Integrations in Azure and My BizTalk Hangover

If you’ve dropped in on this site occasionally (and my WordPress account numbers suggest that once a blue moon ago a few people have), you may have noticed that I haven’t written an article for Talented Monkeys in over 5 years. And to be frank, it was pretty sporadic for the 2-3 years prior to that as well.

So what happened? Well… this blog was primarily about BizTalk and truth be told-and even though Microsoft won’t admit it-it just doesn’t look like there’s that much interest in the product anymore. Myself, I’ve been currently focusing on Azure, particularly PaaS solutions within the integration space. To that end, you might hear from me a bit more often as I learn stuff that others probably already know, but post it here anyway for my own edification.

As always, thanks for your continued support.

Conditional Port Deployment Using the Deployment Framework for BizTalk (BTDF)

Using the Deployment Framework for BizTalk  makes the normally painful task of performing a BizTalk deployment a lot easier. If you don’t know about it, I’d highly recommend taking a look into it. Once you get it going, you’ll find there’s no better way to do a BTS deployment.

Oftentimes while doing BizTalk work, I like to create “test ports” to help me unit test my BizTalk code or configuration. These are usually file-drop locations that I don’t want included in my regular deployment. I’ve found it to be somewhat painful a process to continually have to either add or remove these test locations, so I like to use the Deployment Framework’s capability to use XML Preprocess to selectively deploy a port.

Here’s how:

First, you’ll need to make sure the value of the RequireXmlPreprocessDirectives is set to “True” in the deployment project file. Then, in the PortBindingsMaster file, you simply comment out the port you want to be conditional and wrap it in a preprocessor directive like such:

<!-- ifdef ${_xml_preprocess} -->    
<!-- <ReceivePort Name="TEST" IsTwoWay="false" BindingOption="0">
      <Description xsi:nil="true" />
      <ReceiveLocations>
      <ReceiveLocation Name="TEST_FILE">
          <Description xsi:nil="true" />
          <Address>${someVariable}\*.xml</Address>
          …
      </ReceivePort> -->
<!-- endif -->

When you need to turn it off, you simply change the value of RequireXmlPreprocessDirectives to “False” and BTDF will treat your port definition as it would any other commented out code-it’ll ignore it.

One caveat to this approach, though, is that you’ll need to wrap ALL other variable-based definitions in the PortBindingsMaster with preprocessor directives as such:

<!-- ifdef ${_xml_preprocess} -->
<!-- <Address>mssql://${dbServerName}//${dbName}?</Address>-->
<!-- else -->
    <Address>mssql://${dbServerName}//${dbName}?</Address>
<!-- endif -->

Note that the “else” part isn’t commented out. That’s so that if the preprocessor is off, it will recognize it as normal text and BTDF will process accordingly.  Also notice that the “Address” part is identical. This is because I wanted it to work the same way regardless of whether we were going to require the preprocess directive or not. If I wanted to do something different I would simply change these values.

Cumulative Update 1 for BizTalk 2016 Now Available

The first cumulative update for BizTalk 2016 is now available!  Find out more here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/biztalk_server_team_blog/2017/01/27/announcing-biztalk-server-2016-cumulative-update-pack-1/

 

AppFabric Support Ends in April 2016

The clock is ticking if you’re using AppFabric!  Microsoft ends support on April 2, 2016.

See the announcement here:  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/appfabric/archive/2015/04/02/windows-server-appfabric-1-1-ends-support-4-2-2016.aspx.

If you’re looking for a good replacement for caching try:
On Azure use Redis Cache
On premise try Redis On Windows or NCache

BizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter Has Been Updated

Check out  Sandro’s blog for more details: https://sandroaspbiztalkblog.wordpress.com/2015/03/16/biztalk-scheduled-task-adapter-for-biztalk-server-2013-r2-has-been-updated/