerformancePoint Server 2007 business intelligence product.“I believe the planned improvements that will become available in [BizTalk Server 2009] signal Microsoft's continuing intent to make this product a leading solution in the integration space, while ensuring that it's development is synchronized with other major initiatives inside of Microsoft. That's a good strategy,” said Ken Vollmer, a principal analyst for Forrester Research.Outside of the Microsoft stack and beyond the firewall, the 2009 release is slated to have a UDDI 3.0 registry that will provide for extended discovery services, registry affiliation, a subscription API and support for digital certificates for authentication.For business-to-business integrations, Microsoft is broadening its support for AS2 and EDI data sharing protocols. New capabilities will include support for multiple message attachments, configurable auto message resend and file name preservation.BizTalk Server 2009 updates all business rules and message schemas for compliance with the SWIFTReady Financial EAI Gold certification, increasing functionality as a result.The company also vows to offer broader guidance for applying Enterprise Service Bus usage patterns and other tasks.Inside the firewall, BizTalk will include implementations of more recent versions of CICS, CICS HTPP Transport, DB2, DB2/400, DB2 Universal Database, IMS and WebSphere MQ, according to Kawasaki.In addition, the company is developing a Line of Business Adapter for Oracle E-Business Suites and SQL Server, as well as improving its existing set of adapters, said Kawasaki. Adapters are available for MySAP ERP, Oracle Database and Siebel CRM business applications.The company is also updating BizTalk’s RFID standards support to adhere to industry standards, including LLRP, TDS, TDT and WS Discovery. Another standard, EPCIS, will not be fully implemented.Customers should expect a follow-up release within two years, Kawasaki noted. Microsoft will continue to update BizTalk to remain aligned with its application platform, he said. In the release beyond BizTalk 2009, Microsoft intends to collaborate with its research division to develop productivity enhancements like complex mapping, said Kawasaki. Other features will includes complex trading partner management, low-latency messaging enhancements and additional ESB guidance.Another goal is to extend the reach of BizTalk’s enterprise asset tracking to portable devices and laptops by leveraging its existing RFID platform.Customers will also be able to utilize its “Oslo” wave of modeling tools to create composite applications. Services exposed through Windows Communication Foundation by previous versions of BizTalk may also be used with Oslo modeling technologies, said Kawasaki.

I have seen the questions about the differences between BizTalk and WF. I think that you should have a good knowledge in both of technologies in order to make an accurate comparison, thus I had searched within the internet to find an official comparison, I had found it at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc303238.aspx .

The BizTalk Server Team Blog announce the availability of the new BizTalk Adapter Pack Poster.
This poster covers interoperability with Line-of-Business Applications using the BizTalk Adapter Pack and the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) LOB Adapter SDK.
This poster depicts the functionality, components, architecture, and usage/hosting scenarios of BizTalk Adapter Pack 2.0 and of the WCF LOB Adapter SDK. When printed in full scale, this poster size is 38”x 26”.

Download it from HERE

As you know In BizTalk Orchestrations, a new instance of an Orchestration is created every time a message arrives at the Receive Port. So what will be the number of orchestrations if we developed an orchestration responsible to login the user ? WOW. for each user want to login, there will be an instance of orchestration .

So How can I solve this?

Do you know that there is a singleton pattern which is a design pattern that is used to restrict instantiation of a class to one object?

Depending in this term we will build a singleton orchestration which will always be only one instance of the Orchestration

HOW !!!!!!!!

Could you please explain more?

The first message that arrives at the Receive port creates a new instance of the Orchestration (initialize the correlation). All other messages would use the same Orchestration for processing (following the correlation), all the messages which arrive at the orchestration must have common property. In our example it will the receive port name

The recipe is very simple, do the following and you will get a singleton orchestration :

1)Create a correlation type with the property BTS.ReceivePortName.

2)Create a correlation set with the correlation type created in the previous step

3)In the first Receive Shape (Activate = true), set the property "Initializing Correlation Sets" as the correlation set ,and in the Second receive , set the property "Following Correlation Sets" as the correlation type .

4)Do you remember while(true) loop , we will create a similar loop similar to this loop in our orchestration

5)The listen and delay shapes is just for Massage , in order not to let the orchestration being within the memory all the time .

You can download the whole project from here

http://www.biztalkgurus.com/media/p/15575.aspx

I had developed an application which requests for data from an Oracle Database according to the search criteria , everything works fine as I check the Orchestration debugger the search result return from the database successfully , but the error occurred in the web service that generated by the BizTalk.

Detailed Error:
A response message sent to adapter "SOAP" on receive port "WebPort_OracleAdapter_Proxy/OracleAdapter_OracleOrchesteration_rcvRequest" with URI "/OracleAdapter_Proxy/OracleAdapter_OracleOrchesteration_rcvRequest.asmx" is suspended. Error details: There is an error in XML document (1, 40). MessageId: {F231205A-68A4-45D7-9D3A-33CAF2D5889F} InstanceID: {B77F31E2-D2D8-4D12-9768-A5B97938E20B} For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp Operating System: windows 2003 Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006
Oracle Client version : 10.2.0

In order to fix this kind of error , check the following :

This problem is coming up because the URI that is generated by the adapter is rejected by the SOAP adapter. like if the URI for the targetNamespace is something below, it is not valid URI for SOAP adapter:"http://schemas.microsoft.com/[OracleDb:/MSADAPTER/SCOTT/Tables/MYTEST][OracleDb://MSADAPTER/SCOTT/Tables/MYTEST]" In this case the work around is change the URI within the Orchestration so that it is a valid URI for the webservice. Special characters "[" must be replaced with '%' followed by their ISO hex representation. In addition, I am not sure about the "://" string appearing two times in the same string. Here is a valid URI format as per the XML rfchttp://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt. Or else if we do not want to change the schema to be sent to the Oracle adapter there is another workaround where in we need to use Transform in the orchestration.

1. For this create a new schema similar to the one generated by Oracle and change it to a different target name space without any special characters, something like this "http://schemas.microsoft.com/OracleDb/MSADAPTER/SCOTT/Tables/MYTEST"

2. Then create a map whose source schema points to the one given by Oracle and destination schema corresponds to the one you created in step 1. Moreover, correspond the elements of source to destination.

3. Add a Transform (making use of the above Map) in the orchestration before sending it to the SOAP.