So after 5 great years being a technology specialist for connected systems, I've decided to take on a new challenge at Microsoft Canada. I’ve slowly been winding down my BizTalk specific activities for the last month now and as one of my final actions, I wanted to let people know about the upcoming BizTalk 2010 Canadian roadshow and the new BizTalk 2010 Certification.

BizTalk Canadian Roadshow

1. The BizTalk team is hosting a roadshow this year in Toronto and Montreal.  We will have Rahul Garg (Senior Product Manager from Redmond)  at both events to speak about the BizTalk and connected systems platform roadmaps. We will also have partners and clients speaking at the event. So this should be a very interesting and useful event for you to attend.

The Toronto Event Details

Date: April 14^th

Location: 1950 Meadowvale Blvd, Mississauga, On, L5N 8L9

Time: 8:30 Registration, 1:00 Finish

Registration Link: https://microsoft.crgevents.com/BusinessIntegration2011/Content/Home.aspx

The Montreal Event Details

Date: April 12^th

Location: 2000, Av. McGill College, Bureau 450

Time: 9:00 Registration, 1:30 Finish

Registration Link: https://microsoft.crgevents.com/BusinessIntegration2011/Content/Home.aspx

BizTalk Exam

2. After skipping BizTalk 2009, we now have a new BizTalk certification exam specifically for 2010. 2010 You can find details at https://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?ID=70-595

Cheers and stay connected people

Peter

All in all, I found the process to be a very simple one once I figure out a few basic concepts. Hopefully, this blog post will help you figure out those concepts more quickly than I did. Once you’ve got a grip on those, then I believe you’ll find this integration process to be a very easy one.  As with most of these blog videos that I do, I created this after midnight when the house was quite so if you find some issues or bloopers, let me know and I’ll correct them.

Below is an overview of the components, tools and services at play in to the process. In the video, I’ll walk you through this diagram in more depth before showing you the actual project I built.  In this diagram, you can see that there is data flowing from BizTalk out to the CRM 2011 cloud service as well as data flowing from CRM 2011 Online back through the firewall to BizTalk on-premise. In this first video, I focus on the BizTalk to CRM 2011 Online option. In a day or two, I’ll post a second video that shows the CRM 2011 Online event notification being sent back to an BizTalk on-premise installation. (it’s a cool one…)

This is quite a long video (>45 minutes) so I had to split it into a multipart zip file in order to get it to fit into my SkyDrive folder.

You can get:

1. Part one at https://cid-04bc12b1f7b2979a.office.live.com/self.aspx/BlogVideos/CRMBTS%5E_Video%5E_Multi.zip
2. Part two at https://cid-04bc12b1f7b2979a.office.live.com/self.aspx/BlogVideos/CRMBTS%5E_Video%5E_Multi.z01
3. The source project and test file here https://cid-04bc12b1f7b2979a.office.live.com/self.aspx/BlogVideos/BizTalkToCRMOnline.zip

You’ll need to download both parts of the zip file and then use WinZip to extract them.

Cheers and stay connected people

Peter

When selecting a new technology platform, everyone loves to know the platform has already been proven out in production in some other organizations. (Let them find all the bugs and issues! Not us!). With that in mind, I wanted to call out the new case study that we have published for one of our location Canadian BizTalk partners and BizTalk 2010. QLogitek (https://www.qlogitek.com) is a cloud based provider of B2B services and Trading Partner Management. They have been operating for years on a platform that they built mostly in house. With the release of BizTalk 2010 and its enhanced EDI and TPM capabilities, QLogitek decided that it was time to migrate off their custom legacy code and onto the Microsoft platform. They join out Technology Adopter Program (TAP) and started to build out a SOA based verison of the EDI/TPM platform using the BizTalk 2010 beta.  I’ll let the case study (at https://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Microsoft-SQL-Server-2008-R2-Enterprise/QLogitek/Supply-Chain-Integrator-Relies-on-Microsoft-Platform-to-Facilitate-20-Billion-in-Business/4000008714) speak for itself, but I did want to call out a couple of quotes:

1. With its flexible solution based on the Microsoft platform, QLogitek can provide real-time access to transactional data and quickly launch new offerings. The company can also deploy B2B platforms for new enterprise customers up to 75 percent faster.
2. “With Intelligent Mapper, we can look at a purchase order with 100,000 line items and visually create complex mappings 30 to 40 percent faster than we could in the past.
3. “We can add a single trading partner to an established B2B platform 90 percent faster, and we expect to reduce the time and cost of adding new enterprise customers by 75 percent.”

Also, I wanted to send my congrats to the Qlogitek team for a great job done while working with the beta.

Cheers and stay connected:

Peter

Cheers

Peter

 https://www.sqlis.com/sqlis/post/Streaming-Profiler-Data-Through-StreamInsight.aspx

Cheers

Peter

Now as brilliant as a back-room programmer may be, they are often limited in their career. Being brilliant isn’t enough to have success in a professional field. We need those soft skills and people skills in order to grow beyond a simple programmer and into an effective IT consultant or team leader. Over the years, I’ve seen many back-room programmers passed over for promotions, public recognition and general career advancement. 

Of course, when people are routinely passed over for advance and feel that they are missing out on the success that others are achieving, resentment sets in. They come up with any number of reasons why they are left behind while others advance. “Some manager doesn’t like them”, “Some manager is stupid and can’t see how brilliant they are”, “so and so over on that team played politics to get their new job”, “so and so over their boast about their accomplishments and therefore got a role they didn’t deserve”. There are any number of reasons why they haven’t achieved the career success that they hoped for, but the sad thing is, they often fail to look at themselves and assess whether or not they are the reason. We need more than simple technical brilliance to achieve in a professional career. We do need all of those great soft skills and people skills. However, above and beyond all of these soft skills, we really need to have a modicum of self awareness. If we aren’t aware of our own needs, wants, limitations, fears, hang-ups, strengths and limitations then we simply can’t expect that we are going to being able to connect well with other people. To achieve career success  (and life success really), we really need to be aware of why we think the way we think, why we act the way that we act and why we think what we do about others. Once we’ve mastered that (although you never really master this), then we can go out and have great personal and working relationships with others. When you combine this with a strong technical expertise and natural talent, then you have the formula for tremendous success.  I often look at new graduates from university and wonder which ones will bring this complete package and which ones will only bring strong technical skills. Its sad really, to see brilliant people trapped in a back-room wasting their talent due to a self imposed lack of self awareness.

Now that I’ve said my piece about that, I also wanted to welcome my wife to the blogosphere. (https://susyfonseca.wordpress.com) There is a connection between my rant today and my welcome message to her. My wife has recently left the IT field (she lead a product development team at a large Telco here) to purse a new career as an art therapist (www.susyfonseca.ca). She’s focused on helping children and adults connect with themselves so that they can realize why they think the way they do and why they act the way they do. I knew nothing about Art Therapy before I met her, but over the years I’ve found it to be a very fascinating discipline. Human minds are conditioned with all kinds of inhibitions and filters which keep our words in check. We often think things that we will never verbally admit. However, the neat thing is, these filters are pretty much only setup to filter verbal communication. When an individual creates art, their true feelings, wants desires, hates and fears will often slip past these filters. When combined with an ongoing discussion with an Art Therapist, this unfiltered art can become a powerful tool for self discovery. It can be used to help an individual discover a ton of great stuff about themselves. This then leads into an ability to interact with others in a healthier and more open way.  This is certainly a program that many of the people I have worked with over the years would have benefited from! (and yes, that includes me… :))  Hopefully, this new career will help many many people achieve better success (in the IT field and everywhere else in life).

To wrap up, today’s blog entry certainly wasn’t technically focused, but hey! I have a blog tag for “personal” entries that I have never used. I figured it was time. I’ve been ending my recent blogs with the tagline “stay connected”. Today I’ll expand that a little bit and end with

“Stay Connected (with yourself first!)”

Our Connected Systems platform encompasses a number of technologies including BizTalk Server, Windows Server AppFabric, Azure, Windows Azure AppFabric, WCF, etc… If you are interested in any or all of those products, then you should check out our upcoming virtual launch event. It’s going to be held on May 20th 2010 (8:30AM Pacific Time). Details are below, the event site is https://www.appinfrastructure.com and details on the event are included below

Application Infrastructure: Cloud Benefits Delivered

https://www.appinfrastructure.com

Want to bring the benefits of the cloud to your current IT environment? Cloud computing offers a range of benefits, including elastic scale and never-before-seen applications. While you ponder your long-term investment in the cloud, you can harness a number of cloud benefits in your current IT environment now.

Join us on May 20 at 8:30 A.M. Pacific Time to learn how your current IT assets can harness some of the benefits of the cloud on-premises—and can readily connect to new applications and data running in the cloud. As part of the Virtual Launch Event, Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst Yefim Natis will discuss the latest trends and biggest questions facing the Application Infrastructure space. He will also speak about the role Application Infrastructure will play in helping businesses benefit from the cloud.  Plus, you’ll hear some exciting product announcements and a keynote from Abhay Parasnis, GM of Application Server Group at Microsoft.  Parasnis will discuss the latest Microsoft investments in the Application Infrastructure space aimed at delivering on-demand scalability, highly available applications, a new level of connectivity, and more. Save the date!

Cheers and stay connected folks…

Peter

“The type initializer for ‘EsbConfigurationTool.Helper’ threw an exception. You must have Microsoft ESB Guidance installed in order to run the tool.”

Now this is certainly an odd error message since the ESB Toolkit no longer goes by the name ESB Guidance. Also the client most certainly had the toolkit installed. To dig a little deeper into this, I asked for the log file from that the configuration tool creates. This is created in the same directory as the configuration tool and is called “EsbConfigurationTool.log”. After looking in this, I saw a number of error messages which resembled the following:

ESBConfigurationTool.exe Error: 0 : An error has occurred:

Unknown error (0x80005000)

Stack Trace:

   at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Bind(Boolean throwIfFail)

   at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Bind()

   at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.RefreshCache()

   at EsbConfigurationTool.Helper.GetWebSites()

ESBConfigurationTool.exe Error: 0 : An error has occurred:

IIS Install Registry Key is missing.

I could see from this that the issue was actually with IIS and not with a missing copy of the ESB guidance. From this we were able to determine that the IIS 6.0 extensions were not installed on the Windows 2008 system. Once the client installed those, the configuration ran properly. This is certainly an error message that needs updating, hopefully you won’t be caught by it.

Cheers

Build succeeded.
    0 Warning(s)
    0 Error(s)

Time Elapsed 00:00:07.87
New-Object : Exception calling ".ctor" with "0" argument(s): "Explorer OM is no
t supported in a 64bit process."
At C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Source\Install\Scripts\ESBFunctions.ps1:
656 char:19
+     $exp = New-Object  <<<< Microsoft.BizTalk.ExplorerOM.BtsCatalogExplorer
Property 'ConnectionString' cannot be found on this object; make sure it exists
and is settable.
At C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Source\Install\Scripts\ESBFunctions.ps1:
657 char:7
+     $exp.C <<<< onnectionString = $btsConnectionString
Cannot index into a null array.
At C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Source\Install\Scripts\ESBFunctions.ps1:
658 char:27
+     $app = $exp.Applications[$ <<<< appName]
Application  Microsoft.Practices.ESB  not found
New-Object : Exception calling ".ctor" with "0" argument(s): "Explorer OM is no
t supported in a 64bit process."
At C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Source\Install\Scripts\ESBFunctions.ps1:
656 char:19
+     $exp = New-Object  <<<< Microsoft.BizTalk.ExplorerOM.BtsCatalogExplorer
Property 'ConnectionString' cannot be found on this object; make sure it exists
and is settable.
At C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Source\Install\Scripts\ESBFunctions.ps1:
657 char:7
+     $exp.C <<<< onnectionString = $btsConnectionString
Cannot index into a null array.
At C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Source\Install\Scripts\ESBFunctions.ps1:
658 char:27
+     $app = $exp.Applications[$ <<<< appName]
Application  GlobalBank.ESB  not found
Stopping BizTalk Services
New-Object : Exception calling ".ctor" with "0" argument(s): "Explorer OM is no
t supported in a 64bit process."
At C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Source\Install\Scripts\ESBFunctions.ps1:
718 char:19
+     $exp = New-Object  <<<< Microsoft.BizTalk.ExplorerOM.BtsCatalogExplorer
Property 'ConnectionString' cannot be found on this object; make sure it exists
and is settable.
At C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Source\Install\Scripts\ESBFunctions.ps1:
719 char:7
+     $exp.C <<<< onnectionString = $btsConnectionString
Cannot index into a null array.
At C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Source\Install\Scripts\ESBFunctions.ps1:
720 char:27
+     $app = $exp.Applications[$ <<<< appName]
Cannot index into a null array.
At C:\Projects\Microsoft.Practices.ESB\Source\Install\Scripts\ESBFunctions.ps1:
721 char:36
+     $referenceApp = $exp.Applications[$ <<<< referencedAppName]
Application  GlobalBank.ESB  or  Microsoft.Practices.ESB not found
Microsoft (R) BizTalk Application Deployment Utility Version 3.8.368.0

This is caused by the fact that the install scripts are leveraging BizTalk’s BTSCatalogExplorer Object Model which is only available in 32 bit mode. Don’t worry, you can still install the samples. What you have to do is to manually launch a 32 bit version of the powershell console and then run the powershell script from there. This will allow the script to access the BTSCatalogExplorer OM without problem.

Cheers and keep on BizTalking…

Peter

Cheers

Peter