Where did I leave my HAT?

Following an upgrade to BizTalk 2009 you may be left wondering where the Health and Activity Tracking (HAT) Tool has disappeared to. The Start Menu group for BizTalk 2009 no longer contains a link to HAT.

The answer lies in the BizTalk Administration Console MMC Snap-in. If you navigate to the Group Hub and select New Query you will see some new entries in the Value column such as Tracked Service Instances. This will retrieve data in the same way that the HAT queries did.

Right clicking on one of the resultset entries will offer the same options as HAT used to e.g. Message Flow, Orchestration Debugger. Navigate into one of these options presents the same interface as HAT always used to.

In fact HAT is still there under the covers, it's just been integrated into the Admin Console rather than running as a separate application. Try looking in the Task Manager list of running processes and you'll see BTSHatApp.exe.

HAT is dead...long live HAT.

How to find the BizTalk Edition installed

I recently had to find the edition of an existing BizTalk installation on a test server. Initially I thought this would be a case of looking at a few Help > About dialogs in the admin tools. However, it turns out that this is stored in the registry under

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\BizTalk Server\3.0\ProductEdition

MSBTS_SendAdapter doesn't work!

Just a quick post as a reminder to me (and a pointer for anyone else who happens upon this blog) to save lots of time scratching my head, looking at code that should work but doesn't.

I wrote some code as part of a BizTalk deployment framework which was intended to create an adapter handler if one does not already exist for the specified adapter/host. The Receive handler version worked fine but the Send version gave some strange results.

First I queried the existence of the send handler via WMI using MSBTS_SendHandler. This always returned an empty set indicating that it doesn't (even when the handler does in fact exist). When trying to create a send handler I got an error message (will update with exact text when I get a chance to look).

Anyway, to cut a long story short it turns out that MSBTS_SendHandler2 works fine so the guidance is to use this instead. My question is though - why does MSBTS_SendHandler still exist at all? It can't be for backwards compatibility because IT DOESN'T WORK! Why not just fix MSBTS_SendHandler instead of adding MSBTS_SendHandler2? Answers on a postcard to...

Identifying a BizTalk process

When using multiple BizTalk Hosts the process relating to each host can be identified using the following command line instruction:

tasklist /SVC /FI "IMAGENAME eq btsntsvc.exe"

This will display a list of BizTalk processes with the name of the Host and the PID. Note the PID for the host you are interested in. Match the correct PID with the process listed in Task Manager or the Visual Studio  Attach To Process dialog.

Resolving Schema Type Name Clashes

A common schema related error that may occur when building BizTalk projects that include schemas is:

BEC2017: Node "<Schema>" - This schema file has a TypeName that collides with the RootNode TypeName of one of its root nodes. Make sure that they are different.

The reason for this is quite simple - when the project is compiled, a .NET class will be generated for each top level element in your schema. If you have two schemas which share the same top level element name a clash will occur.

This is quite a common scenario and it is not always practical (or even possible) to change the element names. The solution is to change the generated type name for the schema. To do so, select the schema in the Solution Explorer and press F4 to display the Properties window. Then change the Type Name property so that it is not the same as any of the top level elements.

Default content in Maps

On a couple of occasions recently I have hit upon the need to use default content in some elements of a message generated via a map. More specifically I had an orchestration which did the following:

• Defined an input and output schema that contained a standard header section
• Makes calls to external .NET components, other orchestrations and send ports
• If all works OK, a suitable response message is returned
• In the event of a failure, an exception handler is invoked which constructs a new message to send to a common error logging orchestration before creating and returning a response message to the caller

The area of interest is the message sent to the error logging orchestration. This schema contains the standard header along with error information to be logged (for which each element defined as a distinguished field) i.e.

<xsd:element name="exception_details">
  <xsd:complexType>
    <xsd:sequence>
      <xsd:element name="type" type="xsd:string" />
      <xsd:element name="description" type="xsd:string" />
      <xsd:element name="error_source" type="xsd:string" />
      <xsd:element name="details" type="xsd:string" />
    </xsd:sequence>
  </xsd:complexType>
</xsd:element>

To create an instance of this message I transform the original request (to create the standard header) and insert the error details via code in a message assignment shape.

msgException.exception_details.description = ex.Message;
msgException.exception_details.details = ex.ToString();
msgException.exception_details.error_source = "orch name";
msgException.exception_details.type = "details here";

However, in order to programmatically insert the content into these elements, the elements had to exist in the new message! If it does not I get an XPath error when trying to set the distinguished property values.

To ensure that the elements exist I used the useful but often overlooked property of the element - Value. To find this open the Map Designer, select the target element and go to the Properties window. There you will see a Value property which can be used to set a default value for the element or <empty>. In this case <empty> was most appropriate giving message content of:

<message>
    <header>
        ...header content omitted
    </header>
    <payload>
        <exception_details>
            <description/>
            <details/>
            <error_source/>
            <type/>
        </exception_details>
    </payload>
</message>

This allowed me to set the error detail programmatically as required. Voila!

How can I use Fiddler to debug BizTalk messages?

When using HTTP, SOAP or WCF send ports it can be incredibly useful to view the content of messages that are sent on the wire. This allows you to inspect the headers (SOAP or HTTP). Fiddler is a simple but fantastic tool to allow you to do this.

By default, Fiddler will not trace any messages sent to endpoints by BizTalk as it does not use WinInet. However, BizTalk send ports can be configured to use a proxy allowing Fiddler to intercept them. On the Send Port tick the Use Proxy checkbox and set the Server to 127.0.0.1 and the port to 8888. For dynamic ports, set the following properties (as applicable to the adapter being used)

// Debug via fiddler
msgSendRequest(SOAP.UseProxy) = true;
msgSendRequest(SOAP.ProxyAddress) = "127.0.0.1";
msgSendRequest(SOAP.ProxyPort) = 8888;

Note that this needs to be removed when Fiddler is not running since traffic directed to the proxy will not be received by anything.