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• CCNet TFS Migration - Dealing with left over folders

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Im currently in the process of migrating our many BizTalk projects from MKS source control to TFS.  While we will be using TFS for work item tracking and source control etc we will be continuing to use Cruise Control for continuous integration although im updating this to CCNet 1.5 at the same time. Ill post a few things as much as a reminder to myself about some of the problems we come across. Problem After the first build of our code the next time a build is triggered an error is encountered by the TFS source control block refreshing the source code. System.IO.IOException: The directory is not empty.    at System.IO.Directory.DeleteHelper(String fullPath, String userPath, Boolean recursive)    at System.IO.Directory.Delete(String fullPath, String userPath, Boolean recursive)    at ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.Sourcecontrol.Vsts.deleteDirectory(String path)    at ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.Sourcecontrol.Vsts.GetSource(IIntegrationResult result)    at ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.IntegrationRunner.Build(IIntegrationResult result)    at ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.IntegrationRunner.Integrate(IntegrationRequest request) System.IO.IOException: The directory is not empty. at System.IO.Directory.DeleteHelper(String fullPath, String userPath, Boolean recursive) at System.IO.Directory.Delete(String fullPath, String userPath, Boolean recursive) at ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.Sourcecontrol.Vsts.deleteDirectory(String path) at ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.Sourcecontrol.Vsts.GetSource(IIntegrationResult result) at ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.IntegrationRunner.Build(IIntegrationResult result) at ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.IntegrationRunner.Integrate(IntegrationRequest request) Project: Bupa.BPI.Documents Date of build: 2011-01-28 14:54:21 Running time: 00:00:05 Integration Request: Build (ForceBuild) triggered from VMOPBZDEV11 Solution The problem seems to be with a folder called TestLocations which is created by the build process and used along with the file adapter as a way to get messages into BizTalk.  For some reason the source control block when it does a full refresh of the code does not get rid of this folder and then complains thats a problem and fails the build. Interestingly there are other folders created by the build which are deleted fine.  My assumption is that this if something to do with the file adapter polling the directory.  However note that we have not had this problem with other source control blocks in the past. To workaround this I have added a prebuild task to the ccnet.config file to delete this folder before the source control block is executed.  See below for example < prebuild> exec>executable>cmd.exe</executable>buildArgs>/c "if exist "C:\<MyCode>\TestLocations" rd /s /q "C:\<MyCode>\TestLocations""</buildArgs>exec> prebuild> < < < </ </

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• UK Connected Systems User Group - Udi Dahan Event Topic change

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Hi Just wanted to get the word out about a change to the may user group event.  Udi Dahan will present a new topic which he has not presented in the UK before.  Details below. To register for this event please refer to: http://ukconnectedsystemsusergroup.org/UpcomingEvents.aspx Title: High Availability - A Contrarian View   Abstract: Many developers are aware of the importance of high availability, critically analyzing any single points of failure in the infrastructure. Those same developers rarely give a second thought to the periods of time when a system is being upgraded. Even if all the servers are running, most systems cannot function in-between versions. Yet with the increased pace of business, users are demanding ever more frequent releases. The poor maintenance programmers and system administrators are left holding the bag long after the architecture that sealed their fate was formulated. Join Udi for some different perspectives on high availability - architecture and methodology for the real world.

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• SharePoint Saturday Charlotte 2010 Recap, Slides and Photos

  - by Brian Jackett

  This past weekend I attended SharePoint Saturday Charlotte (SPSCLT) in Charlotte, North Carolina.  For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint.  This made my fourth SharePoint Saturday attended and third I’ve spoken at.  The event was very well organized, attended, and a pleasure to be a part of along with many other great speakers.     At SharePoint Saturday Charlotte I had the opportunity to give two presentations.  First was “The Power of PowerShell + SharePoint 2007” and second was a new one “Managing SharePoint 2010 Farms with PowerShell.”  I want to thank everyone who attended either of my sessions and for all of the feedback given.  Below you will find links to my slides, demo scripts, and pictures taken throughout the event.  If anyone has any questions from the slides or scripts feel free to drop me a line.   Pictures SharePoint Saturday Charlotte Apr '10 Pictures on Facebook (recommend these with comments and tagging)   View Full Album   Slides, Scripts, and Rating Links SharePoint Saturday Charlotte Apr '10 Slides and Demo Scripts SpeakerRate: The Power of PowerShell + SharePoint 2007 SpeakerRate: Managing SharePoint 2010 Farms with PowerShell   Conclusion     Big thanks out to Brian Gough (@bkgough), Dan Lewis (@sharepointcomic) and all of the other organizers of this event.  Also a big thanks out to the other speakers and sponsors (too many to list) who made the event possible.  Lastly thanks to my Sogeti coworker Kelly Jones (@kellydjones) for picking me up from the airport and a ride back to Columbus.  I hope everyone that attended got something out of the event and will continue to grow the SharePoint community.  I’m on a break from conferences for a few weeks and then have 3 more back to back weekends in May, blog posts announcing those coming later.  Enjoy the slides, scripts, and pictures.         -Frog Out

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• Farewell

  - by brian.harrison

  Dear Friends and Colleagues After 8.5 years with Plumtree/BEA/Oracle, it is time for me to move on to something new and exciting. Tomorrow, May 21, will be my last day with Oracle. Prior to joining Plumtree back in 2001, I had not stayed with any one company for more than two years at a time and I really thought that that might be the case with Plumtree even then. However, 8.5 years later, I can definitely say that it has been a great ride with very few regrets. I have made some fantastic friends and have learned something from each and every one of you. I have definitely considered this to be a rewarding experience and I will miss all of you. I do hope that you will keep in contact. You never know, our paths may cross again in the future. If you would like to keep in contact, then you can find me on Facebook or Linked In and my personal email is: [email protected]. Goodbye and Good Luck. Brian C. Harrison

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• Monitoring almost anything with BizTalk 360

  - by Michael Stephenson

  When you work in an integration environment it is common that you will find yourself in a situation where you integrate with some unusual applications or have some unusual dependencies. That is the nature of integration. When you work with BizTalk one of the common problems is that BizTalk often is the place where problems with applications you integrate with are highlighted and these external applications may have poor monitoring solutions. Fortunately if you are a working with a customer who uses BizTalk 360 then it contains a feature called the "Web Endpoint Manager". Typically the web endpoint manager is used to monitor web services that you integrate with and will ping them at appropriate times to make sure they return the expected HTTP status code. When you have an usual situation where you want to monitor something which is key to the success to your solution but you find yourself having to consider a significant custom solution to monitor the external dependency then the Web Endpoint Manager could be your friend. The endpoint manager monitors a url and checks for a certain status code. This means that you can create your own aspx web page and then make BizTalk 360 monitor this web page. Behind the web page you could write any code you wished. An example of this is architecture is shown in the below diagram.     In the custom web page you would implement some custom code to do whatever it is that you want to monitor. In the below code snippet you can see how the Page_Load default method is doing some kind of check then depending on the result of the check it returns a certain HTTP code. protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { var result = CheckSomething();   if (result == "Success") Response.StatusCode = 202; else if (result == "DatabaseError") Response.StatusCode = 510; else if (result == "SystemError") Response.StatusCode = 512; else Response.StatusCode = 513;   }   In BizTalk 360 you would go into the Monitor and Notify tab and then to BizTalk Environment which gives you access to the Web Endpoint Manager. You need an alarm setup which configures how the endpoint will be checked. I'm not going to go through the details of creating the alarm as this is already documented in the BizTalk 360 documentation. One point to note is that in the example I am using I setup a threshold alarm which means that the url is checked about every minute and if there is an error that persists for a period of time then the alarm will raise the alert notification. In my example I configured the alarm to fire if the error persisted for 3 minutes. The below picture shows accessing the endpoint manager.   In the web endpoint manager you would then configure your endpoint to monitor and the HTTP response code which indicates all is working fine. The below picture shows this. I now have my endpoint monitoring setup and BizTalk 360 should be checking my custom endpoint to see that it is available. If I wanted to manually sanity check that the endpoints I have registered are working fine then clicking the Refresh button will show if they are all good or not. If my custom ASP.net page which is checking my dependency gets a problem you will see in the endpoint manager that the status code does not match the expected return code and your endpoints will display in red and you can see the problem. The below picture shows this. If I use specific HTTP response codes for the errors the custom ASP.net page might encounter I can easily interpret these to know what the problem is. Using the alarms and notifications with BizTalk 360 it means when your endpoint goes into an error state you can easily configure email or SMS notifications from BizTalk 360 to tell you that your endpoint is having problems and you can use BizTalk 360 to help correlate what the problem is to allow you to investigate further. Below you can see the email which tells me my endpoint is not working.   When everything returns to normal you will see the status is now fixed and you will see a situation like below where you can see the WebEndpoints are now green and the return code matches what is expected.   Conclusion As you can see it is really easy to plug your own custom ASP.net page into the BizTalk 360 web endpoint monitoring feature. This extension then gives you the power to really extend the monitoring to almost anything you want as long as you can write some .net code to check that the dependency is available and working. It would be interesting to hear of any ideas people have around things they would monitor with this extension. More details on the end point monitor can be found on the following link: http://www.biztalk360.com/tour/monitoring_notifications

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• Introducing the BizTalk Maturity Assessment

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/06/22/153208.aspxIn the past I have had a number of customer engagements where Ive been called in because there are problems. There were often common themes to these issues faced by customers and I had a few processes, tools and ideas about how I helped these customers.Over time I learned developed a way of analysing the customers position and this has evolved into the BizTalk Maturity Assessment which I wanted to share.  The idea is that you complete a survey which asks various things related to BizTalk in your organisation.  You are then presented with a visualization of where you sit in terms of maturity in different areas of your BizTalk capability.You should be able to see the areas you need to improve and by retaking the survey at regular intervals you should be able to demonstrate improvement.I have taken the original idea and then been joined by some of my good friends in the community and included ideas from their experience and I think we have something which will help a lot of customers and something which could be a key community asset in the future.The site for this project is on the following link:http://www.biztalkmaturity.com/There is also a case study where I have used the original assessment which demonstrated how I originally used this to help one customer get from a place where they had lots of problems to a place where they were doing BizTalk really well.

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• Timeout Considerations for Solicit Response – Part 2

  - by Michael Stephenson

  To follow up a previous article about timeouts and how they can affect your application I have extended the sample we were using to include WCF. I will execute some test scenarios and discuss the results. The sample We begin by consuming exactly the same web service which is sitting on a remote server. This time I have created a .net 3.5 application which will consume the web service using the basichttp binding. To show you the configuration for the consumption of this web service please refer to the below diagram. You can see like before we also have the connectionManagement element in the configuration file. I have added a WCF service reference (also using the asynchronous proxy methods) and have the below code sample in the application which will asynchronously make the web service calls and handle the responses on a call back method invoked by a delegate. If you have read the previous article you will notice that the code is almost the same.   Sample 1 – WCF with Default Timeouts In this test I set about recreating the same scenario as previous where we would run the test but this time using WCF as the messaging component. For the first test I would use the default configuration settings which WCF had setup when we added a reference to the web service. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:01:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service Test Results The client-side trace is as follows:   The server-side trace is as follows: Some observations on the results are as follows: The timeouts happened quicker than in the previous tests because some calls were timing out before they attempted to connect to the server The first few calls that timed out did actually connect to the server and did execute successfully on the server   Test 2 – Increase Open Connection Timeout & Send Timeout In this test I wanted to increase both the send and open timeout values to try and give everything a chance to go through. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:10:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:10:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service   Test Results The client side trace for this test was   The server-side trace for this test was: Some observations on this test are: This test proved if the timeouts are high enough everything will just go through   Test 3 – Increase just the Send Timeout In this test we wanted to increase just the send timeout. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:10:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service   Test Results The below is the client side trace The below is the server side trace Some observations on this test are: In this test from both the client and server perspective everything ran through fine The open connection timeout did not seem to have any effect   Test 4 – Increase Just the Open Connection Timeout In this test I wanted to validate the change to the open connection setting by increasing just this on its own. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:10:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:01:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service Test Results The client side trace was The server side trace was Some observations on this test are: In this test you can see that the open connection which relates to opening the channel timeout increase was not the thing which stopped the calls timing out It's the send of data which is timing out On the server you can see that the successful few calls were fine but there were also a few calls which hit the server but timed out on the client You can see that not all calls hit the server which was one of the problems with the WSE and ASMX options   Test 5 – Smaller Increase in Send Timeout In this test I wanted to make a smaller increase to the send timeout than previous just to prove that it was the key setting which was controlling what was timing out. The timeout values for this test are: openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:02:30"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service Test Results The client side trace was   The server side trace was Some observations on this test are: You can see that most of the calls got through fine On the client you can see that call 20 timed out but still hit the server and executed fine.   Summary At this point between the two articles we have quite a lot of scenarios showing the different way the timeout setting have played into our original performance issue, and now we can see how WCF could offer an improved way to handle the problem. To summarise the differences in the timeout properties for the three technology stacks: ASMX The timeout value only applies to the execution time of your request on the server. The timeout does not consider how long your code might be waiting client side to get a connection. WSE The timeout value includes both the time to obtain a connection and also the time to execute the request. A timeout will not be thrown as an error until an attempt to connect to the server is made. This means a 40 second timeout setting may not throw the error until 60 seconds when the connection to the server is made. If the connection to the server is made you should be aware that your message will be processed and you should design for this. WCF The WCF send timeout is the setting most equivalent to the settings we were looking at previously. Like WSE this setting the counter includes the time to get a connection as well as the time to execute on a server. Unlike WSE and ASMX an error will be thrown as soon as the send timeout from making your call from user code has elapsed regardless of whether we are waiting for a connection or have an open connection to the server. This may to a user appear to have better latency in getting an error response compared to WSE or ASMX.

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• Central Ohio Day of .Net 2010 Slides and Files

  - by Brian Jackett

  This weekend I presented my “The Power of PowerShell + SharePoint 2007” session at the Central Ohio Day of .Net conference in Wilmington, OH this weekend.  This is the second year I’ve attended this conference, first time as a presenter.  For those unfamiliar Day of .Net conferences are a one-day conference on all things .NET organized by developers for developers.  These events are usually offered at no cost to anyone interested in .NET development.     The attendees of my session had some great questions and I hope they all got something worthwhile out of it.  Below are my slides and demo scripts (some of which I didn’t have time to demo) along with my sample profiles.  If you have any questions, comments, or feedback feel free to leave comments here or send me an email at brian[email protected].   Slides and Files SkyDrive link   Technology and Friends Interview Experience     On a side note, any of you familiar with one of my Sogeti co-workers in Detroit David Giard may know that he hosts a web series called Technology and Friends.  After my session David tracked me down and asked to interview me about PowerShell.  I was happy to oblige so we sat down and taped some material.  I don’t know when that interview will be going live, but look for it on www.davidgiard.com.   Conclusion     A big thanks goes out to all of the sponsors, speakers, and attendees for the Central Ohio Day of .Net conference.  Without all of them this conference couldn’t have been possible.  I had a great time at the conference and look forward to coming back next year whether that is as a speaker or attendee.       -Frog Out

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• Humerous Word 2010 "feature"?

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Im just sitting on the train to work and had a funny experience with word 2010 that I thought id share. Im writing a document and all of a sudden like usually happens the train gets a little bit bumpy.  Word decides it doesnt like this (maybe it prefers to fly?).  Anyway to show its dissatisfaction with the journey it starts adding new rows to my table in the document all by itself. 5 pages of rows later I still cant workout how to stop itso have to kill word. Thank you autosave

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• Installing pygame with pip

  - by David Y. Stephenson

  I'm trying to install pygame using pip in a virtualenv. I'm following this tutorial on using Kivy. However, running pip install pygame returns Downloading/unpacking pygame Downloading pygame-1.9.1release.tar.gz (2.1MB): 2.1MB downloaded Running setup.py egg_info for package pygame WARNING, No "Setup" File Exists, Running "config.py" Using UNIX configuration... /bin/sh: 1: sdl-config: not found /bin/sh: 1: smpeg-config: not found Hunting dependencies... WARNING: "sdl-config" failed! WARNING: "smpeg-config" failed! Unable to run "sdl-config". Please make sure a development version of SDL is installed. No files/directories in /tmp/pip-build-root/pygame/pip-egg-info (from PKG-INFO) Storing complete log in /home/david/.pip/pip.log The content of /home/david/.pip/pip.log can be found at http://paste.ubuntu.com/5800296/ What am I doing wrong? I'm trying to keep to the standard methodology for installing pygame as much as possible in order to avoid deviating from the tutorial. Suggestions?

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• Timeout Considerations for Solicit Response

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Background One of the clients I work with had been experiencing some issues for a while surrounding web service timeouts.  It's been a little challenging to work through the problems due to limitations in the diagnostic information available from one of the applications, but I learned some interesting things while troubleshooting the problem which don't seem to have been discussed much in the community so I thought I'd share my findings. In the scenario we have BizTalk trying to make calls to a .net web service which was exposed as a WSE 2 endpoint.  In the process BizTalk will try to make a large number of concurrent web service calls to the application, and the backend application has more than enough infrastructure and capability to handle the load. We have configured the <ConnectionManagement> section of the BizTalk configuration file to support up to 100 concurrent connections from each of our 2 BizTalk send servers to the web servers of the application. The problem we were facing was that the BizTalk side was reporting a significant number of timeouts when calling the web service.   One of the biggest issues was the challenge of being able to correlate a message from BizTalk to the IIS log in the .net application and the custom logs in the application especially when there was a fairly large number of servers hosting the web services.  However the key moment came when we were able to identify a specific call which had taken 40 seconds to execute on the server (yes a long time I know but that's a different story!).  Anyway we were able to identify that this had timed out on the BizTalk side.  Based on the normal 2 minute timeout we knew something unexpected was going on. From here I decided to do some experimentation and I wanted to start outside of BizTalk because my hunch was this was not a BizTalk behaviour but something which was being highlighted by BizTalk because of our large load.     Server-side - Sample Web Service To begin with I created a sample web service.  Nothing special just a vanilla asmx web service hosted in IIS6 on Windows 2003 Standard Edition.  The web service is just a hello world style web service as shown in the below picture.  The only key feature is that the server side web method has a 30 second sleep in it and will trace out some information before and after the thread is set to sleep.      In the configuration for this web service there again is nothing special it's pretty much the most plain simple web service you could build. Client-Side To begin looking at what was happening with our example I created a number of different ways to consume the web service. SoapHttpClientProtocol Example I created a small application which would use a normal proxy generated to call the web service.  It would iterate around a loop and make calls using the begin/end methods so I can do this asynchronously.  I would do a loop of 20 calls with the ConnectionManager configuration section supporting only 5 concurrent connections to the server.     <connectionManagement> <remove address="*"/> <add address = "*" maxconnection = "12" /> <add address = "http://<ServerName>" maxconnection = "5" />                         </connectionManagement> </system.net>     The below picture shows an example of the service calling code, key points are: I have configured the timeout of 40 seconds for the proxy I am using the asynchronous methods on the proxy to call the web service         The Test I would run the client and execute 21 calls to the web service.   The Results  Below is the client side trace showing what's happening on the client. In the below diagram is the web service side trace showing what's happening on the server Some observations on the results are: All of the calls were successful from the clients perspective You could see the next call starting on the server as soon as the previous one had completed Calls took significantly longer than 40 seconds from the start of our call to the return. In fact call 20 took 2 minutes and 30 seconds from the perspective of my code to execute even though I had set the timeout to 40 seconds     WSE 2 Sample In the second example I used the exact same code to call the web service again with a single exception that I modified the web service proxy to derive from WebServiceClient protocol which is part of WSE 2 (using SP3).  The below picture shows the basic code and the key points are: I have configured the timeout of 40 seconds for the proxy I am using the asynchronous methods on the proxy to call the web service        The Test This test would execute 21 calls from the client to the web service.   The Results  The below trace is from the client side: The below trace is from the server side:   Some observations on the trace results for this scenario are: With call 4 if you look at the server side trace it did not start executing on the server for a number of seconds after the other 4 initial calls which were accepted by the server. I re-ran the test and this happened a couple of times and not on most others so at this point I'm just putting this down to something unexpected happening on the development machine and we will leave this observation out of scope of this article. You can see that the client side trace statement executed almost immediately in all cases All calls after the initial few calls would timeout On the client side the calls that did timeout; timed out in a longer duration than the 40 seconds we set as the timeout You can see that as calls were completing on the server the next calls were starting to come through The calls that timed out on the client did actually connect to the server and their server side execution completed successfully     Elaboration on the findings Based on the above observations I have drawn the below sequence diagram to illustrate conceptually what is happening.  Everything except the final web service object is on the client side of the call. In the diagram below I've put two notes on the Web Service Proxy to show the two different places where the different base classes seem to start their timeout counters. From the earlier samples we can work out that the timeout counter for the WSE web service proxy starts before the one for the SoapHttpClientProtocol proxy and the WSE one includes the time to get a connection from the pool; whereas the Soap proxy timeout just covers the method execution. One interesting observation is if we rerun the above sample and increase the number of calls from 21 to 100,000 then for the WSE sample we will see a similar pattern where everything after the first few calls will timeout on the client as soon as it makes a connection to the server whereas the soap proxy will happily plug away and process all of the calls without a single timeout. I have actually set the sample running overnight and this did happen. At this point you are probably thinking the same thoughts I was at the time about the differences in behaviour and which is right and why are they different? I'm not sure there is a definitive answer to this in the documentation, or at least not that I could find! I think you just have to consider that they are different and they could have different effects depending on your messaging solution. In lots of situations this is just not an issue as your concurrent requests doesn't get to the situation where you end up throttling the web service calls on the client side, however this is definitely more common with an integration broker such as BizTalk where you often have high throughput requirements.  Some of the considerations you should make Based on this behaviour you should be aware of the following: In a .net application if you are making lots of concurrent web service calls from an application in an asynchronous manner your user may thing they are experiencing poor performance but you think your web service is working well. The problem could be that the client will have a default of 2 connections to remote servers so you should bear this in mind When you are developing a BizTalk solution or a .net solution with the WSE 2 stack you may experience timeouts under load and throttling the number of connections using the max connections element in the configuration file will not help you For an application using WSE2 or SoapHttpClientProtocol an expired timeout will not throw an error until after a connection to the server has been made so you should consider this in your transaction and durability patterns     Our Work Around In the short term for our specific scenario we know that we can handle this by just increasing our timeout value.  There is only a specific small window when we get lots of concurrent traffic that causes this scenario so we should be able to increase the timeout to take into consideration the additional client side wait, and on the odd occasion where we do get a timeout the BizTalk send port retry will handle this. What was causing our original problem was that for that short window we were getting a lot of retries which significantly increased the load on our send servers and highlighted the issue.  Longer Term Solution As a longer term solution this really gives us more ammunition to argue a migration to WCF. The application we are calling has some factors which limit the protocols we can use but with WCF we would have more control on the various timeout options because in WCF you can configure specific parts of the timeout. Summary I've had this blog post on my to do list for ages but hopefully it will be useful to some people to just understand this behaviour and to possibly help you with some performance issues you may have. I do not believe there is too much in the way of documentation particularly around WSE2 and ASMX in this area so again another bit of ammunition for migrating to WCF. I'll try to do a follow up post with the sample for WCF to show how this changes things.

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• BizTalk 360 Alarms, How do you configure yours?

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/06/18/153157.aspxIve recently written a guest post for BizTalk 360 on their blog about how customers may configure BizTalk 360 Alarms to optimize getting the right information to the right type of support people.This is my thoughts on how users of BTS 360 can get the best value out of BizTalk 360 alarmshttp://blogs.biztalk360.com/what-are-the-different-types-of-alarms-alerts-you-should-configure-in-biztalk360/

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• BizTalk Testing Series - The xpath Function

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Background While the xpath function in a BizTalk orchestration is a very powerful feature I have often come across the situation where someone has hard coded an xpath expression in an orchestration. If you have read some of my previous posts about testing I've tried to get across the general theme like test-driven or test-assisted development approaches where the underlying principle is that your building up your solution of small well tested units that are put together and the resulting solution is usually quite robust. You will be finding more bugs within your unit tests and fewer outside of your team. The thing I don't like about the xpath functions usual usage is when you come across an orchestration which has something like the below snippet in an expression or assign shape: string result = xpath(myMessage,"string(//Order/OrderItem/ProductName)"); My main issue with this is that the xpath statement is hard coded in the orchestration and you don't really know it works until you are running the orchestration. Some of the problems I think you end up with are: You waste time with lengthy debugging of the orchestration when your statement isn't working You might not know the function isn't working quite as expected because the testable unit around it is big You are much more open to regression issues if your schema changes     Approach to Testing The technique I usually follow is to hold the xpath statement as a constant in a helper class or to format a constant with a helper function to get the actual xpath statement. It is then used by the orchestration like follows. string result = xpath(myMessage, MyHelperClass.ProductNameXPathStatement); This means that because the xpath statement is available outside of the orchestration it now becomes testable in its own right. This means: I can test it in its own right I'm less likely to waste time tracking down problems caused by an error in the statement I can reduce the risk or regression issuess I'm now able to implement some testing around my xpath statements which usually are something like the following:    The test will use a sample xml file The sample will be validated against the schema The test will execute the xpath statement and then check the results are as expected     Walk-through BizTalk uses the XPathNavigator internally behind the xpath function to implement the queries you will usually use using the navigators select or evaluate functions. In the sample (link at bottom) I have a small solution which contains a schema from which I have generated a sample instance. I will then use this instance as the basis for my tests.     In the below diagram you can see the helper class which I've encapsulated my xpath expressions in, and some helper functions which will format the expression in the case of a repeating node which would want to inject an index into the xpath query.             I have then created a test class which has some functions to execute some queries against my sample xml file. An example of this is below.         In the test class I have a couple of helper functions which will execute the xpath expressions in a similar way to BizTalk. You could have a proper helper class to do this if you wanted.         You can see now in the BizTalk expression editor I can use these functions alongside the xpath function.         Conclusion I hope you can see with very little effort you can make your life much easier by testing xpath statements outside of an orchestration rather than using them directly hard coded into the orchestration.     This can also save you lots of pain longer term because your build should break if your schema changes unexpectedly causing these xpath tests to fail where as your tests around the orchestration will be more difficult to troubleshoot and workout the cause of the problem.     Sample Link The sample is available from the following link: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/testbtsxpathfunction     Other Tools On the subject of using the xpath function, if you don't already use it the below tool is very useful for creating your xpath statements (thanks BizBert) http://www.bizbert.com/bizbert/2007/11/30/XPath+The+Hidden+Language+Of+BizTalk.aspx

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• SBUG --> UK Connected Systems User Group

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Following a recent user group meeting we have decided that the UK SOA/BPM User Group will be renamed to the UK Connected Systems User Group.  The reasons for this are as follows: 1. Other user groups who cover the same topics as us are all called something similar 2. We feel the name change will help to increase user group membership The focus and topics of the user group will remain the same.

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• Creating a Training Lab on Windows Azure

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/06/17/153149.aspxThis week we are preparing for a training course that Alan Smith will be running for the support teams at one of my customers around Windows Azure. In order to facilitate the training lab we have a few prerequisites we need to handle. One of the biggest ones is that although the support team all have MSDN accounts the local desktops they work on are not ideal for running most of the labs as we want to give them some additional developer background training around Azure. Some recent Azure announcements really help us in this area: MSDN software can now be used on Azure VM You don't pay for Azure VM's when they are no longer used  Since the support team only have limited experience of Windows Azure and the organisation also have an Enterprise Agreement we decided it would be best value for money to spin up a training lab in a subscription on the EA and then we can turn the machines off when we are done. At the same time we would be able to spin them back up when the users need to do some additional lab work once the training course is completed. In order to achieve this I wanted to create a powershell script which would setup my training lab. The aim was to create 18 VM's which would be based on a prebuilt template with Visual Studio and the Azure development tools. The script I used is described below The Start & Variables The below text will setup the powershell environment and some variables which I will use elsewhere in the script. It will also import the Azure Powershell cmdlets. You can see below that I will need to download my publisher settings file and know some details from my Azure account. At this point I will assume you have a basic understanding of Azure & Powershell so already know how to do this. Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestrictedcls $startTime = get-dateImport-Module "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Azure\PowerShell\Azure\Azure.psd1"# Azure Publisher Settings $azurePublisherSettings = '<Your settings file>.publishsettings'  # Subscription Details $subscriptionName = "<Your subscription name>" $defaultStorageAccount = "<Your default storage account>"  # Affinity Group Details $affinityGroup = '<Your affinity group>' $dataCenter = 'West Europe' # From Get-AzureLocation  # VM Details $baseVMName = 'TRN' $adminUserName = '<Your admin username>' $password = '<Your admin password>' $size = 'Medium' $vmTemplate = '<The name of your VM template image>' $rdpFilePath = '<File path to save RDP files to>' $machineSettingsPath = '<File path to save machine info to>'    Functions In the next section of the script I have some functions which are used to perform certain actions. The first is called CreateVM. This will do the following actions: If the VM already exists it will be deleted Create the cloud service Create the VM from the template I have created Add an endpoint so we can RDP to them all over the same port Download the RDP file so there is a short cut the trainees can easily access the machine via Write settings for the machine to a log file  function CreateVM($machineNo) { # Specify a name for the new VM $machineName = "$baseVMName-$machineNo" Write-Host "Creating VM: $machineName"       # Get the Azure VM Image      $myImage = Get-AzureVMImage $vmTemplate   #If the VM already exists delete and re-create it $existingVm = Get-AzureVM -Name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName if($existingVm -ne $null) { Write-Host "VM already exists so deleting it" Remove-AzureVM -Name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName }   "Creating Service" $serviceName = "bupa-azure-train-$machineName" Remove-AzureService -Force -ServiceName $serviceName New-AzureService -Location $dataCenter -ServiceName $serviceName   Write-Host "Creating VM: $machineName" New-AzureQuickVM -Windows -name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName -ImageName $myImage.ImageName -InstanceSize $size -AdminUsername $adminUserName -Password $password  Write-Host "Updating the RDP endpoint for $machineName" Get-AzureVM -name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName ` | Add-AzureEndpoint -Name RDP -Protocol TCP -LocalPort 3389 -PublicPort 550 ` | Update-AzureVM    Write-Host "Get the RDP File for machine $machineName" $machineRDPFilePath = "$rdpFilePath\$machineName.rdp" Get-AzureRemoteDesktopFile -name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName -LocalPath "$machineRDPFilePath"   WriteMachineSettings "$machineName" "$serviceName" }    The delete machine settings function is used to delete the log file before we start re-running the process.  function DeleteMachineSettings() { Write-Host "Deleting the machine settings output file" [System.IO.File]::Delete("$machineSettingsPath"); }    The write machine settings function will get the VM and then record its details to the log file. The importance of the log file is that I can easily provide the information for all of the VM's to our infrastructure team to be able to configure access to all of the VM's    function WriteMachineSettings([string]$vmName, [string]$vmServiceName) { Write-Host "Writing to the machine settings output file"   $vm = Get-AzureVM -name $vmName -ServiceName $vmServiceName $vmEndpoint = Get-AzureEndpoint -VM $vm -Name RDP   $sb = new-object System.Text.StringBuilder $sb.Append("Service Name: "); $sb.Append($vm.ServiceName); $sb.Append(", "); $sb.Append("VM: "); $sb.Append($vm.Name); $sb.Append(", "); $sb.Append("RDP Public Port: "); $sb.Append($vmEndpoint.Port); $sb.Append(", "); $sb.Append("Public DNS: "); $sb.Append($vmEndpoint.Vip); $sb.AppendLine(""); [System.IO.File]::AppendAllText($machineSettingsPath, $sb.ToString());  } # end functions    Rest of Script In the rest of the script it is really just the bit that orchestrates the actions we want to happen. It will load the publisher settings, select the Azure subscription and then loop around the CreateVM function and create 16 VM's  Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile $azurePublisherSettings Set-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $subscriptionName -CurrentStorageAccount $defaultStorageAccount Select-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $subscriptionName  DeleteMachineSettings    "Starting creating Bupa International Azure Training Lab" $numberOfVMs = 16  for ($index=1; $index -le $numberOfVMs; $index++) { $vmNo = "$index" CreateVM($vmNo); }    "Finished creating Bupa International Azure Training Lab" # Give it a Minute Start-Sleep -s 60  $endTime = get-date "Script run time " + ($endTime - $startTime)    Conclusion As you can see there is nothing too fancy about this script but in our case of creating a small isolated training lab which is not connected to our corporate network then we can easily use this to provision the lab. Im sure if this is of use to anyone you can easily modify it to do other things with the lab environment too. A couple of points to note are that there are some soft limits in Azure about the number of cores and services your subscription can use. You may need to contact the Azure support team to be able to increase this limit. In terms of the real business value of this approach, it was not possible to use the existing desktops to do the training on, and getting some internal virtual machines would have been relatively expensive and time consuming for our ops team to do. With the Azure option we are able to spin these machines up for a temporary period during the training course and then throw them away when we are done. We expect the costing of this test lab to be very small, especially considering we have EA pricing. As a ball park I think my 18 lab VM training environment will cost in the region of $80 per day on our EA. This is a fraction of the cost of the creation of a single VM on premise.

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• Slides and Pictures from PowerShell Saturday Columbus 2012

  - by Brian Jackett

  On March 10th, 2012 the first ever PowerShell Saturday conference took place in Columbus, OH and I couldn’t be happier with the outcome.  We had 100 attendees from 10 different states (the biggest surprise to me) come to see 6 speakers present on a variety of PowerShell topics: introduction, WMI, SharePoint, Active Directory, Exchange, 3rd party products and more.      A big thank you also goes out to a number of people. Planning committee Wes Stahler, lead organizer of PowerShell Saturday Columbus, president of Central Ohio PowerShell User Group Ed “Microsoft Scripting Guy” Wilson Teresa “The Scripting Wife” Wilson Ashley McGlone Brian T. Jackett (myself) Speakers Ed Wilson Ashley McGlone James Brundage Trevor Sullivon Daniel Cruz Volunteer Lisa Gardner, fellow Microsoft PFE volunteered her time on a Saturday to assist with smooth operation of the day Facility Coordination Debbie Carrier, facilities coordinator for the Columbus Microsoft Office and helped us out greatly with the venue   Slides and Script Samples    I presented my session on “PowerShell for the SharePoint 2010 Developer”.  Below you can download the slides and script samples.   Photos    I wasn’t able to take took many pictures (only 3) as I was busy doing my presentation, answering questions, and taking care of random items throughout the day.   Pictures on Facebook    click here Pictures on SkyDrive (higher res) PowerShell Saturday Columbus Mar '12 VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL   Conclusion    I’m very happy that this first ever PowerShell Saturday was a success.  My fellow PFE and speaker Ashley McGlone also has a short write-up on his blog about the event (click here).  I have heard rumors that there are other cities starting to plan their own local events.  When I hear more details I’ll spread the word here and on Twitter.         -Frog Out

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• Versioning and Continuous Integration with project settings files

  - by Michael Stephenson

  I came across something which was a bit of a pain in the bottom the other week. Our scenario was that we had implemented a helper style assembly which had some custom configuration implemented through the project settings. I'm sure most of you are familiar with this where you end up with a settings file which is viewable through the C# project file and you can configure some basic settings. The settings are embedded in the assembly during compilation to be part of a DefaultValue attribute. You have the ability to override the settings by adding information to your app.config and if the app.config doesn’t override the settings then the embedded default is used. All normal C# stuff so far… Where our pain started was when we implement Continuous Integration and we wanted to version all of this from our build. What I was finding was that the assembly was versioned fine but the embedded default value was maintaining the non CI build version number. I ended up getting this to work by using a build task to change the version numbers in the following files: App.config Settings.settings Settings.designer.cs I think I probably could have got away with just the settings.designer.cs, but wanted to keep them all consistent incase we had to look at the code on the build server for some reason. I think the reason this was painful was because the settings.designer.cs is only updated through Visual Studio and it writes out the code to this file including the DefaultValue attribute when the project is saved rather than as part of the compilation process. The compile just compiles the already existing C# file. As I said we got it working, and it was a bit of a pain. If anyone has a better solution for this I'd love to hear it

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• Azure Service Bus - Authorization failure

  - by Michael Stephenson

  I fell into this trap earlier in the week with a mistake I made when configuring a service to send and listen on the azure service bus and I thought it would be worth a little note for future reference as I didnt find anything online about it.  After configuring everything when I ran my code sample I was getting the below error. WebHost failed to process a request.Sender Information: System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment+HostingManager/28316044Exception: System.ServiceModel.ServiceActivationException: The service '/-------/BrokeredMessageService.svc' cannot be activated due to an exception during compilation.  The exception message is: Generic: There was an authorization failure. Make sure you have specified the correct SharedSecret, SimpleWebToken or Saml transport client credentials.. ---> Microsoft.ServiceBus.AuthorizationFailedException: Generic: There was an authorization failure. Make sure you have specified the correct SharedSecret, SimpleWebToken or Saml transport client credentials.   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.RelayedOnewayTcpClient.ConnectRequestReplyContext.Send(Message message, TimeSpan timeout, IDuplexChannel& channel)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.RelayedOnewayTcpListener.RelayedOnewayTcpListenerClient.Connect(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.RelayedOnewayTcpClient.EnsureConnected(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.RefcountedCommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.RelayedOnewayChannelListener.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ChannelDispatcher.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostBase.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.SocketConnectionTransportManager.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.TransportManager.Open(TimeSpan timeout, TransportChannelListener channelListener)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.TransportManagerContainer.Open(TimeSpan timeout, SelectTransportManagersCallback selectTransportManagerCallback)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.SocketConnectionChannelListener`2.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ChannelDispatcher.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostBase.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment.HostingManager.ActivateService(String normalizedVirtualPath)   at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment.HostingManager.EnsureServiceAvailable(String normalizedVirtualPath)   --- End of inner exception stack trace ---   at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment.HostingManager.EnsureServiceAvailable(String normalizedVirtualPath)   at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment.EnsureServiceAvailableFast(String relativeVirtualPath)Process Name: w3wpProcess ID: 8056As recommended by the error message I checked everything about the application configuration and also the keys and eventually I found the problem.When I set the permissions in the ACS rule group I had copied and pasted the claim name for net.windows.servicebus.action from the Azure portal and hadnt spotted the <space> character on the end of it like you sometimes pick up when copying text in the browser.  This meant that the listen and send permissions were not setup correctly which is why (as you would expect) my two applications could not connect to the service bus.So lesson learnt here, if you do copy and paste into the ACS rules just be careful you dont leave a space on the end of anything otherwise it will be difficult to spot that its configured incorrectly

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• Combining Shared Secret and Username Token – Azure Service Bus

  - by Michael Stephenson

  As discussed in the introduction article this walkthrough will explain how you can implement WCF security with the Windows Azure Service Bus to ensure that you can protect your endpoint in the cloud with a shared secret but also flow through a username token so that in your listening WCF service you will be able to identify who sent the message. This could either be in the form of an application or a user depending on how you want to use your token. Prerequisites Before going into the walk through I want to explain a few assumptions about the scenario we are implementing but to keep the article shorter I am not going to walk through all of the steps in how to setup some of this. In the solution we have a simple console application which will represent the client application. There is also the services WCF application which contains the WCF service we will expose via the Windows Azure Service Bus. The WCF Service application in this example was hosted in IIS 7 on Windows 2008 R2 with AppFabric Server installed and configured to auto-start the WCF listening services. I am not going to go through significant detail around the IIS setup because it should not matter in relation to this article however if you want to understand more about how to configure WCF and IIS for such a scenario please refer to the following paper which goes into a lot of detail about how to configure this. The link is: http://tinyurl.com/8s5nwrz   The Service Component To begin with let's look at the service component and how it can be configured to listen to the service bus using a shared secret but to also accept a username token from the client. In the sample the service component is called Acme.Azure.ServiceBus.Poc.UN.Services. It has a single service which is the Visual Studio template for a WCF service when you add a new WCF Service Application so we have a service called Service1 with its Echo method. Nothing special so far!.... The next step is to look at the web.config file to see how we have configured the WCF service. In the services section of the WCF configuration you can see I have created my service and I have created a local endpoint which I simply used to do a little bit of diagnostics and to check it was working, but more importantly there is the Windows Azure endpoint which is using the ws2007HttpRelayBinding (note that this should also work just the same if your using netTcpRelayBinding). The key points to note on the above picture are the service behavior called MyServiceBehaviour and the service bus endpoints behavior called MyEndpointBehaviour. We will go into these in more detail later.   The Relay Binding The relay binding for the service has been configured to use the TransportWithMessageCredential security mode. This is the important bit where the transport security really relates to the interaction between the service and listening to the Azure Service Bus and the message credential is where we will use our username token like we have specified in the message/clientCrentialType attribute. Note also that we have left the relayClientAuthenticationType set to RelayAccessToken. This means that authentication will be made against ACS for accessing the service bus and messages will not be accepted from any sender who has not been authenticated by ACS.   The Endpoint Behaviour In the below picture you can see the endpoint behavior which is configured to use the shared secret client credential for accessing the service bus and also for diagnostic purposes I have included the service registry element. Hopefully if you are familiar with using Windows Azure Service Bus relay feature the above is very familiar to you and this is a very common setup for this section. There is nothing specific to the username token implementation here. The Service Behaviour Now we come to the bit with most of the username token bits in it. When you configure the service behavior I have included the serviceCredentials element and then setup to use userNameAuthentication and you can see that I have created my own custom username token validator.   This setup means that WCF will hand off to my class for validating the username token details. I have also added the serviceSecurityAudit element to give me a simple auditing of access capability. My UsernamePassword Validator The below picture shows you the details of the username password validator class I have implemented. WCF will hand off to this class when validating the token and give me a nice way to check the token credentials against an on-premise store. You have all of the validation features with a non-service bus WCF implementation available such as validating the username password against active directory or ASP.net membership features or as in my case above something much simpler.   The Client Now let's take a look at the client side of this solution and how we can configure the client to authenticate against ACS but also send a username token over to the service component so it can implement additional security checks on-premise. I have a console application and in the program class I want to use the proxy generated with Add Service Reference to send a message via the Azure Service Bus. You can see in my WCF client configuration below I have setup my details for the azure service bus url and am using the ws2007HttpRelayBinding. Next is my configuration for the relay binding. You can see below I have configured security to use TransportWithMessageCredential so we will flow the username token with the message and also the RelayAccessToken relayClientAuthenticationType which means the component will validate against ACS before being allowed to access the relay endpoint to send a message.     After the binding we need to configure the endpoint behavior like in the below picture. This is the normal configuration to use a shared secret for accessing a Service Bus endpoint.   Finally below we have the code of the client in the console application which will call the service bus. You can see that we have created our proxy and then made a normal call to a WCF service but this time we have also set the ClientCredentials to use the appropriate username and password which will be flown through the service bus and to our service which will validate them.     Conclusion As you can see from the above walkthrough it is not too difficult to configure a service to use both a shared secret and username token at the same time. This gives you the power and protection offered by the access control service in the cloud but also the ability to flow additional tokens to the on-premise component for additional security features to be implemented. Sample The sample used in this post is available at the following location: https://s3.amazonaws.com/CSCBlogSamples/Acme.Azure.ServiceBus.Poc.UN.zip

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• Should I get my masters in Game Design and Development or Computer Science?

  - by Christopher Stephenson

  I am a recent grad with a B.S. in IT while I didn't minor in Game Desgin and development, I took few classes in it. During my job search I have seen that most gaming companies seems to want someone that majored in C.S, mathematics, or physics. During my undergrad I never had to take physics nor did I learn much about data structures and algorithms. These seem to be really important when searching for a job in game development. So I am thinking about going back to school to get my masters in either CS, or GDD. The problem though is which one? I am really not looking to create my own games, I just want to work on games.

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• BizTalk & NService Bus Whitepaper

  - by Michael Stephenson

  My whitepaper discussing BizTalk and NService Bus is not available on MSDN http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=b57b7625-7316-4f56-b88e-1fb685efae5b Thanks to Steve Lemkau for his contribution and to Udi Dahan and the NServiceBus User Forums for help with a few questions I had.

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• Testing Reference Data Mappings

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Background Mapping reference data is one of the common scenarios in BizTalk development and its usually a bit of a pain when you need to manage a lot of reference data whether it be through the BizTalk Cross Referencing features or some kind of custom solution. I have seen many cases where only a couple of the mapping conditions are ever tested. Approach As usual I like to see these things tested in isolation before you start using them in your BizTalk maps so you know your mapping functions are working as expected. This approach can be used for almost all of your reference data type mapping functions where you can take advantage of MSTests data driven tests to test lots of conditions without having to write millions of tests. Walk Through Rather than go into the details of this here, I'm going to call out to one of my colleagues who wrote a nice little walk through about using data driven tests a while back. Check out Callum's blog: http://callumhibbert.blogspot.com/2009/07/data-driven-tests-with-mstest.html

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• Cleaning your BizTalk Build Server

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Just a little note for myself this one.At one of my customers where it is still BizTalk 2006 one of the build servers is intermittently getting issues so I wanted to run a script periodically to clean things up a little.  The below script is an example of how you can stop cruise control and all of the biztalk services, then clean the biztalk databases and reset the backup process and then click everything off again.This should keep the server a little cleaner and reduce the number of builds that occasionally fail for adhoc environmental issues.REM Server Clean ScriptREM =================== REM This script is ran to move the build server back to a clean state echo Stop Cruise Controlnet stop CCService echo Stop IISiisreset /stop echo Stop BizTalk Servicesnet stop BTSSvc$<Name of BizTalk Host><Repeat for other BizTalk services> echo Stop SSOnet stop ENTSSO echo Stop SQL Job Agentnet stop SQLSERVERAGENT echo Clean Message Boxsqlcmd -E -d BizTalkMsgBoxDB -Q "Exec bts_CleanupMsgbox"sqlcmd -E -d BizTalkMsgBoxDB -Q "Exec bts_PurgeSubscriptions"  echo Clean Tracking Databasesqlcmd -E -d BizTalkDTADb -Q "Exec dtasp_CleanHMData" echo Reset TDDS Stream Statussqlcmd -E -d BizTalkDTADb -Q "Update TDDS_StreamStatus Set lastSeqNum = 0" echo Force Full Backupsqlcmd -E -d BizTalkMgmtDB -Q "Exec sp_ForceFullBackup" echo Clean Backup Directorydel E:\BtsBackups\*.* /q  echo Start SSOnet start ENTSSO echo Start SQL Job Agentnet start SQLSERVERAGENT echo Start BizTalk Servicesnet start BTSSvc$<Name of BizTalk Host><Repeat for other BizTalk services> echo Start IISiisreset /start echo Start Cruise Controlnet start CCService

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• More on Map Testing

  - by Michael Stephenson

  I have been chatting with Maurice den Heijer recently about his codeplex project for the BizTalk Map Testing Framework (http://mtf.codeplex.com/). Some of you may remember the article I did for BizTalk 2009 and 2006 about how to test maps but with Maurice's project he is effectively looking at how to improve productivity and quality by building some useful testing features within the framework to simplify the process of testing maps. As part of our discussion we realized that we both had slightly different approaches to how we validate the output from the map. Put simple Maurice does some xpath validation of the data in various nodes where as my approach for most standard cases is to use serialization to allow you to validate the output using normal MSTest assertions. I'm not really going to go into the pro's and con's of each approach because I think there is a place for both and also I'm sure others have various approaches which work too. What would be great is for the map testing framework to provide support for different ways of testing which can cover everything from simple cases to some very specialized scenarios. So as agreed with Maurice I have done the sample which I will talk about in the rest of this article to show how we can use the serialization approach to create and compare the input and output from a map in normal development testing. Prerequisites One of the common patterns I usually implement when developing BizTalk solutions is to use xsd.exe to create .net classes for most of the schemas used within the solution. In the testing pattern I will take advantage of these .net classes. The Map In this sample the map we will use is very simple and just concatenates some data from the input message to the output message. Hopefully the below picture illustrates this well. The Test In the test I'm basically taking the following actions: Use the .net class generated from the schema to create an input message for the map Serialize the input object to a file Run the map from .net using the standard BizTalk test method which was generated for running the map Deserialize the output file from the map execution to a .net class representing the output schema Use MsTest assertions to validate things about the output message The below picture shows this: As you can see the code for this is pretty simple and it's all strongly typed which means changes to my schema which can affect the tests can be easily picked up as compilation errors. I can then chose to have one test which validates most of the output from the map, or to have many specific tests covering individual scenarios within the map. Summary Hopefully this post illustrates a powerful yet simple way of effectively testing many BizTalk mapping scenarios. I will probably have more conversations with Maurice about these approaches and perhaps some of the above will be included in the mapping test framework.   The sample can be downloaded from here: http://cid-983a58358c675769.office.live.com/self.aspx/Blog%20Samples/More%20Map%20Testing/MapTestSample.zip

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• How to focus on one topic? [closed]

  - by Brian

  I have a huge problem while reading computer books. Every couple pages I'll end up googling something I want to learn more about, but then I'll find something on that page that I'll want to learn more about and google that (sometimes programming related, sometime hardware related). Normally after wasting around 3 hours going into different subjects I'll return to the original text only to repeat the process a few pages later. Any advice for sticking to one subject and learning that in-depth? I have tons of programming books I've read half-way through since I'll become interested in other languages/topics (not that I'm not interested in the books I've started). Also, what would be worth focusing on in depth? I've gone into Python in the most depth but for classes I'm learning Java and assembly (ARM and Motorola 68000). Also, I've taken a class on C++. Lately I've been spending most of my time learning about Linux instead of programming though. I'm not sure what would be worth focusing on the most to get a job. In other words, how can you focus on one topic and not let curiosity about everything else get in the way? Thanks in advance, Brian

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