Signup: http://ukcsugmay2012-eorg.eventbrite.com/

Start Time: 6:30pm (doors open from 6pm)
End Time: 9:30pm
Location:
Customer Meeting Room 05
Microsoft
Cardinal Place
London

Signup: http://ukcsugmay2012-eorg.eventbrite.com/

Session 1 – Developing with an Administrator in mind
Speaker: Tord Glad Nordahl

This brings me into the content of the book. One of the things I find amazing with this book is that the target audience is not only developers, but architects, administrators and people not working that much with BizTalk but want to have a good reference, for that’s one of things you can use this book for, you might have the knowledge of how to utilize the different tools, but configuring them and setting them up might be a hazel every now and then, this book has a complete reference to both scenarios when it comes to setting up SCOM, BizTalk360, MessageBox Viewer etc. It’s a great reference of both information and how-to for using tools, setting up patterns, using the deployment framework, using Azure and AppFabric etc.

Since this is an admin blog I’ll focus on the administration parts of the book, basically it provides us with a few chapters that really relevant to us.

Chapter 1

Information about gathering requirements for whats needed to design the BizTalk environment for your company, validation of the installation, SSO and MSDTC configuration and analyzing performance. Setting up a multi-server environment etc.

Chapter 3

Information of how to trace and monitor BizTalk solution usage of tools and of course the deployment framework for BizTalk (which is useful to know when creating a guideline)

Chapter 4

This chapter is partially for Administrator and partially for developer, importing and exporting certificates on the BizTalk Servers and the how to do this is described in-depth and easy.

Chapter 7

This chapter goes in-depth on how to monitor your BizTalk environment, how to set up and configure SCOM and BizTalk 360, information about the BizTalk SQL Agent jobs and how to configure the BizTalk Server Backup Job and the DTA Purge and Archive job. It also guides you through the performance monitor and PAL including the information of how to utilize tools like the MessageBox Viewer.

The rest of the chapters are more related to development but is more than welcome in my opinion for administrators, the reason why I find this book so intuitive is because everything is described easy and in-depth providing the administrator with knowledge of development elements in an easy what. It’s definitely worth a read, and I think everybody should buy this book, I was probably the first one to buy it, but this will be a book that will follow all versions in the future. Happy reading, and if you haven’t bought the book yet, sign up for my competetion to win a signed copy of the book, or go and buy it here.

But there’s a cath, in order to receive this book you need to send me a mail tordgladnordahl@gmail.com with you shipping address and answer the two following questions.

You start out with 100 points, the one with the most points in the end will win,  the questions are:

1. How many BizTalk books have been published by PackT (if you miss by 10 books, you’ll lose 10 points, miss by 40 book and you’ll lose 40 pints and so on)
2. What is the name of the new book from PackT co-authored by Steef-Jan Wigger, Howard S. Edidin, Andres Del Rio and me, Tord Glad Nordahl  (for each wrong letter you’ll lose one point) (hint: Check our twitter accounts)

The winner will be announced May 31st!

And for a teaser, PackT also have the following code for all my blog readers: Type the following discount code during checkout and get 18% off the price both E-books and printed copy: abeb18p

Good luck to all of you!

If you want to participate on this deep dive administration course please feel free to fill out the below form and send it to tord.nordahl@bouvet.no

Price for the course is 4495USD per attendee.

Course date: August 28th-30th (3 days)
Course name: BizTalk Admin Deep Dive London
Attendee name
Company:
Department:
Contact address:
Invoice address:
Area code:
City:
What shall the invoice be marked with:
Comment/questions:
Cellphone (with country code):
Your mail address:
Position:

If you have any questions please feel free to send me an mail. Note that if we get less than five atendees the course will not be held.

Most of my contributions are uploaded to the TechNet galleries over there its easier for many to find them. You can download them, ask questions or rate them accordingly.

SQL

Find information of orphaned messages
This simple code snippet gives you more information of the orphaned messages, by running this query it can be easier to see what application(s) that are causing the orphaned messages.

Large files in tracking database
I use this script often to see the largest files in the tracking database, how big is the biggest file BizTalk has processed the last couple of days according to the length of storage in the Tracking database

Find recieve locations by address

I often have to search and locate a receive location by a reference, or count receive locations going to a specific EAI Share, this one does the job for me. Gathers name of receive location, receive port and application.

Statistics from in and out events in BizTalk
Gather information of the amount of transactions transferred through BizTalk over a given timeframe.

Instances in Messagebox being processed by a host instance
Gives you information of all instances being processed by a host instance and which one.

Statistics from in out events grouped by portname and date
Gathers information of the amount of transactions being performed in BizTalk over a given timeframe and grouped by portname and date

Find send ports by port address
Find and locate send ports pointing to a specific share, gathers information of send port name and application.

Get statistics from Instances in BizTalk
Get the amount of instances that have been or are under processes in BizTalk over a given timeframe

Count Send Ports by adapters in BizTalk
This one gathers information of all adapter and how many send ports that use this adapter.

Count Receive Location based on adapter usage
This one counts the receive location used by the different adapters in BizTalk.

PowerShell

Stop all applications
Simply stops all applications running in BizTalk

Powershell script to delete old files
This script is mostly used for cleaning up backup and backup folders.

I’ll get more scripts out there, enjoy!

Enough about that, but back to the book. This is a book that contains recipes if I may call it that, to scenarios and “how-to” for both BizTalk developers and BizTalk administrators.

PackT say the following about the content of the book and what you will learn:

• Deploy a robust, durable, and performing BizTalk Environment
• Broaden you knowledge on implementing BizTalk orchestration patterns
• Enhance your toolset in instrumenting BizTalk solutions
• Deepen your knowledge and skillset on messaging security
• Apply SOA patterns with your BizTalk solution
• Extend the reach of BizTalk to the Cloud
• Leverage SCOM and other tools in supporting your BizTalk environment
• Pragmatic use of Business Rules with BizTalk Server
• Deploy a robust and smooth performing BizTalk environment

So have you ordered the book, if not you can do it here, I highly recommend it!

>>Order the book here <<

1. What jobs do you need to configure when you install BizTalk

2. What is thresholds

3. Why do you have automatic throttling states and what can it be used for

4. What does a “high available environment” mean

5. What is NLB

6. What is host architecture

7. How do you route messages by receive port name

8. How do you measure performance for BizTalk

9. What are the four most important BizTalk databases

10. What are the dangers of filters combined with send port groups and multiple send ports

11. What needs to be backed up for a complete disaster recovery

12. What is an orphan message

13. What is a zombie message

14. what is a DNS server

15. How can you improve performance for BizTalk

16. What is ment by “parties”

17. Which default adapters cannot run with 64 bit OS

18. Which default adapters can only run with a single host instance

19. What is TDDS

20. What are best practices for tracking in production

21. What is global tracking and what does it track when global tracking is on

22. What is the difference between BizTalk 2009 and 2010

23. What is a Cumulative update

24. how many BizTalk versions is there

25. What is the BizTalk Adapter Pack

26. What is the ESB toolkit

27. What is required to install the Sharepoint adapter

28. What is special about the BizTalk Backup job?

29. What SQL agent job came in BizTalk 2010?

30. What tool were removed in BizTalk 2009?

31. How do the BizTalk Administration Console cache applications?

32. How can you solve slow administration consoles

33. What should be included in a basic guideline

34. What can you use the tracking database for

35. What is a trusted / un-trusted host

35. What is MSMQ used for?

36. What is ment by dedicated hosts

37. Should the DTA Purge and Archive job be configured and running if you have global tracking turned off?

38. What has not been changed regarding hosts since BizTalk 2006?

39. How do you turn of global tracking in BizTalk 2006 – 2006 R2

40. What is the main difference between BAM and DTA?

I will come with a new blogpost with more advanced question later..

This is just the top 5 I decided to choose, if you have any others feel free to ask them, I will do more blog posts like this in the future

1.       Tord Glad Nordahl

Yes, that is me, so assuming you are either looking for information regarding me or the blog, however you can contact me on Twitter, feel free to add me on LinkedIn my Facebook however is not so public.

2.       tracking the message passed through BizTalk

This one is some fun, actually because the answer is so easy, BizTalk is a set of Microsoft SQL databases, and they provide you with the information you need to do any “live” monitoring or within the expire date. The expire data is usually when the SQL Agent Job “DTA Purge and Archive” job purges data. There are a few tables in the BizTalkDTADb you can benefit from, it’s the InOutEvents and ServiceInstances, you can read more about this database on one of my TechNet Wiki articles here and locate some TSQL queries here.

3.       Orchestration tracking and orchestration start and end in “production”

This is one of the things I talked about in my blog post Artifact tracking, as you can see from this search string, even the one searching for this knew something was bad by doing it in Production. Neither Orchestration tracking nor any other artifacts should be tracked in production, unless you really need it. I yet have to see someone that really needs that instead of improved performance.

4.       the windows page file and BizTalk

I assume you might have read my blog post regarding health checking and noticed I said the pagefile should be removed from the local disk (usually C-drive) and yes it should this is how you can do it:

1. Log on to the computer as Administrator.
2. Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
3. Click Performance and Maintenance, and then click System.
4. Click the Advanced tab, and then under Performance, click Settings
5. You will see the location of the pagefile.sys here you can easy modify the settings

5.       BizTalk “track message bodies” is greyed out

Track message body under Orchestration will be grayed out as long as you don’t have anything else turned on for tracking. You need to enable the following options to be able to track bodies in the Orchestration. “Track events  – Orchestration Start and End”, and “Track events  – Message Send and receive”.

Artifacts in BizTalk can be a lot of things, but only a few of them (actually most of them) have the ability to perform some sort of tracking. Receive Ports, Pipelines, Send Ports, Orchestrations, Business rules, Maps and Schemas all have options for tracking. But what is this tracking data really used for?

In most cases the tracking data is used for tracking data during development to look for changes or see where problems or changes happen. But when it comes to production do you still need debugging data, in a perfect world all bugs should have been eliminated at this moment, but we all know this rarely happens. But do we still need the tracking information.

If you turn of the three first tracking options on the orchestration (all the event tracking) you won’t have the Orchestration Debugger and the data won’t be stored. But what are the impacts if I keep them on?

I’m pretty sure must of you have heard, read or experienced issues with large databases. Forum threads like “My tracking data base is xx gb big”, most likely due to the fact you forgot to configure and start the DTA Purge and Archive job, or you have too much tracking turned on.

It is good to know that when you ship out an application containing orchestrations from Visual Studio some of the options when it comes to orchestration tracking is turned on by default, and should be turned off manually before entering production.

My professional recommendation regarding artifact tracking is to turn it completely off in any production environment. This will lower the load of your BizTalk databases and make sure that the BizTalkDTADb won’t grow enormous.

In the end it will give you a better performance, this is my two cents, and I recommend you check your production environment and solve any artifact tracking you have. You will be amazed by the findings!

Coursedate: April 23-25
Coursename:
BizTalk Admin Deep Dive
Atendee name
Company:
Departement:
Contact address:
Invoice address:
Area code:
City:
What shall the invoice be marked with:
Comment/questions:
Cellphone (with country code):
Your mail address:
Position: