I just got the news my BizTalk Performance Optimization session was approved for Tech·Ed:

Topic Information

Primary Track
Application Server & Infrastructure

Session Type
Lunchtime Session

Session Title
BizTalk Server Performance: Configuring BizTalk Server for performance

Description
Optimizing and verifying your BizTalk Server installation is not an easy thing to do. The documentation is good but very extensive. This presentation aims to guide you through the most important operations you need to do in order to boost the performance of BizTalk. The session includes a live demo where these settings are applied and how it significantly improves the performance.

Major Products or Technologies Covered
Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2

Hope to see you there. Let me know you’re coming.

I got great feedback from many users, and have made some updates to the bLogical BizTalk adapter:.

Disabling the connection pool (only used for send ports)

Some SSH servers can not handle the connection pool very well. This can also be a problem if there is a limit set to number of connections a certain user can have. So I’ve been asked for the possibility to disable the connection pool for send ports, and this can now be done by setting the SSH Connection Limit to "0" in the admin console or BTSNTSvc.exe.config.

Logging and tracing

A much more verbose tracing as been added. If you care to save the trace info to file, you can use the TraceListener (System.Diagnostics):

1. Enable Tracing in the port configuration.
2. Open the BTSNTSvc.exe.config (or BTSNTSvc64.exe.config) file and add the following in the Config section:

   <system.diagnostics>
     <trace autoflush="false" indentsize="4">
       <listeners>
         <add name="BTSListener" 
              type="System.Diagnostics.TextWriterTraceListener" 
              initializeData="bLogical.Shared.Adapters.Sftp.log" />
         <remove name="Default" />
       </listeners>
     </trace>
   </system.diagnostics>

Public key authentication

There was a problem using identity file authentication as the password was sent as an empty string. This works for some but not all servers. The new version always set the password to null, which should work for all servers.

Macros

%UniversalDateTime% added to the list of supported macros

Misc

• temp folder and remote permissions no longer required properties.
• Empty files are no longer picked up or processed.

Special thanks to John Vestal at CSC and Antti.

Download the adapter from CodePlex

As you should by now, we are hosting a BizTalk Release Party in Stockholm on the 8th-9th of September, featuring Richard Seroter, Stephen W. Thomas and Ewan Fairweather.  All the sessions will be technical (level ~300) and targets Developer/Architects. The event is almost full (150 attendees), however Richard will do a one hour “bonus event” about the hype around Cloud Computing which targets CTO, CIO, Senior Manager or similar.

This will be a great event for your Manager, and we urge you to recommend it. The session starts at 13:15 on the 9th of September.

Sign up here: http://bugs20100909.eventbrite.com/

Välkommen!

The videos from the BizTalk performance talk by me and Ewan Fairweather  has finally got published on msdn.

Instrument your BizTalk Server

Optimizing and verifying your BizTalk Server installation is not an easy thing to do. The documentation is good but very extensive. This presentation aims to guide you through the most important operations you need to do in order to boost the performance of BizTalk.

Performance Optimization Patterns

This session will present architectural, design, and development patterns to improve BizTalk processing performance. "Performance" can be expressed by latency and/or throughput, and this session will cover aspects of both. This will include pipeline and orchestration patterns to increase throughput, reduce latency, and reduce memory usage during BizTalk processing. We will also cover the results from BizTalk CAT recent Perf engagements.

Thanks to everyone attending the BizTalk Performance talk at the Swedish User Group, last week. The webcasts are ready and will be posted on DevCenter shortly.

The downloads includes presentations and scripts used in the first talk. It also includes the Streaming and Large Message Transmission demo from the second talk. I did not include the Transformation demo, as you download that from Paolos blog:

(Part 1) How To Boost Message Transformations Using the XslCompiledTransform class

(Part 2) How To Boost Message Transformations Using the XslCompiledTransform class Extended

Thank you

Download presentation, demos and scripts

Speaker:

Ewan Fairweather

Ewan Fairweather has worked for Microsoft for five years. He currently works as a program manager in the Business Platform Division on the Customer Advisory Team (CAT) working on large scale Integration and OLTP SQL applications.  Prior to this, Ewan spent three years working for Microsoft U.K. in the Premier Field Engineering team where he worked with enterprise customers, helping them to maintain and optimize their BizTalk applications. This included working in a dedicated capacity on some of the world's largest BizTalk deployments, predominantly within financial services.

Ewan coauthored the successful Professional BizTalk Server 2006 (Wrox, 2007) and has written many white papers for Microsoft including the "Microsoft BizTalk Server Performance Optimization Guide," which is available on the Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) Web site. Prior to joining Microsoft, Ewan worked as a Cisco Certified Academy Instructor (CCAI) for a regional training organization, delivering advanced routing and networking courses. Ewan holds a bachelor's degree in computing with management from the University of Leeds. Outside of work, Ewan's hobbies include reading, taking part in as many sports as possible, and regularly going to the gym.

Ewan maintains his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/ewanf

The Benchmark Wizard was released earlier this year, and even though we got lots of good feedback we’ve also got requests for some changes.

If you haven’t yet heard about this tool, the purpose of it is to verify your BizTalk environment performs as expected. There are two different scenarios you can run, a Messaging and an Orchestration scenario. Each of the scenarios has been tested on various environments and configuration. The result of these tests has provided the tool with a set of KPI’s, which your test result will be benchmarked against. For more information about the Benchmark Wizard:

Benchmark your BizTalk Server (Part 1) - Overview

Benchmark your BizTalk Server (Part 2) – How to install

Benchmark your BizTalk Server (Part 3) – Drill down and analyse

The most common feedback is related to the fact that it was very difficult to meet the KPI’s. A reason for this is that the original tests where executed while global tracking was disabled. This was unfortunate as the DTA tracking has ~30% overhead. We have done a re-run of all the tests, and updated the KPI’s for the new version (shown at the bottom of this page).

Further more, there seams to be a question of how to interpret the result. What does “Succeeded” mean? Does it reflect the best possible result or good enough? To make this more clear, we’ve implemented the “stop light approach”, where if you’ve Succeeded you should be proud of yourself and make a blog post, while an Acceptable result is nothing to be ashamed of.     

There has also been some other fixes such as the resetting all the counters when you re-run the test, and fixing the CPU counters to show correct values.

Special thanks to Microsoft and Ewan Fairweather for letting me use their test lab!

Download BizTalk Benchmark Wizard from CodePlex

Scenario KPI’s: Messaging Single and Multi Message Box

Scenario KPI’s: Orchestration Single Message Box

Test environment:

* Storage: EMC Clarion CX-240 ( 5 solid state drives )

Configuration:

• Global tracking enabled
• Partitioned the tempDb, BizTalkDTADb and BizTalkMsgBoxDb to as many files as CPU’s
• Separated the BizTalk MessageBox database into multiple filegroups / files
• Enabled the -T1118 flag on the SQL Service
• Disabled Throttling on send and processing hosts
• Updated the thread settings (CLR Hosting) on all hosts

I have been playing around with Azure since it was first released at the PDC. I have since then done several demos for Microsoft and my employer Logica. The demos have been pretty much the same demo over and over, why I stopped the service rather than deleting it.

To be fair, it’s pretty clear stated that this will continues to accrue charges, but if you’re doing demos like I have, –Make sure to delete it!!!

I got billed ~$700 since Feburuary.

Thanks to feed-back we got, we’ve done some minor, but important, changes to the adapter:

• %UniversalDateTime% added to the list of supported macros
• Temp folder and remote permissions no longer required properties.
• Empty files are no longer picked up or processed.

The 1.3.5 version is currently in beta, and will remain so for a couple of weeks until it’s been properly tested. PLEASE provide us with feedback.

Special thanks to John Vestal at CSC, who made most of the changes.

Download the adapter from CodePlex

BizTalk User Group Sweden has so far, published all recorded sessions on Channel9, so that these could later be viewed by those who could not attend.

As different user groups over the world have chosen to publish their videos on different sites, it has become somewhat difficult to find them. Some of these groups have therefor, together decided to move all content to the BizTalk DevCenter, as it becomes much easier to access and publish new material.

Sessions published on BizTalk DevCenter:

• BizTalk Server, SOA and the Shift to the Cloud (1/2)
• BizTalk Server, SOA and the Shift to the Cloud (2/2)
• BizTalk Server -Development Best Practices (1/2)
• BizTalk Server -Development and Administration Best Practices (2/2)
• Inside the Windows Application Server Enhancements known as Dublin (1/2)
• Inside the Windows Application Server Enhancements known as Dublin (2/2)
• BizTalk 2009 - End to end performance testing (1/2)
• BizTalk 2009 - End to end performance testing (2/2)
• Ten most useful orchestration patterns (1/2)
• Ten most useful orchestration patterns (2/2)
• Use Team Foundation Server for BizTalk Server 2009 development
• Building Pipeline Components with Forward Only Streaming
• How to use and install BizTalk Benchmark Wizard

For complete list of all webcasts: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/biztalk/dd849956.aspx

Support for integration with IBM Mainframe and AS 400 is often mentioned as a key feature of BizTalk. And as many of these system are still in use, the knowledge of these adapters should be widely spread; -but unfortunately it is not.

In fact, it has been a challenge to even find anyone to do a session about this topic. It was not until we sent out a request for speaker on our blogs that we eventually found someone qualified to do the job. This is a great opportunity for anyone calling themselves a “BizTalk developer”, to find out how to use one of the key selling points of BizTalk, and open up some new prospects for business.      

Are you in Stockholm on the 16th of March? Then come see Sam Vanhoutte and Peter Borremans from CODit talk about: Network integration, Data integration, Application integration and Messaging integration.

Sign up now: http://swebug20100316-widget.eventbrite.com/

Apparently, this post has no relevance to BizTalk or any related technology…

While under the influence of alcohol. Kent Weare had me convinced we should have this ridiculous bet (but it seamed reasonable at  the time), where if Sweden would win the gold medal in the Olympics, he would post a picture of the Swedish hockey team, and if Canada…you get the point…so here it is…

…and yes -I’m humiliated!

By clicking the    icon above you can have the content of the blog post to be read back to you. Not a very useful feature perhaps, but I thought it was pretty cool. The feature is provided by ReadSpeaker and is easy to implement.

First, register you on the ReadSpeaker site. The advertisement version is free but can only be used for personal websites and bloggers.

Secondly, add the script tag below in the head of your page. I’m using Community Server, so I added it to the theme masterpage.

<script 
    language="javascript" 
    type="text/javascript" 
    src="http://wr.readspeaker.com/webreader/webreader.js.php?cid=[PrivateKey]">
</script>

Then, on your page add the img tag below:

<img onclick="readpage(this.id+escape(document.location.href),1); return false;"
src="http://blogical.se/blogs/mikael/loudspeaker.png" 
id="http://wr.readspeaker.com/webreader/webreader.php?cid=[PrivateKey]&amp;t=blog_free&amp;title=readspeaker&amp;url="
title="Listen with webReader" 
alt="Listen with webReader"/>

If you want to limit the text to be read you can use the comments below:

<!-- RSPEAK_START -->
<p>
    Blog post....</p>
</p>
<!-- RSPEAK_STOP -->

btw, it’s not optimized for reading code, as you might have already found out ;)

I’ve seen several posts of how to add .cs files to your VS2008 BizTalk projects (Yossi has a good post), but none of them shows how to use them, which is not that obvious.

First of all, you can not use classes defined in the same project as the orchestration where you plan to use them. Secondly, and this is where I got stuck, – You don’t get any Intellisense!

But it will compile and work just fine.

Thanks to Jan Eliasen for the help.