It is a pleasure to announce release of BizTalk Server 2013 CU2 and BizTalk Adapter Pack 2013 CU1.

With the release of these updates, we are happy to note that we have addressed all known customer issues for BizTalk server 2013. 

Some of the salient fixes in CU2 for BizTalk Server 2013 includes updated schemas that enables support for HiX and feature improvements to receive messages from sharepoint document library.

Here is a complete list of fixes includes in BizTalk Server 2013 CU2.

The following is the list of fixes in the first Cumulative update for BizTalk Adaptor Pack 2013.

We feel it a privilege to be able to delight our customers by releasing fixes in one convenient package. BizTalk Server CUs include all fixes released till date.  Your valuable feedback continues to inspire us to improve the CU experience.

Thank you

Guru & Rajesh

As part of this CU, we have addressed about 25 fixes spanning across BizTalk Server and BizTalk Adapter Pack. The CU for BAP includes two separate downloads; one for the adaptor pack and another one specific to SQL Adaptor.  The packages are applicable to both x86 and x64 (although called as x86). 

Thank you all for bearing with us patiently for an extended period of time for these CUs.  With the release of these CUs, we have now addressed all known customer reported product issues for BizTalk Server 2010 as of date.  As always please feel free to provide your feedback/suggesting on the CU process.

Thank you

Guru and Rajesh

We have now released the first Cumulative Update for BizTalk Server 2013. 

For the first time, we are delivering CU for BizTalk Server using Microsoft Update and this would be available through the hotfix download as well. 

Fixes that are part of this update

• FIX:
       User cannot perform certain database-related operations in BizTalk Server 2013

• FIX:
       BAM tools cannot be configured in a multi-node BizTalk Server 2013 environment

• FIX:
       The vertical scroll bar on the target schema does not work correctly when
       you use Visual Studio to design a BizTalk Server 2013 map

Additional details about the individual fixes are available here.

MU installation process

The following steps are applicable if you have Microsoft
Update enabled in the machine where BizTalk Server is installed.

1. Log into a server where BizTalk Server is already installed, and Microsoft Update is enabled
2. Check for windows update
3. Notice available fixes for BizTalk Server under optional updates
4. Select the update and install

(Perform the above operations in each of the BizTalk nodes)

Thank You,

Guru Venkataraman

https://connect.microsoft.com/Azure/Survey/Survey.aspx?SurveyID=14401

We are specifically looking for ISVs and partners who can leverage the IaaS (Infrastrucutrue as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service) functionalities of BizTalk.  This version of BizTalk opens up the immense opportunities made possible with Hybrid applicaiton development.

Look forward to your partcipations/nominations.

Thanks

Guru

BizTalk support and product teams have investigated into the possible impact of the issue and remedial measures.  The escalation engineering team has put together an excellent FAQ explaining all of these in detail.  I encourage you to please go through this before calling for support.

Here is an extract from the FAQ for customers who  have not been able to apply the fix yet as of 2/29/2012:

--------------

Unfortunately, it depends.  What you will see are suspended receive or send pipelines. 
You may see failed orchestrations if they were somehow dependent on the failed pipeline. 

 For a send pipeline, it will be suspended (resumable) and you can simply resume the instance after updating the machine to have the Leap Year Fix installed.

 A receive pipeline instance will be suspended (resumable) but resuming them will just result in the following error:

 EventType:     Error

Event Source:  BizTalk Server 2006

Event ID:          5719

There was a failure executing the receive pipeline:
"Microsoft.BizTalk.Edi.DefaultPipelines.EdiReceive,
Microsoft.BizTalk.Edi.EdiPipelines, Version=3.0.1.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" Source: "EDI disassembler"
Receive Port: "<RP>" URI: "<URI>" Reason: No
Disassemble stage components can recognize the data.

The reason is that the failed instance has already converted the EDI message to XML (since the datatype validation happens after conversion) and resuming just hands this XML back to the pipeline and the EDI Disassembler component does not recognize XML data. 

In the case of a single EDI file that uses interchange splitting to split into multiple XML messages, you will have a suspended instance for each split message (since datatype
validation also happens after splitting) and again resuming will fail since EDI Disassembler will not recognize the XML data.

In order to successfully resume the instance, you will need to change the pipeline used by the receive port to a pipeline that can handle the XML data.  That would be the passthrough pipeline, XML pipeline, or a custom pipeline.  The message  context properties will be preserved but be aware that EDI context
properties will no longer be promoted.  This means that although the context properties will be available from an orchestration if you do
routing based on EDI-specific context, they will fail because they require promoted context properties.  The list of properties that will still be
promoted even after resume are as follows:

•  BTS.MessageType
• BTS.ReceivePortName
• BTS.InboundTransportType
• BTS.InboundTransportLocation
• BTS.ReceivePortID
• BTS.LastInterchangeMessage

 There may be a few additional promoted properties for custom pipelines or specific adapters.  Since BTS.MessageType is still promoted, you will still be able to route based on the type of EDI document - but the main thing to notice is that none of the actual EDI context properties are promoted.  In order to have them promoted, you must create a custom pipeline that will promote the EDI properties that you use for routing and use that pipeline when resuming.

----------

Thanks

Guru

Hi,

It is a pleasure to announce the release of CU4 for BizTalk Server 2010 on behalf of the BPD Sustained 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 all 9 locales.

This CU includes 8 product updates based on customer escalations. Based on the current trend of number of fixes, it is very exciting to note the number of customer escalations has significantly steadied since the release of BizTalk 2010. Including the fixes in this CU, we have had about 53 fixes on this product over 4 CUs, averaging slightly over 10 fixes per CU.

Successful on time release of Cumulative Update 4 is a testament to the commitment of the many teams within BizTalk, who make every effort to provide a better customer experience. The coordination, determination and execution between all the teams were instrumental in continuing the Sustained Engineering team’s vision for on time release of high quality Cumulative Updates.

We thank the development, test and content team for diligently working on a timely release of this CU amidst of their other major commitments. We thank our support team members and field engineers for their tireless efforts. Their customer focus and triaging customer issues in time for this release has been of tremendous help.

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 CU5 for BizTalk Server 2010. This CU is available for download from https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2667310 as of 2\28\2012. The associated cumulative KB article has also been published. Customers can also 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.

Thank You,

Guru Venkataraman

There have multiple requests from customers seeking for clarity on the applicability of the leap year fix https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2435900.

If you are not using X12 in your EDI transactions, this issue is not applicable to you and hence you dont have to worry about taking this fix at this time.  The fix is only on the x12 code path and does not affect EDIFACT processing.

Please to my earlier post for a repro sample.

PS:  Please ensure that you have Biztalk 2006 R2 SP1_CU3 "before" applying this fix.  The fix is a later build after CU3 and has certain engine binaries that have updates/dependancies on earlier builds. 

Please reach out to Biztalk Support team if you need any assistance in installing SP1 or CU3.

Thanks
Guru

Please treat this as an Important Fix (on the line of Security updates) for all 2006_R2 and 2009 BizTalk servers. 

This fix need to be applied ASAP (before next week) as we will be hitting the leap year date 2/29/2012 in just about a week

 The fix has been available for quite some time and also included as part of the CU for BizTalk 2009 (since CU1). 

But there are still many customers who might not have taken the CUs or applied the patch.  I urge you all to please reach out to your customers proactively
and let them know of this fix.

EDI Leap Year hotfix: BizTalk 2009 and BizTalk 2006 R2

If using EDI in BizTalk 2009 and BizTalk 2006 R2, install the EDI leap year hotfix before 2/29/12:

 2435900  FIX: "Invalid Date" EDI interchange error occurs in BizTalk Server 2006 R2 or in BizTalk Server 2009 if a data element contains a leap date value

 BizTalkServer 2009:

There are two ways to get this fix: 

Option1: Install any BizTalk 2009 Cumulative Update. KB 2555976 lists the available cumulative updates:

 Option 2: Install thestand-alone fix by clicking View and request hotfix downloads at the top of KB article 2435900.

BizTalk Server 2006 R2

1. Install BizTalk 2006 R2 Service Pack 1.
2. Install BizTalk 2006 R2 Service Pack 1 Cumulative Update 3.
3. Install leap year fix (3.6.2230): https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2435900

PS: It is required to install CU3 before applying the fix as there are many other dependent binaries that get updated and it is in the customer’s best interest to be on the latest supported platform and minimize troubleshooting efforts.

 Note BizTalk Server 2010 is not impacted by this bug.

Please use the following repro steps and sample message for X12, to ascertain if this issue is applicable in your environment:

Repro Step:

1. Install and configure BizTalk 2006R2 + SP1.
2. Deploy schema “X12_00401_850” in attached file.
3. In BizTalk Application 1, add reference “BizTalk EDI Application”
4. Create one receive port.
5. Create one receive location for above receive port, then set Type to “File”, and set Receive Pipeline to “EDIReceive”.
6. Create send port and Send pipeline to “PassThansmit”, and subscribe the message of above receive port.
7. Drop file “X12_00401_850 - 20120229.edi” in attached file to receive location folder, the message contains leap year for one “X12_DT” data type element as below:

BEG*00*AB*BEG03**20120229~

[Actual Result]

       The message is suspended for “Invalid Date” error, please refer to detailed error below:

          Error encountered during parsing. The instance is being suspended with following errors:

            Error: 1 (Field level error)

SegmentID: BEG      
Position in TS: 2         
Data Element ID: BEG05          
Position in Segment: 5          
Data Value: 20120229          
8: Invalid Date

Thanks and appreciate your help

Guru Venkataraman

X12_00401_850.zip

https://blogs.msdn.com/b/biztalk_server_team_blog/archive/2011/12/08/biztalk-server-2010-r2.aspx

Will keep you all posted on the developments once we get further into the development process.  In the mean time please provide your feedback on the current CUs and what you expect to see in the new releases.

Thanks

Guru

It is a pleasure to announce the release of CU3 for BizTalk Server 2010 on behalf of the BPD Sustained Engineering group.   

With this CU, we have addressed all known customer issues and included major enhancements in the form of HIPAA 5010 support and perf improvement in tracking.

The primary scope of this CU is around support for HIPAA 5010 In BizTalk 2010.  The updates leverage the enhanced EDI engine in BizTalk 2010, to natively support 5010 schemas and
acknowledgements without having a need to remap at the application level.  The changes in the CU enables usage of 999 functional acknowdgements and 277CA schemas for 5010 Errata.

Currently there are gaps in the inplementation around side by side support for 4010; we will be addressing this in future updates.

I would also like to highlight an interesting find we had around performance during this CU cycle.  It was identified by some of the highly dedicated team of Biztalk consultants in the field

and was quite a feat to repro the problem as it was senstive to the size of the database and the repro environment.  Thanks to the efforts of test engineers and active participation of the

field team in isolating and narrowing down the affected code path.

Changes to TDDS_GetTrackingData stored procedure resulted in perf improvements of over 100% in cases where we had a high number of records in the TrackingData tables. 

The change to the stored proc itself was very trivial but the results are quite impressive. Here is a snapshot of the SQL query plans that shows the gain in performance:

Query Plan Before Fix:

<StmtSimple StatementCompId="6" StatementEstRows="100" StatementId="1" StatementOptmLevel="FULL" StatementSubTreeCost="11.376"
<QueryPlan DegreeOfParallelism="0" MemoryGrant="1024" CachedPlanSize="120" CompileTime="11" CompileCPU="11" CompileMemory="680">
<RelOp AvgRowSize="953" EstimateCPU="8.05306" EstimateIO="0.0112613" EstimateRebinds="0"
EstimateRewinds="0" EstimateRows="100" LogicalOp="TopNSort" NodeId="0" Parallel="false" PhysicalOp="Sort"
EstimatedTotalSubtreeCost="11.376">

Query Plan After Fix:

<StmtSimple StatementCompId="11" StatementEstRows="100" StatementId="1" StatementOptmLevel="TRIVIAL" StatementSubTreeCost="0.00580374"
<QueryPlan DegreeOfParallelism="0" CachedPlanSize="24" CompileTime="1" CompileCPU="1" CompileMemory="152">
<RelOp AvgRowSize="952" EstimateCPU="0.00001" EstimateIO="0" EstimateRebinds="0" EstimateRewinds="0" EstimateRows="100" LogicalOp="Top"
NodeId="0" Parallel="false" PhysicalOp="Top" EstimatedTotalSubtreeCost="0.00580374">

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@microsoft.com.  Look for information & announcements for upcoming CU4 for BizTalk Server 2010.

This CU is available for download as of 11\30\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.

Look forward to your comments and suggestions.

Thanks

Guru Venkataraman

Senior Program Manager