Thursday, October 9, 2008

BizTalk Server 2006 on Vista RTM

I had earlier blogged about my attempts to get BizTalk Server 2006 working on Vista RC1. I recently downloaded and upgraded to Vista RTM and after getting some other things out of the way, I finally found time to try out installing BizTalk Server 2006 on Vista RTM.

Having read in couple of posts about the "Run as Administrator" requirement to run certain software, I decided to run all setup programs and configurations wizards in that mode. Here is how it all went.

With Vista, VS 2005 Team Suite and SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition all installed and configured properly, I then started with BizTalk Server 2006 Developer edition setup. During setup BizTalk offers to automatically download and install the pre-requisites from the CAB file. Since in my earlier attempt i had used the XP cab file, I decided to use the auto-download option this time to see what happens. The setup program tried to download some cab file. I waited for about 5 mins, but didn't see any activity happening. It didn't report any error nor did it show any progress update.

Deciding not to wait further, I cancelled the setup and restarted again and this time pointed to my pre-downloaded XP specific cab file. I didn't try the Windows2003 specific cab file, since that is a server platform. To keep things simple, I didn't select EDI Adapter, no portal components and no single sign-on features. I did select Business Rules Engine though. The setup proceeded normally and completed without any errors. During setup, it did show a dialog about VS 2005 compatibility issues on Vista, but I select "run program" option and went ahead.

But this much had happened last time also. Post this, I then started the Configuration wizard (with run as administrator). Again without attempting anything fancy, I selected the basic configuration and provided a local user ID/pwd that I had created earlier (and made part of Administrator group) and went ahead. To my delight the configuration also completed successfully and I started feeling more confident about a successful execution this time.

I ran the BizTalk Server Administration tool and was able to navigate to various items without issues. During my last attempt, when trying to access an adapter I had got WMI error. This time, I was able to access all adapters without any errors. Having disabled user access control (UAC) feature already, I then proceeded to pick a sample from SDK and configure it so that I could test a running application. I picked up CBRSample from \SDK\Samples\Messaging (no particular reason for using this application) and ran the setup.bat file.

If you have been reading my earlier blog, you would know that i had again faced some errors here related to UAC and also WMI. Since I had already disabled UAC, there was no errors for directory creation and the setup.bat file ran successfully. Like setup, I again got a compatibility warning for VS 2005, but again I went ahead with "run program" option. I was almost there. With the application successfully configured and started, I knew that it will work fine this time.

I picked up the sample files provided with the CBRSample and placed them in the IN folder. A small wait (typically required for the receive location to poll again) and the files disappeared. However more wait, but the files never appeared in the output folder. Was something wrong with the setup again !

Via BizTalk Adminstration console, I found out that two service instances in resumable state. So this was still good news. The error stated no active subscription was found and little more investigation showed that the send ports didn't had the filter set. This was pretty simple to resolve and I added the appropriate filter as below. This behavior is also documented in the BizTalk's documentation.

CBRSample.CountryCode == 100 (for US)
and
CBRSample.CountryCode == 200 (for CAN)

I then resumed the suspended services and the messages were picked up by appropriate send ports and the output files appeared in their respective locations. To ensure that all was well, I picked up another sample from SDK - \SDK\Samples\Orchestrations\CallOrchestration and ran setup for this. This again was installed and configured without issues. The sample file from the In folder was picked up and i saw a file in the Out folder as expected.

The only small issue was that this sample didn't create a custom Application in BizTalk and got added to BizTalk Application 1, the default application. I haven't checked all the samples, so not sure which others use or not use the application feature. It would be good if all samples use the new Application feature of BizTalk since it really makes working with the various artifacts related to an application simple.


source:- infosysblogs.com/

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