Thursday, January 27, 2005

 

BizTalk Server Service Pack 1 released

As for each product a Service Pack 1 release is always an important milestone. From today on you can get it here.


Overview
BizTalk Server 2004 Service Pack 1 addresses a variety of customer scenarios and contains a collection of hotfixes, security fixes and fixes for performance and stress. Microsoft recommends that all BizTalk Server 2004 customers deploy SP1 across all editions of BizTalk Server to ensure their implementations are up to date.

IMPORTANT: BizTalk Server 2004 SP1 is not compatible with BizTalk Server 2002 and BizTalk Server 2000 systems.Please be sure to read and review the SP1 documentation before installing SP1.

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

 

New BizTalk Competency Exam Debuts - Link is online

Preparation guide for exam "Developing E-Business Solutions Using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004" at http://www.microsoft.com/learning/exams/74-135.asp

Article at:
http://mcpmag.com/news/article.asp?EditorialsID=761

Microsoft released another "partner competency" exam this week: Exam 74-135, Developing E-Business Solutions Using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004, was released Monday, January 17, but the exam made its formal debut Tuesday at Microsoft's Envision Conference, a summit of the company's sales and channel partners, which is taking place this week in Seattle.
According to information published on the guides for similar exams released late last year, partner competency exams "validate that individuals in a partner environment are efficient and capable of deploying multifaceted IT solutions to their customer with skills across multiple Microsoft products and technologies." These exams also do not qualify test takers as Microsoft Certified Professionals.

To find out more about the new partner competency exams, see the earlier news report, "New Exams Target Competencies," at http://mcpmag.com/news/article.asp?editorialsid=755.
To find out more about the Microsoft Certified Partner program, click here (Microsoft Passport registration is required for access); for Microsoft Competencies, click here. (As this report was being posted, the exam objective guide did not appear on the Microsoft Learning site; a link to it will be provided when it goes live on that site.)

Friday, January 14, 2005

 

BizTalk Server Web Publishing Tips

Two things I often encounter when giving assistance in BizTalk project that uses the BizTalk Web Services Publishing wizard.
The first is rather simple and more related towards Visual Studio .NET nevertheless it's often not known. Often you don't find the menu item back within the Visual Studio .NET environment to start the BizTalk Web Services Publishing Wizard, this in fact is nothing else than an external tool you can simple add yourself.
1) Go within Visual Studio to the Tools - External Tools menu item.
2) Choose Add
3) Fill in following:
Title: BizTalk &Web Services Publishing Wizard
Command: C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004\BTSWebSvcWiz.exe
Arguments: Assembly="$(TargetPath)"
Initial directory: C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004
4) Click Apply
From now on you've got the Menu Option beneath the Tools menu.

A second tip is once you've deployed a BizTalk Web Service often it doesn’t work the first time you'll try it out. Unfortunately you get then always a very descriptive error stating "Internal SOAP Error..." with as good as no detail about the real exception. Also HAT doesn’t show more than this often. If you've get a look at the public newsgroups about BizTalk you'll see this error is asked a lot for.
A help for this is that you can adopt the Web.config file of the generated Web Service to provide you more error details.
1) Open the Web.config of the Web Service project that has been generated.
2) At the bottom you’ll find following section:



<appSettings>


<!-- ThrowDetailedError = one of {"False" (default), "True"} -->


<add key="ThrowDetailedError" value="False" />


</appSettings>




3) Put the value on "True"
4) Save the file

If you'll then retry you will see a more detailed description, very often related to the values that are contained within the XML Document you are sending.





Friday, January 07, 2005

 

GREAT

Some useful things I discovered the last weeks thanks to Scott's blog:

* In the past I've already giving some training on BizTalk and .NET. To facilitate the training and to get started fast I'll start most of the time with a Virtual PC image with the development environment on it. Like this we can dive directly into the product and don't have to start with installing it first (which is still very often a painful thing).
But after the course people like to continue with exercises and very often the are asking then on how to get their hands on a development environment. Now there is a great solution for this request that is the Visual Studio Hosted Experience you need to register yourself the first time. But from then on you can learn .NET and since a few weeks also BizTalk Server in a hosted environment. So you just need an internet connection and you can start off with exercises.
Great stuff try it out. Hopefully SQL Reporting Services will be available soon to.

* Another thing I discovered thanks to Scott’s blog was the implementation of some of the integration patterns described in the practice & patterns book. There are 2 gotdotnet workspaces available to have a look at. This is just great suspense.

I myself have been rewarded with the MVP status for the Windows Server System - BizTalk Server, Great no? So expect to see me often in the BizTalk Community newsgroups in the future (it's really the place to be to see what people are doing with the product). And I'm working on some articles about HAT and Orchestrations with Web services and BPEL that hope will be finished soon.

Happy New Year and a GREAT 2005

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