Announcing CU2 for Biztalk Server 2010 and CU2 for BAP 2010

Hi, It is a pleasure to announce the release of CU2 for BizTalk Server 2010 on behalf of the BPDSustained Engineering group.   With this CU, we have addressed all known customer issues from all branches of BizTalk (i.e. applicable to BizTalk 2010) and also available in multiple locales. I am proud to mention that we do not have any open customer issues on both branches of BizTalk (2009 and 2010) as of this CU. This CU includes few serviceability improvements along with product updates based on customer requests.  Some of the notable updates in this CU are: Transparent Setup: Provides info on number of fixes applicable to feature during installation It is hard for the customer to comprehend the specific fixes that are applicable to each feature.  In this “supportability improvement” we have attempted to provide a level of transparency to the customer by explicitly categorizing each fix as applicable to a feature area and displaying that info in the installation wizard.   The interface shows only the applicable features with the number of fixes included in this specific CU. There is still quite a lot of scope for improvement in this area and this is a pilot effort in this direction. I encourage your feedback on how you perceive this functionality and suggestions on improvements. The changes to the Setup interface are completely localized. Enhanced EPM debug Tracing: Helps the support team isolate specific failures in a large volume scenario End Point Mapper (EPM) is a critical high touch component in BizTalk engine and is an important source of diagnostics for troubleshooting.  It is quite cumbersome and time consuming to correlate the info in BizTalk traces with the real message data to isolate an issue in a high throughput environment.  In this supportability improvement we have added the following Registry Key "EnableMessageTracing"(DWORD, Default=0, Set to 1to Enable Message Tracing). Support team can turn on this registry setting to trace the  contents and context properties for the Message received by the EPM. ** Note that this should be used only for debugging, and is not supported in production.

BizTalk Server 2010 Host Instances not coming back-on-line after SQL being off-line Allows to restart the BizTalk service automatically when SQL connectivity is restored This issue is a behavior regression from earlier versions of BizTalk; although not a code defect.  In case of a SQL connectivity failure, BizTalk Service would shutdown and had to be manually restarted.  With this fix theservice would be restarted automatically after the SQL connection is restored. The impact of this issue was quite high on some of our mission critical customers using SQL clusters. BAM Archive checks & Logging before dropping tables from BAMPI Prevents possible data loss scenarios when archiving fails unexpectedly and also allows for a user configurable setting on the rate of archiving. This fix is a result of a customer escalation that resulted in multiple improvements across BAM archiving. The core issue was that the archiving job did not have a validation flag before deleting the data from the primary database.  This could result in dataloss whenever therewas a failure in the archival process. As part of this fix, we implemented the following improvements and code enhancements: Validate archival of data into the BAM Archive database from the SSIS package Log the extent of archival (based on a user defined rowcount) There were UI changes to enable the user to set the rowcount and also reflect the logging. Hotfix installer was also updated to run bm.exe automatically as part of the setup process. The UI changes and additional strings are also fully localized. Applications stop responding or crash when System Center Operations Manager monitors BizTalk Server applications: Issue was caused by a race condition in one of our internal class and has been fixed in this release. The fix on Explorer OM is applicable if you are using SCOM to monitor BizTalk environments.  SCOM uses WMI provider which in turn implements ExplorerOM (EOM) for providing data for artifacts like send port, receive location etc. All this logic is present in an internal class called AdminOMAdapter. The deadlock happens when there are 2 WMI queries running parallely - one going to EOM and another going directly to management database (for e.g. host, hostinstance etc.). It is avoided by explicitly creating a dummy instance of AdminOMAdapter before executing a query going directly to management db. This changes the order in which the critical section resources are acquired thereby avoiding the deadlock Please note that BAP (BizTalk Adaptor Pack) is also being serviced as a CU and released along with BizTalk 2010 CU2. As we start our planning process for the next Cumulative Update we welcome any suggestions you may provide to improve future Cumulative Update projects.   Please send your suggestions and feedback to sqlsecu. Look for information & announcements for upcoming CU3 for BizTalk Server 2010. This CU is available for download from css as of 8/31/2011. The associated cumulative KB article has also been published.   Customers are directed to contact CSS to access the CU build or obtain the hotfix package through the new self-service feature by clicking on the “Hotfix Download Available” button found at the top of the KB article. BizTalk 2010 CU2 Details:          Public KB Article          Hotfix Download Location              BizTalk Adaptor Pack (BAP) 2010 CU2 Details:          Public KB Article          Hotfix Download Location Thank You, Guru Venkataraman

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 04, 2011
  Hi Guru, the link to the email to send feedback and suggestion don't work, the mail is sqlsecu, but the domain not appear. my email is marco.hernandez@itsynergy.co
• Anonymous
  September 05, 2011
  Hi Marco,You can send feedback directly to me - guruven@microsoft.com or feel free to post it as comments.ThanksGuru