Comparing BizTalk with WebSphere Integration Server

This document helps you understand the key technologies from Microsoft and IBM in the integration space.  It then compares and contrasts the various products and technologies.

 This document was done in 2005. I’m not sure if there is an updated study to compare the two offerings?

Document: Click here

Pakistan crowned World Cup Champions (20-20)

There is no stopping Afridi when he is on a roll. This is exactly what the Sri Lankans and South Africans found out when he produced some magic with the bat and ball to win first world cup for Pakistan in the 20-20 format. On comparison I would rate Sri Lanka as a better team in today’s final primarily in two departments (batting and fielding). Pakistan surely had the edge in the bowling department, as that turned out to be the decisive case rolling SriLanka out below 140.

 
Man of the match – for the semifinal and final

With Umar Gul, Ajmal, Afridi and young Amir having a brilliant run to the finals – the only way to beat them was to post a big total. Sadly for lankans, that couldn’t happen. Personally, the highlight of the match was the spectacular display of fast bowling in the first over of the day. Amir bowling six short balls to Dilshan (man of the series), trapping him for a duck with a mistimed pull shot.

 
Two man of the match performances handed South Africa and SriLanka their first loss in the tournament

Pakistan with momentum is a beast that cannot be contained. England discovered that fact to their cost in 1992 at Melbourne, when Imran Khan’s cornered tigers sprung at their throats to seize the country’s first major global title. And now, a generation later but in a campaign of distinct and glorious parallels, Sri Lanka have also sampled the unstoppable alchemy that occurs when cricket’s most emotional and temperamental participants find a way to meld their ambitions to their deeds 

 The South African juggernaut was brought to a screeching halt by Shahid Afridi (man of the match for the semifinal and final) who, dumped the tournament favourites out of the World Twenty20 and secured Pakistan’s place in the final. For South Africa it was their first loss in the tournament, as it was for Sri Lanka in the final.  

This is how it happened (click the image for full view)..

 

  

As the Pakistan team took their victory lap, the public address system belted out Dil Dil Pakistan, an all-time favourite rock song by Vital Signs, one of the early Pakistani bands. Later at the press conference, Younis Khan described the win as a gift to the nation.

 

The celebrations have just started ..

VS: View/Extract your GAC assemblies

In order to view your GAC assemblies – to disassemble / copy or whatever – open the following location is your in the windows explorer

 Location: C:\WINNT\assembly\GAC_MSIL\

General: How Microsoft delivers successful software (SDC)

Microsoft Australia’s Solutions Development Centre (SDC) has been successfully delivering complex custom-developed applications for customers. This session elaborates on those practices at the Microsoft Development Center (North Ryde, Sydney)

 In the presentations below we provide an overview of the SDC, a day in the life for the team and details on how we approach each of the key disciplines in an SDC project team

Link: Click here

Happy learning:)

BizTalk: Load/View context properties from the Spool table imgContext value

Refer: Click here

General: Microsoft Remix – For the web developer

Incase you are passionate about Web technologies on the Microsoft platform – this bit is for you.. Microsoft Remix is the place to advance your web development and design skills, get in-depth exposure to exciting new Microsoft technologies

 Agenda: http://www.microsoft.com/australia/remix/agenda/schedule.aspx

1. Create the User Experience you want in SharePoint
2. Silverlight 3 Super Session
3. What’s new Expression 3
4. Azure with David Burela
5. Building great standards based websites for the big wide world with ASP.NET 4.0
6. The Next Level of Creativity with Expression Blend 3
   IE8 for Developers
7. Real World S+S Architecture
8. Introducing the Microsoft Virtual Earth Silverlight Map Control
9. Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit for Social Websites
   Compelling User Experiences for Surface

10.  Sibling Rivalry or Love: Microsoft and Open source

 Cost: $200 (early bird)

 Date: 11 June (Star City – Sydney)

  

Happy learning

BizTalk Server 2006 R2: Compare Editions

After the release of BizTalk 2009 – finding the BizTalk 2006 R2 edition comparion chart has become more than important (just because I couldn’t find it ). Hope it saves you the pain of searching around !

Comparison Matrix
Capability Poster
Capability Doc	(Click icon to download)

 Happy choosing

BizTalk: Retrieve the “document strong name” value from a BizTalk message stream

Here is a small code snippet to extract the strong name value from a BizTalk message stream.

 

//messageStream is the stream extracted from the BizTalk pipeline context

XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();

xmlDoc.Load(messageStream);

 

string documentMessageType = xmlDoc.DocumentElement.NamespaceURI + “#” + xmlDoc.DocumentElement.LocalName;

 

IDocumentSpec documentSpec = pContext.GetDocumentSpecByType(documentMessageType);

 

string documentStrongName = documentSpec.DocSpecStrongName;

 

Happy coding J

BizTalk: Performance problems using the SOAP adapter

Consulting with one of my colleague on a BizTalk assignment, we came across a performance question while calling web-services from a BizTalk application. The application was quite simple in BizTalk terms doing the following:

 

1)     Input is an xml file (around 1KB in size)

2)     BizTalk consumes the file and sends it to a web-service (SOAP Adapter)

3)     The web-service is a dummy service that just returns back “Hello world”

 

 

We measured the overall response time for a load of 25, 50 and 100 concurrent users. The BizTalk solution consists of a simple orchestration that receives the message à calls the web-service and logs the response. To our surprise, for a load of about 100 users the web-service response time increased to about 2.42 seconds – which is unacceptable!

 

After looking on to several fronts and performance tuning with the recommendations the response time was no better! Some of the major steps we under took during the process are as follows:

·      Increase the concurrent connection from 80 to 300 concurrent

·      Increased the SQL Max. Worker thread from 750 to 1600

·      Added the scope in the BizTalk Orchestration to reduce the no. of persistence points.

·      Distribute the host instances (Receive, Processing and Send)

·      All other points as mentioned in the blog entry (Click here)

Now the average response time decreased from 2.42 seconds to 2.32 (an improvement of 4% – still unacceptable!).

 

 

Solution:

Finally, we thought about removing the SOAP adapterand calling the services inline from C# code. This time around we could process 100 concurrent users with an average response time of about 1.1 seconds (improving 54% from our original time).  Here is the screen shot using load runner.

 

 Explanation: 

1)     Webservices and the 15 second delay

 

The problem is that both the Orchestration Engine and the SOAP/HTTP stack share the same .NET process, and hence the same threadpool. For many scenarios, this might not be an issue. For inline Web service/HTTP sends, however, it often is. Both the Orchestration Engine and the SOAP/HTTP stacks make aggressive use of the .NET threadpool.

 

Any threads that have not been used for 40 seconds will be deleted from the pool. When adding threads to the threadpool, it tries to avoid creating threads. The threadpool will try to create only one thread every 500 milliseconds. Under high-load conditions there is a good chance that you will run into this issue – say incase the thread pool has about 100 requests lined up.

 

Option 1:

Control the number of thread in the thread pool by using the following registry key – typicall setting the minimum value to the maximum.

 

Registry Key: HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\BTSSvc$BizTalkServerApplication\CLR Hosting

 

Option 2:

Look into process isolation – this would using a different instance of the .NET threadpool executed in a separate address space from the BizTalk NT service. This approach provides a high level of isolation. Because you are in complete control of the work loaded onto the threadpool, its behavior is more predictable. This approach uses the COM+ application hosting model to avoid the issue of few threads. The other benefit it provides is disposing the transport component and the message after the method returns.

 

 

With a short time on our hand (about half a day!) – Option 1 served our purpose plus replacing the SOAP adapter with the inline webservice calls.

 

I can hear some of you saying, “Use the WCF adapter” – yeah – that’s another food for thought.
Thats all folks  

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 Other Useful Posts   

1)     Webservices and the 15 second delay

     Link: Click here and here   

2)     Microsoft BizTalk Server Performance Optimization Guide

     Link: Click here

 

 

3)     Troubleshooting MessageBox Latency Issues
Link: Click here

 

4)     Identifying BizTalk Bottlenecks
Link: Click here

 

 

 

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Happy coding J

BizTalk: Database ‘BizTalkMsgBoxDb’ is full

 

Error:

The transaction log for database ‘BizTalkMsgBoxDb’ is full. To find out why space in the log cannot be reused, see the log_reuse_wait_desc column in sys.databases (.Net SqlClient Data Provider)

 

 

Solution:

sp_helpdb ‘BizTalkMsgBoxDb’

 

ALTER DATABASE BiztalkMsgBoxDb

SET RECOVERY SIMPLE;

GO

 

DBCC SHRINKFILE (BiztalkMsgBoxDb_log, 1);

GO

sp_helpdb ‘BizTalkMsgBoxDb’

 

Hope that helps..
Happy coding