Willy-Peter Schaub's Cave of Chamomile Simplicity

An introduction to BizTalk 2006 by the ATC Collective ... Day 7a of many BizTalk Fridays (Transactions)

2008-09-05T09:42:55Z

Continued from last week at http://dotnet.org.za/willy/archive/2008/08/29/an-introduction-to-biztalk-2006-by-the-atc-collective-day-6b-of-many-biztalk-fridays-orchestrations.aspx.

My colleague Ryan, the SA Biztalk Guru, requested that we mention persistence points ... Ryan, I hope today's note on our BTS studies will make you happy ;-)

Transactional Business Processes

When working with BizTalk orchestrations, we have support for transactions, instance persistence and persistence points (Ryan!!!). So what are these three magical things all about?

Transactions

Transactions refer to the coordination of series of tasks and operation and the agreement of parties on the outcome of a single unit of work. The aim is to have a "OK" and "FAIL" switch, which ensures consistency and reliability regardless of environment and the stability thereof. The acronym ACID is often used to describe the main pillars of a transaction:

Atomicity. The unit of work either succeeds or fails ... on|off switch.
Consistency. The unit of work produces consistent results.
Isolation. The unit of work are isolated and not visible or open to attack from others. The work is done behind closed doors and invisible until transaction is committed.
Durability. The result of a unit of work is never lost.

Refer to our book "Interoperability for the Connoisseur", section "transactions, on page 161, for more information. For details on the book, refer to this post.

Back to BizTalk ... business processes can consist of atomic transactions, that automatically roll-back in case of anyone selecting the FAIL or EJECT switch, and long-running transactions that can span a "long" period of time. The latter is often a complex environment, requiring custom exception handlers and compensation logic.

Instance Persistence

BizTalk can save the entire state of an orchestration instance to the BizTalk Messaging database, allowing us to recover from failures and conserve resources by hydrating idle orchestrations. The persistence points within an orchestration include the following:

End of a transaction scope, both for atomic and long-running transactions.
Executing the START orchestration state, that starts another orchestration asynchronously.
Executing a SEND shape that is not contained within a transaction scope or is the last point in an orchestration.
When an orchestration instance completes.Suspending an orchestration.
System is shutdown in a controlled manner.
Debugging breakpoints.

What you need to do to use transactions in BizTalk

Create a scope
Define type of transaction required, i.e. Atomic or Long-Running.
- Long running transactions have some special characteristics:
  1. Could run forever.
  2. Does not include ACID properties.
  3. Data is not locked.
  4. Transaction is only committed when all steps have been completed.
  5. Can be nested to include atomic components.
Define whether transaction requires compensation
Define exception handlers
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Define compensation logic if required
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- Compensation? It is logic that reverses the effects of a transaction in case of failure.

See you later today for part B - web service integration. Today we are really having fun q;-)

Why are my comments not showing on this blog?

2008-09-05T07:22:54Z

I recently got a query from a reader as to why his comment was never published on my blog. Well, due to a hectic spam attack on our community server and associated blogs, I have turned comments to manual approval long time ago. There are obviously certain disadvantages, because

I have to trawl through a lot of spam to find your comments,
You have to wait for a long time for your comment to show and
I often have to make a decision whether to post or delete a post.

I created and am contributing to this specific blog to share information and to build an awareness and readiness around a number of technologies and concepts. I am also trying to keep the blog neutral and void from vendor-vendor-customer mud-slinging and political debates. The set of rules I use to decide whether to hit approve or reject includes the following:

Comments that share information relevant to the blog post are approved, unless they fail any of the following criteria:

Spam comments of any kind are rejected.
Comments which are not relevant to the blog post are rejected.
Comments attacking anyone are rejected.
Comments including bad language are rejected.

If your comment never shows, please check the list above. Get in touch with me if you feel that a comment has been incorrectly rejected, so that I can go back and re-analyse, because the last thing I want to do is to introduce censorship.

In summary, a huge THANK YOU to the spammers out there, for creating all the additional traffic. You are stifling collaboration and ensuring that instead of spending our free time on meaningful research and collaboration, we are trawling through waves of meaningless information.

Team Foundation Server 2008 in Action: Review (Part 5 of 5)

2008-09-05T06:17:05Z

Continued from part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4, where we discussed chapters 1-8. In this post we will review chapters 9-10 of the exciting new book titled "Team Foundation Server 2008 in Action", ISBN: 1933988592, authored by Jamil Azher.

Chapter 9 - "Configuring and Extending TFS"

The chapter introduces a bit of the planning we queried in previous blog posts and describes some common limitations (many of which have been resolved in TFS2008 and TFS2008 SP1). The scenarios covered include moving team projects, load balancing, customised work items and creating key performance indicators (KPI). The latter is very interesting to those that have project leads and/or managers who want to define KPIs ... again demonstrated with re-usable examples. Obviously there are many, many other scenarios that could or should be included, but then there is only so much an author can fit within the book and chapter constraints set by the publishers.

Chapter 10 - "Using Workflow with TFS"

Although not really relevant to our current TFS environment, this section was an interesting introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and the integration with Team Foundation Server (TFS) to manage distributed builds. Definitely an interesting read, packed with many code samples.

Wish List and Queries for the author / publisher

My personal wish list to the author and the publisher to date, whereby I will carry over the list to the next posts and indicate new additions in italic.

Include a summary of the option "defaults", for the various options discussed in the chapter. This would allow the reader to go to the table summarising the options, rather than having to trawl entire sections looking for the option description.
Use or refer to many of the illustrations and quick-reference posters created by many TFS specialists and MVPs. The quick reference posters that would be appropriate for the first two sections include:
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Build Process
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Editions 2008
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Environments
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Licensing Overview
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Planning
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Project Capacity Planning 2008
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Project Planning
At this stage the book is missing the section that I looked for immediately and believe is one of the most important sections of any TFS book, namely planning a TFS deployment, including capacity planning, team planning, source control planning, branching and dependency planning and licensing planning.
Add line numbers to the source examples, making it easier to reference the line number in the text. This avoids the reader having to read through pages of source, to find a specific property referenced in the text. For example the source file "team build script modified to label only branch-specific files" and the referenced url "http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181737(VS.80).aspx" have anomalies and line numbers would probably assist in the cross-mapping of text and source,
Move the DB Pro chapter to the end of the book, because it seems to sit in-between TFS focused chapters ... if DP Pro gets a mention, why do the other editions not receive similar focused attention?
Use the branching guidance II diagram look&feel, which will make the branching diagrams more intuitive and use a look&feel which we will be sharing on CodePlex soon.
TLA glossary ... TLA = three lettered acronyms would be invaluable.
The title for Chapter 5 is misleading ... can it be changed?
Ensure that the book, as indicated by the title, is primarily focused on TFS2008, not TFS2005 features, guidelines and problems.
Add a bit of explanation to the reams of code in chapter 10, remembering point 4 above. Pages and ages of code and configuration files are hard to absorb in a book and therefore more verbose description thereof and line number, for easy references, would be beneficial.

Conclusion

Writing a technology book is challenging, because the author is continuously enhancing and updating his manuscript to match the latest technology, something that is evident in this book with focus on TFS2005, TFS2008 and the need to focus on the latest enhancements shipped with TFS 2008 SP1.

The book presents information and practical example code. It complements other publications, such as Professional Team Foundation Server, by David, Gousset and Gundvaldson, very well, making it an invaluable companion and reference book for anyone involved with Team Foundation Server. Obtain a copy of this book for your personal library if you either want to learn more about Team Foundation Server or add a real asset to your collection of TFS/VSTS literature.

Team Foundation Server 2008 in Action: Review (Part 4 of 5)

2008-09-04T14:53:39Z

Continued from part 1, part 2 and part 3, where we discussed chapters 1-6. In this post we will review chapters 7-8 of the exciting new book titled "Team Foundation Server 2008 in Action", ISBN: 1933988592, authored by Jamil Azher.

Chapter 4 - "Understanding Branching in Version Control"

The following sentence in the chapter bugged me "Team Build will download all files in the team project, not just files in the source branch" ... subsequently had to go back, re-read, get feedback from my TFS MVP peers and then re-tested this. With proper workspace mappings, which can be done in the TFS 2008 Build Wizard, this problem can be avoided. Also the recommendation to edit the workspacemapping.xml file is based on TFS2005 ... the file no longer features in TSF 2008. I can fortunately switch off one of the many technology worry threads keeping me awake at night q-:)

Chapter 7 - "Understanding Team Build"

This is a great chapter, giving the reader an overview of the build architecture and then delving into important topics such as customizing targets, creating builds from labelled source files, click-once integration into the build, gated check-in service, desktop builds and build server deployment scenarios. A detailed list of the 2005 and 2008 build events are documented, whereby the latter is graphically represented in our "0202 Microsoft Team System Build Process " quick reference poster. If you cannot wait for Rosario releasing the gated check-in feature, refer to this chapter and build your own using the "Creating the Source Code Submission Service" example.

Chapter 8 - "Versioning Assemblies using Team Build"

My colleague Zayd often shows this important topic at our TFS and TFS/Interoperability events. There are many ways of achieving the versioning as documented in this chapter, however, I personally like Zayd's option which is straightforward and effective. Have a look at the TFS Widgets site ... there are many, many tools to assist you in this adventure. Nevertheless, the section covers the important topic of versioning very well and again the practical example code makes the day.Anyone seriously considering automated builds and versioning, must pick-up this chapter and throw a pair of eye balls at it.

Wish List and Queries for the author / publisher

My personal wish list to the author and the publisher to date, whereby I will carry over the list to the next posts and indicate new additions in italic.

Include a summary of the option "defaults", for the various options discussed in the chapter. This would allow the reader to go to the table summarising the options, rather than having to trawl entire sections looking for the option description.
Use or refer to many of the illustrations and quick-reference posters created by many TFS specialists and MVPs. The quick reference posters that would be appropriate for the first two sections include:
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Build Process
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Editions 2008
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Environments
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Licensing Overview
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Planning
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Project Capacity Planning 2008
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Project Planning
At this stage the book is missing the section that I looked for immediately and believe is one of the most important sections of any TFS book, namely planning a TFS deployment, including capacity planning, team planning, source control planning, branching and dependency planning and licensing planning.
Add line numbers to the source examples, making it easier to reference the line number in the text. This avoids the reader having to read through pages of source, to find a specific property referenced in the text. For example the source file "team build script modified to label only branch-specific files" and the referenced url "http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181737(VS.80).aspx" have anomalies and line numbers would probably assist in the cross-mapping of text and source,
Move the DB Pro chapter to the end of the book, because it seems to sit in-between TFS focused chapters ... if DP Pro gets a mention, why do the other editions not receive similar focused attention?
Use the branching guidance II diagram look&feel, which will make the branching diagrams more intuitive and use a look&feel which we will be sharing on CodePlex soon.
TLA glossary ... TLA = three lettered acronyms would be invaluable.
The title for Chapter 5 is misleading ... can it be changed?
Ensure that the book, as indicated by the title, is primarily focused on TFS2008, not TFS2005 features, guidelines and problems. .

See you tomorrow, for the final part 5 covering chapters "Configuring and Extending TFS", "using Workflow with TFS" and the overall conclusion.

Team Foundation Server 2008 in Action: Review (Part 3 of 5)

2008-09-03T13:18:48Z

Continued from part 1 and part 2, where we discussed chapters 1-4. In this post we will review chapters 5-6 of the exciting new book titled "Team Foundation Server 2008 in Action", ISBN: 1933988592, authored by Jamil Azher.

Chapter 5 - "Understanding Branch Policies"

The chapter talks about security policies and predominantly check-in policies, which made me think ... while reading ... that the chapter title is a bit misleading. The chapter covers the 'what is possible' with both access control and check-in policies, but for my personal liking is too light on the "how to actually do it". TFS security is another one of the complex environments to get to grips to properly and I am missing details on fine-granular security configuration and the security groups and profiles ... see 0202 Microsoft Team System Roles and Security quick reference poster, for some of the details I am eluding to.

Again a great practical program example "Custom Check-in Policy Class" delivers a great and re-usable example ... these program examples are the diamonds of this book.

Chapter 6 - "Understanding Merging in Version Control"

A great section focused on the merge process, finding out potential merge candidates, determining changes, merge conflict resolution and much, much more. The chapter needs a quick dust-off and introduction of TFS/VSTS Service Pack 1, which implements a lot of the features documented using the TFS power tool, in the IDE itself. Other than that this is a great chapter and excellent reference material for those embarking on a merge exhibition.

Again the message is ... download, install and start using the TFS Sidekicks tool !!!

Wish List and Queries for the author / publisher

My personal wish list to the author and the publisher to date, whereby I will carry over the list to the next posts and indicate new additions in italic.

Include a summary of the option "defaults", for the various options discussed in the chapter. This would allow the reader to go to the table summarising the options, rather than having to trawl entire sections looking for the option description.
Use or refer to many of the illustrations and quick-reference posters created by many TFS specialists and MVPs. The quick reference posters that would be appropriate for the first two sections include:
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Build Process
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Editions 2008
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Environments
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Licensing Overview
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Planning
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Project Capacity Planning 2008
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Project Planning
At this stage the book is missing the section that I looked for immediately and believe is one of the most important sections of any TFS book, namely planning a TFS deployment, including capacity planning, team planning, source control planning, branching and dependency planning and licensing planning.
Add line numbers to the source examples, making it easier to reference the line number in the text. This avoids the reader having to read through pages of source, to find a specific property referenced in the text. For example the source file "team build script modified to label only branch-specific files" and the referenced url "http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181737(VS.80).aspx" have anomalies and line numbers would probably assist in the cross-mapping of text and source,
Move the DB Pro chapter to the end of the book, because it seems to sit in-between TFS focused chapters ... if DP Pro gets a mention, why do the other editions not receive similar focused attention?
Use the branching guidance II diagram look&feel, which will make the branching diagrams more intuitive and use a look&feel which we will be sharing on CodePlex soon.
TLA glossary ... TLA = three lettered acronyms would be invaluable.
The title for Chapter 5 is misleading ... can it be changed?

See you tomorrow, for part 4 covering chapters "Understanding Team Build" and "Versioning Assemblies using Team Build".

Team Foundation Server 2008 in Action: Review (Part 2 of 5)

2008-09-02T10:03:09Z

Continued from http://dotnet.org.za/willy/archive/2008/09/01/team-foundation-server-2008-in-action-review-part-1-of-5.aspx, where we discussed chapters 1-2. In this post we will review chapters 3-4 of the exciting new book titled "Team Foundation Server 2008 in Action", ISBN: 1933988592, authored by Jamil Azher.

Chapter 3 - Introducing VSTS 2008 Database Edition

The section gives a good overview of the Visual Studio Team System - DB Professional edition, demonstrating the integration with TFS and advantages of DP Pro to the DBAs and developers. I personally like the focus on build and the great generator program example, that as in chapter 2, introduces a practical and reusable example.

Chapter 4 - Understanding Branching in Version Control

The section introduces branching strategies, labelling, code sharing, build and gives great and deserving mention to the TFS Sidekicks tools. Without the latter, we would probably run three light-years when confronted with a TFS server issue ... the tools are just great, especially the latest version. Check out http://widgets.accentient.com/ or http://www.attrice.info/ for details.

The section probably does not scare the reader enough with the potential pitfalls of branching and contains some sections and diagrams that will make the TFS Branching Guidance II team raise an eye brow. If you are seriously considering branching, make sure you keep your eye on this blog, because I will notify everyone as soon as we have released the new branching guidance.

Again Jamil adds invaluable spice to the chapter with his sample program "identifying changes in a branch after applying a label" ... there is nothing more valuable than an intuitive and reusable sample program ... from my last quick-read, I remember many more such examples in the remaining chapters q;-)

Wish List and Queries for the author / publisher

My personal wish list to the author and the publisher to date, whereby I will carry over the list to the next posts and indicate new additions in italic.

Include a summary of the option "defaults", for the various options discussed in the chapter. This would allow the reader to go to the table summarising the options, rather than having to trawl entire sections looking for the option description.
Use or refer to many of the illustrations and quick-reference posters created by many TFS specialists and MVPs. The quick reference posters that would be appropriate for the first two sections include:
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Build Process
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Editions 2008
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Environments
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Licensing Overview
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Planning
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Project Capacity Planning 2008
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Project Planning
At this stage the book is missing the section that I looked for immediately and believe is one of the most important sections of any TFS book, namely planning a TFS deployment, including capacity planning, team planning, source control planning, branching and dependency planning and licensing planning.
Add line numbers to the source examples, making it easier to reference the line number in the text. This avoids the reader having to read through pages of source, to find a specific property referenced in the text. For example the source file "team build script modified to label only branch-specific files" and the referenced url "http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181737(VS.80).aspx" have anomalies and line numbers would probably assist in the cross-mapping of text and source,
Move the DB Pro chapter to the end of the book, because it seems to sit in-between TFS focused chapters ... if DP Pro gets a mention, why do the other editions not receive similar focused attention?
Use the branching guidance II diagram look&feel, which will make the branching diagrams more intuitive and use a look&feel which we will be sharing on CodePlex soon.
TLA glossary ... TLA = three lettered acronyms would be invaluable.

At this stage I am looking forward to re-reading the next few chapters. See you tomorrow, for part 3 covering chapters "Understanding Branch Policies" and "Understanding Merging in Version Control".

TFS: Configuring Get Latest Files Option

2008-09-01T18:19:56Z

Reading through the TFS book I am busy reviewing, I noticed two checkboxes which I am often asked for, namely to "Get Latest" and "Show Deleted Files".

With TFS2005 the notion of Get Latest introduced great confusion, because instead of actually determining which version is the latest and downloading this version to the requesting client, TFS2005 made the file in your workspace editable, i.e. it assumed it is the latest "to you". This means that even though there may be a version 3 centuries later than yours, it was not downloaded to your workspace during a checkout. With TFS2008 this is also the default behaviour ...

The options you can pursue if you want to change the default behaviour:

In both TFS2005 and TFS2008 use the context menu options "Get Latest Version" or "Get Specific Version".
Configure the Team Project Source Control Settings "Enable get latest on check-out".
Configure the VSTS Source Control Options "Get latest version of item on check out".

Option 1 - Example:

Option 2 - Example:

Option 3 - Example:

Also note the "Show deleted items in the Source Control Explorer" option under option 3 ... that answers the other frequent question, namely "how can I convince Source Control Explorer" to show deleted files?

Team Foundation Server 2008 in Action: Review (Part 1 of 5)

2008-09-01T18:17:57Z

This is the first of 5 planned book review posts, on the exciting new book titled "Team Foundation Server 2008 in Action", ISBN: 1933988592, authored by Jamil Azher. Manning Publications asked a number of TFS MVPs to review the book and although I just recently re-started the review late, due to family issues and associated delays, I nevertheless hope that these will be in time and of value to you and the publishers.

All comments are based on the unedited DRAFT I have received from the publisher and therefore observations or issues I highlight may already be resolved by the author. My personal conclusion and recommendation of the potential readers will be included in part 5, scheduled for Friday ... "touch wood".

Today I re-read chapters 1 and 2, the former of which is available for free from here. This post comments on these two chapters.

Chapter 1 - TFS and the Practice of Software Development

You can review this section yourself by reading the freely available chapter. In my opinion it gives a good overview of TFS as an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) system and the bits and pieces making up TFS.

Chapter 2 - Exploring the Changes in TFS 2008

Anyone who has written a technical book will realise that by the time the early DRAFTs of the book are available for review, many of the sections are already out of date. This is evident in chapter 2, which has obviously not included the enhancements we enjoyed in Power Tool releases or more importantly, in the recent Service Pack 1 release for TFS 2008 and VSTS 2008. The chapter, nevertheless, gives a great introduction to the TFS 2008 enhancements, including Build, Version Control, Annotations and Offline support. A huge emphasis is placed on the build, which is great as it is an extremely unexplored territory ... and you will notice that future chapters are also heavily focused on the build environment.

Two great sample programs make this chapter a winner:

Sample program for queuing builds to the "least busy" Build Agent
Sample program that determines which Build contains a particular fix

The latter sample program can save you many, many, many, ... hours of manually exploring build reports, viewing their associated work items, and finding the build that includes a certain work item.

Wish List

My personal wish list to the author and the publisher to date, whereby I will carry over the list to the next posts:

Include a summary of the option "defaults", for the various options discussed in the chapter. This would allow the reader to go to the table summarising the options, rather than having to trawl entire sections looking for the option description.
Use or refer to many of the illustrations and quick-reference posters created by many TFS specialists and MVPs. The quick reference posters that would be appropriate for the first two sections include:

0202 Microsoft Team System Build Process
0202 Microsoft Team System Editions 2008
0202 Microsoft Team System Environments
0202 Microsoft Team System Licensing Overview
0202 Microsoft Team System Planning
0202 Microsoft Team System Project Capacity Planning 2008
0202 Microsoft Team System Project Planning

At this stage the book is missing the section that I looked for immediately and believe is one of the most important sections of any TFS book, namely planning a TFS deployment, including capacity planning, team planning, source control planning, branching and dependency planning and licensing planning.

At this stage I am looking forward to re-reading the next few chapters. See you tomorrow, for part 2, covering chapters "Introducing VSTS 2008 Database Edition" and "Understanding Branching in Version Control".

TFS - New Quick Reference Poster: An overview of TeamReview

2008-09-01T12:00:40Z

We have posted a new quick reference poster in PDF (low-medium quality) and JPEG (High quality, scalable) format at the following community servers. If you

http://www.drp.co.za ... DRP Community Server, hosted in and optimised for access in America.
http://www.saarchitect.net ... SA Architect Community Server, hosted in South-Africa and optimised for access in MEA. The posters are located here on the server.

Please download the new quick reference poster, named "0202 Microsoft Team System TeamReview", and give us your comments.

You can find a review of the TeamReview product here and the downloads for TeamReview here on CodePlex.

New TFS 2008 Book - Team Foundation Server 2008 in Action

2008-08-30T12:06:37Z

I am busy reviewing a DRAFT of the Team Foundation Server 2008 in Action book, by Jamil Asher. When I am through the book and when it is practical to start talking about the actual content I will open the sluice gates and start commenting.

At this point I am thoroughly enjoying the read and am picking up some really interesting and valuable sections.

Definitely worth keeping an eye on this one ,... the book that is!

TFS Branching Guidance II - A peek at the latest "look and feel"

2008-08-29T13:07:18Z

Together with Bill Heys and Ian Ceicys, the latter being responsible for the scenarios in the Branching Guidance II project, we have refined the branching diagram look and feel as follows:

Note that the numbers match up with the numbering in the relevant scenario documentation, i.e. the documented steps. We hope that this new, clear and less cluttered view, with references to the actual documentation, will add value to the new branching guidance document.

Your views?

Enabling service oriented architectures (SOA) and solutions

2008-08-29T13:00:41Z

I have just received the green light to publish one of the white papers I wrote for a SOA conference in the Middle East back in May . The document is slightly dated, but I believe that the content, the views and the guidelines are still relevant today.

Please throw an eye ball at the white paper and give me some feedback on the views of SOA adoption.

You can find the white paper here, whereby the filename is BBD Enabling SOA ad Solutions.

BizTalk - Predefined Macros that are useful when working with files

2008-08-29T11:41:48Z

For some time I have been ploughing through documentation in search for a simple list of all predefined BizTalk macros ... have not found the consolidated list as yet, but the following post by Linglom summarises predefined macros that are very useful when defining output filenames on FILE send handlers: http://www.linglom.com/2008/06/08/biztalk-macros-on-file-send-adapter/

The post defines the following macros:

%datetime%
%datetime_bts2000%
%datetime.tz%
%DestinationParty%
%DestinationPartyQualifier%
%MessageID%
%SourceFileName%
%SourceParty%
%SourcePartyQualifier%
%time%
%time.tz%

An introduction to BizTalk 2006 by the ATC Collective ... Day 6b of many BizTalk Fridays (Automating Processes)

2008-08-29T11:27:21Z

Continued from this morning at http://dotnet.org.za/willy/archive/2008/08/29/an-introduction-to-biztalk-2006-by-the-atc-collective-day-6a-of-many-biztalk-fridays-orchestrations.aspx.

Automating ... or should that be controlling ... Business Processes

Orchestrations need to be managed, controlled and synchronised. BizTalk packs a few pieces of tools in this regard, in terms of scope, group, flow control, expression and exception shapes. Let us explore all of these 'quickly':

Scope		Organises shapes for transactional execution and exception handling, as well as maintaining variable scope. Scopes can be nested and defined as synchronized or not synchronized ... at this point we will assume you understand the difference.
Group		Used to arrange actions in an intuitive way, using it as a placeholder for future functionality or collapse a junk of stuff to remove clutter and noise from the designer views.
Flow Control	If...Else...	if (condition) {...} else {...}
	Delay	Pause for a period or until a specific time or date.
	Listen	Listen Wait for events to occur.
	Loop	Repeated actions.
	Parallel Actions	Parallel activities, all of which must complete before orchestration continues.
	Suspend	Suspend operations, whereby administrative intervention is needed to resume.
	Terminate	Eject, eject, eject ... terminate immediately.
Expression		Define an expression, such as initializations and manipulation of orchestration variables.
Throw Exception		Throw and exception and in a friendly way as the runtime engine to pass the exception to the nearest exception handler for the exception type.

Nesting Orchestrations

An orchestration can call another orchestration asynchronously by using the Start orchestration shape or synchronously by using the Call orchestration shape.
In both cases parameters can be passed, including messages, variables, port references, role links or correlation sets.

Distinguished Fields

Remember promoted properties, which are created primarily for the message engine. Peek at http://dotnet.org.za/willy/archive/2008/08/22/an-introduction-to-biztalk-2006-by-the-atc-collective-day-5a-of-many-biztalk-fridays-message-routing.aspx for more details. Distinguished fields are message data of special interest, creating an alias directly to a schema node and are created in the BizTalk Editor by promoting nodes and then selecting the relevant node on the Distinguished Fields tab.

Creating Expressions

Expressions can operate on orchestration variables, assign values to messages and message parts, assign values to dynamic ports and event call .NET assemblies.
Use the Expression Editor to create an expression.
Filter Expression example:

Correlation

Correlation matches an incoming message to an appropriate instance of an orchestration, for example an orchestration may receive three messages which must be processed in a specific order.

So what's next? ACID ... Transactions ... and it seems a lot more interesting stuff.