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Microsoft BizTalk Server Performance Optimization Guide

From MSDN: Welcome to the first edition of the Microsoft® BizTalk® Server Performance Optimizations Guide. We created this guide to provide in depth information for optimizing the performance of a BizTalk Server solution. Full end-to-end performance testing is frequently overlooked during enterprise application deployment. Knowing that Microsoft has built a scalable messaging infrastructure, many organizations that use BizTalk Server spend little or no time conducting performance testing of their own applications.

Thursday, July 10, 2008 Read
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BizUnit Designer

From CodePlex: BizUnit Designer is a GUI that allows rapid creation of BizUnit test cases which can be used for unit testing or system testing distributed applications. The easy to use drag and drop user interface has minimal learning curve which will get you up and running with test cases in a matter of minutes. I’ve used BizUnit on a couple of projects (even non-BizTalk projects) and I think it’s very useful.

Friday, July 4, 2008 Read
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More BizTalk posters

Somebody at the product team has really started a rush to push out these nice looking posters. Here is a rather new one: BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Database Infrastructure Poster http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=24662FB5-622C-4E7E-9E83-505D1F664C4D&displaylang=en And as a service to those of you that haven’t seen anyone of these: BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Runtime Architecture Poster http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=8790E652-1DA5-4E80-88FE-B87606233DB4&displaylang=en BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Capabilities Poster http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=34F41573-C552-466F-B531-32CB09A57CDD&displaylang=en BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Scale-Out Configurations Poster http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=FF468298-64BE-4947-A086-F61584CAF995&displaylang=en

Wednesday, July 2, 2008 Read
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Video: BizTalk Services Explained

In this video, James Conard talks with John Shewchuk and Dennis Pilarinos about BizTalk Services. In the simplest definition, BizTalk Services simplifies application connectivity by extending WCF and providing a set of hosted services. John and Dennis quickly explain BizTalk Services by discussing the challenges with building applications today. Dennis also shows four demos of BizTalk Services and then drops into Visual Studio along the way to show the programming model.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008 Read
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Released: BizTalk Server 2006 extentions for WF

Just released (oh well, a couple of months ago), the long awaited BizTalk Server 2006 extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation SDK. Use WF modeling and host workflows in BizTalk Server. Note the BTS messaging activities in the image. The new BizTalk Server edition will most likely sport the Workflow Designer instead of the plain old Orchestration Designer. This probably results into something that looks a lot like what you get with the extentions.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008 Read
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Microsoft LoadGen 2007

Microsoft LoadGen 2007 generates message transmission loads to run performance and stress tests for your Microsoft BizTalk Server applications, and provides performance counters to monitor the performance of the infrastructure running BizTalk Server. This tool is intended for developers and IT professionals to simulate load on a BizTalk Server. Using this tool, you can simulate load to instrument performance and stress against a BizTalk deployment. In addition, this tool may also be extended by developers to simulate load for custom transports.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008 Read
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BizTalk Server capabilities poster

From the source: This poster lists the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 capabilities bucketed in categories and is designed to provide both a high level and a detailed view of the capabilities and features that are included in the product. (When printed in full scale this poster size is: 35”x 32”) Download the poster here.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008 Read
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FarPoint Spread for BizTalk Server 2006

If you’ve ever wanted or needed to parse Excel files using BizTalk, you can now. Some time ago FarPoint released a pipeline dissassembler component for BizTalk Server 2006 which is able to convert Excel files into XML. From their website: Spread for BizTalk Server 2006 provides a complete solution for integrating Microsoft Excel data seamlessly into your BizTalk applications. Spread includes a pipeline disassembler that parses Excel data (XLS, Excel 2007 XML, CSV, TXT) into XML, and a pipeline assembler that creates Excel (XLS, Excel 2007 XML) and PDF documents from XML data in BizTalk Applications.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008 Read
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Map xs:string to xs:datetime

Remember that situation where you needed to convert a string representation of a DateTime to a valid DataTime using the BizTalk mapper? No? Well, I do. The parsing of the string as a DateTime is not the real problem here. Once you know how the string is formatted it is simply writing a way to parse it, either using substrings or using the DateTime.Parse method. Once you have a DateTime though, you need to format it to be valid according to the XSD spec.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008 Read
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First look at WCF Adapter for BizTalk Server 2006 R2

Although the WCF adapter for BizTalk Server 2006 R2 has been released a while ago, I found that a coworker of mine had created a simple and short video explaining all the basics of using the WCF adapter. If you haven’t used the adapter before or just want to see how easy it is to use the adapter, go see the video here.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008 Read
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BizTalk Server 2006 R3 just around the corner

Quote: “Once SQL Server 2008 (…) becomes generally available, we will follow with an updated version of BizTalk Server designed for the latest versions of Windows Server, the .NET Framework, Visual Studio, and SQL Server. This will mean that BizTalk Server customers will continue to take full advantage of the platform’s latest improvements including: scalability for mission-critical workloads, improved support for next-generation web and service oriented applications, improved virtualization support and better business insight through Office.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 Read