BizTalk Orchestration Profiler 2010

BizTalk Orchestration Profiler is a really useful tool and one I would recommend to BizTalk developers building orchestration based solutions. It illustrates the degree of shape coverage for a given orchestration. It also facilitates the identification of latency issues and error prone shapes.

The current release of the BizTalk Orchestration Profiler on CodePlex will not work with BizTalk Server 2010 without some minor configuration changes as detailed below.

1. Update the following settings with your installation path for HTML Help Workshop and BizTalk Server 2010:

   <add key="HelpCompilerLocation"
   value="C:\Program Files (x86)\HTML Help Workshop\hhc.exe" />

   <codeBase version="3.0.1.0" 
   href="C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010\
   Tracking\Microsoft.BizTalk.XLangView.dll"/>

2. Finally add the following setting before the closing “configuration” tag:

   <startup useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy="true">
   <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.0"/>
   </startup>

ESB Toolkit 64-bit Issue

One of the issues I came across recently running the ESB Toolkit on a 64-bit server was the following.

Error details: The send adapter for this send port is not supported on 64-bit host instances. Please make sure that the send adapter is associated with a 32-bit only handler.

This occurred while sending a fault message to the exception management frameworks’ “All.Exceptions” send port. The “All.Exceptions” send port utilises the legacy SQL Adapter which does not support 64-bit mode.

To resolve this issue the send handler that the “All.Exceptions” send port is configured with must be running in 32-bit only mode.

I created a new 32-bit only Host and Host Instance for the legacy SQL Adapter and added a Send Handler for the Host.

1. Create a 32-bit Host

2.Create a Host Instance

3. Create a Send Handler

Given that the legacy SQL Adapter is planned for removal in future releases of BizTalk Server I suspect the WCF-SQL Adapter will be used in the next release of the ESB Toolkit. Although it was hoped that would be the case for the 2.1 release.

Blog Inactivity

I haven’t had the opportunity to add to this blog as much as I had hoped. However, in the coming months I will do my best to post the experiences and lessons learned while working on my current project; an Enterprise Service Bus implementation utilising BizTalk Server 2010, ESB Toolkit 2.1, Windows Server AppFabric, WCF, Entity Framework 4.1, SQL Server Service Broker and SQL Server 2008 R2.

Tracing with ESB Toolkit 2.1

There are two minor changes that are worth noting when turning tracing for ESB Toolkit 2.1 on.

1. In Notepad open
   
   C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\CONFIG\machine.config
   
2. Locate the line with the closing configSections tag.
3. Under that line paste the following section:

   <system.diagnostics>
         <switches>
             <add name="BizTalkESBToolkit21" value="4"/>
         </switches>
   </system.diagnostics>

4. Save and close machine.config.
5. Start the DebugView program (Download)
6. In DebugView, on the Capture menu, click Capture Global Win32 to make sure that it is checked.
7. In the BizTalk Server Administration console, restart the BizTalkServerApplication host instance.

Original steps documented for ESB Toolkit 2.0 by Nick Hauenstein.

Another point worth noting is that there are less traces output by ESB Toolkit 2.1 in comparison with ESB Toolkit 2.0.