• Encrypt: Setting this to true encrypts all data sent between client and server.
• TrustServerCertificate: When set to true, SSL/TLS is used to encrypt the channel when bypassing walking the certificate chain to validate trust. If TrustServerCertificate is set to true and Encrypt is set to false, the channel is not encrypted. Beginning in .NET Framework 4.5, when TrustServerCertificate is false and Encrypt is true, the server name (or IP address) in a SQL Server SSL certificate must exactly match the server name (or IP address) specified in the connection string. Otherwise, the connection attempt will fail.

• .dsp project files: This is a project file for VC++ 6 and earlier. Note that these projects are already out of support and MUST be upgraded ASAP.

• .vcproj project files: These files are used for VC++ 7 to VC++ 9 runtimes. Again, these are out of support starting April 2018 and MUST be upgraded ASAP. The vcproj is an XML file. It can be parsed further to understand the specific runtime version that it is targeting.

• .vcxproj project files: These files are used for VC++ 10 and above. This one again is an xml file and can be parsed further to understand the specific runtime version being  targeted.

1. Gather software inventory for VC++ Runtime installations: This would be the first step and probably the easiest as most organizations already maintain an inventory of installed software or can easily prepare an inventory of the installed software with the configuration management tools. If the machines do note have the older runtimes installed, then there are high chances that those machines are still supported. Unless some rogue application is using an older version of runtime before VS 2005.
2. Inspect Source codes for available applications: This step ensures that all of the applications written by your development teams are covered and supported.
3. Detect third party application dependencies using DUMPBIN: This step is perhaps the most challenging and very difficult to automate with some challenges of its own. But possibly once the first two steps are done, it will help address most of the legacy applications within your environment and you would hopefully have a very small subset to perform a scan using DUMPBIN.

Well, as always is with the hard days – they need to end somewhere. I recently discovered this ASP.net 4.0 feature that allows us to do just exactly that – auto-start the applications. Quite a no-brainer that the feature is titled "auto-start".

The ASP.net auto start feature allows us to automatically boot up the ASP.net applications and execute certain code that would be critical for the efficient functioning of the app - for instance, loading items into an in-memory cache or just pre-loading certain heavy assemblies.

The feature is partly enabled by the functionality in IIS 7.5 that helps load the worker process and application proactively. Hence IIS 7.5 is definitely required for this to work.

Getting it to work

    What changes on the configuration?

To use this feature, you will need to modify the applicationHost.config file under (C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config\applicationHost.config) and change the start mode of the application pool to "AlwaysRunning". This ensures that the application pool is always running and does not stop after a couple of minutes of inactivity – which is the case for the default setting of the application pools.

Now since one app pool usually hosts more than one web application, it is also important that the web application specifies explicitly if it wants to perform any pre-load tasks. This is done very easily by adding a "ServiceAutoStartEnabled" attribute on the specific web site in the same file and setting it to "true".

As the last bit in the configuration, we also need to create an entry for autostart provider and reference it at the site level. So, when completed, sections of your web config would look something similar to –

<applicationPools>
<add name="MyAppPool" managedRuntimeVersion="v4.0" startMode="AlwaysRunning" />
</applicationPools>

<sites>
<site name="MySite" id="1">
<application path="/" serviceAutoStartEnabled="true" serviceAutoStartProvider=" MySitePreLoad" />
</site>
</sites>

<serviceAutoStartProviders>
<add name="MySitePreLoad" type="MyTypeForWarmup, SomeAssembly" />
</serviceAutoStartProviders>

        In some of the cases, you might encounter a file not found error when trying to edit this file in Visual Studio. The best way that I found to circumvent this is to simply open the file in Notepad – it always works.

    What changes in the code?

As you might've noticed in the above snippets, we need to specify a type for the auto start service providers. As with most of the types that you specify in the configs, this one also needs to be written in a particular way. The below code snippet demonstrates how we can specify the pre-load logic in code.

public class MyTypeForWarmup: System.Web.Hosting.IProcessHostPreloadClient
{
npublic void Preload(string[] parameters)
{
// Code for pre load goes here.
}
}

This class and the code in the PreLoad method is what will get executed on the appPool start and recycle events. Once this method executes completely, the ASP.net application will be marked as "Ready for processing requests" and subsequently IIS will start sending requests your way.

This is definitely one of the features that I have been longing for on the ASP.net sites and I am pretty sure it will help you in a lot of scenarios as well.

The high availability at the database tier can be achieved by using SQL clustering and is very standard in terms of configuration. The below link explains this in details. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa559920.aspx

Secondly, the BizTalk Server tier can constitute of multiple "Hosts". The BizTalk Hosts run as windows services and allow segregating the processing of different logical components in the solution. Hence allowing process and memory separation on the server for these different solution components. These hosts can reside on multiple servers within the group hence inheriting the high availability features provided by the groups.

In certain cases, the hosts cannot run on multiple groups – for instance a host that is responsible for running ports that receive file inputs from FTP. In this case, if the host is running on multiple servers, all the servers will be trying to get the same resource (file). In order to avoid such scenarios, the hosts can be clustered in active/passive mode. The below links discuss more about Hosts and their clustering.

• BizTalk Hosts - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa578695.aspx
• Host Clustering - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa560059(BTS.10).aspx

Scaling of BizTalk servers can again be done on either the SQL tier or the BizTalk Server tier depending on where the bottlenecks are present in a given infrastructure. The BizTalk message box is usually the most used database and that can be scaled by adding multiple message box databases as detailed on this link  (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc296848(v=bts.10).aspx).

Scaling for the BizTalk Server tier essentially means adding a new BizTalk server to the group so that it can start sharing the load immediately. This can be done without bringing down any of the existing servers in the group. Also, we can choose to configure only selected hosts on the new server. Hence ensuring that we augment the capacity only at the place where it is absolutely required in the solution.

• The orchestrations in the referenced BizTalk project may show compiler warnings.
• The changes that are made to the referenced BizTalk project are not propagated on to the referencing project.
• When you edit the orchestrations of the referenced project, XLANG errors are thrown. These errors may disappear after the orchestrations are saved and recompiled.
• After you deploy the referencing project, the local copies of the referenced project’s binaries are deleted.
• After you deploy the referencing project, various errors or warnings occur in Orchestration Designer.

A colleague then metioned about this hotfix - KB 97748. After installing this, the references do work like a charm.

--Sanket

Created a new C# Class Library project and right clicked the project to "Add">"New Itinerary…". However, when the template selection dialog box came up, the itinerary template was not visible. Tried a couple of things including restarting VS in admin mode (common remedy), repair the toolkit installation, repaired the Visual Studio 2008 DSL SDK etc. However, none seemed to help much.

Apparently, the item templates were not properly registered with visual studio. So the fix was as simple as running the below command –

    devenv /installvstemplates

After this, I restarted the Visual Studio and was able to get the itinerary template thereafter.

--Sanket

If you want to do that, here is a quick tip –

• Open the SQL Management Studio, connect to the BizTalk tracking database server
• Run the following sproc on the DTADB - dtasp_PurgeAllCompletedTrackingData

This stored procedure takes care of purging all the data without archiving. This link (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd745781.aspx) will provide further details for BizTalk 2006 R2.

It's very handy when cleaning off the database for production go-live after performing a quick smoke test.

--Sanket

Tom Canter (https://blogs.neudesic.com/blogs/enterprise_integration/archive/2007/02/22/4260.aspx) has put down the exact permissions that you would require for the FILE adapter that would help alleviate some of the concerns for the admins.

Overall, here is what it boils down to –

For the FILE Receive Adapter

• After you provide "Modify" rights, Click on "Advanced" button and on the Advanced Security Dialog, edit the permission entries for the BizTalk Service Account
• Here you will notice that the "Delete Sub Folders and Files" option is not given by default. This is exactly the missing link for the receive adapter.
• Simply set this property and you are good to go without "Full Control"

For the FILE Send Adapter

• If you are NOT USING the "use temporary file while writing" attribute on your send port, only the following permissions are required on the permissions entry dialog
  • Create Files / Write Data

     

• If you are using the "use temporary file while writing" attribute on your send port, the following permissions are required on the permissions entry dialog
  • Create Files / Write Data
  • Delete Files
  • Delete Sub Folders and Files
  • Read Permissions