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• Versioning and Continuous Integration with project settings files

  - by Michael Stephenson

  I came across something which was a bit of a pain in the bottom the other week. Our scenario was that we had implemented a helper style assembly which had some custom configuration implemented through the project settings. I'm sure most of you are familiar with this where you end up with a settings file which is viewable through the C# project file and you can configure some basic settings. The settings are embedded in the assembly during compilation to be part of a DefaultValue attribute. You have the ability to override the settings by adding information to your app.config and if the app.config doesn’t override the settings then the embedded default is used. All normal C# stuff so far… Where our pain started was when we implement Continuous Integration and we wanted to version all of this from our build. What I was finding was that the assembly was versioned fine but the embedded default value was maintaining the non CI build version number. I ended up getting this to work by using a build task to change the version numbers in the following files: App.config Settings.settings Settings.designer.cs I think I probably could have got away with just the settings.designer.cs, but wanted to keep them all consistent incase we had to look at the code on the build server for some reason. I think the reason this was painful was because the settings.designer.cs is only updated through Visual Studio and it writes out the code to this file including the DefaultValue attribute when the project is saved rather than as part of the compilation process. The compile just compiles the already existing C# file. As I said we got it working, and it was a bit of a pain. If anyone has a better solution for this I'd love to hear it

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• Azure Service Bus - Authorization failure

  - by Michael Stephenson

  I fell into this trap earlier in the week with a mistake I made when configuring a service to send and listen on the azure service bus and I thought it would be worth a little note for future reference as I didnt find anything online about it.  After configuring everything when I ran my code sample I was getting the below error. WebHost failed to process a request.Sender Information: System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment+HostingManager/28316044Exception: System.ServiceModel.ServiceActivationException: The service '/-------/BrokeredMessageService.svc' cannot be activated due to an exception during compilation.  The exception message is: Generic: There was an authorization failure. Make sure you have specified the correct SharedSecret, SimpleWebToken or Saml transport client credentials.. ---> Microsoft.ServiceBus.AuthorizationFailedException: Generic: There was an authorization failure. Make sure you have specified the correct SharedSecret, SimpleWebToken or Saml transport client credentials.   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.RelayedOnewayTcpClient.ConnectRequestReplyContext.Send(Message message, TimeSpan timeout, IDuplexChannel& channel)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.RelayedOnewayTcpListener.RelayedOnewayTcpListenerClient.Connect(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.RelayedOnewayTcpClient.EnsureConnected(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.RefcountedCommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.RelayedOnewayChannelListener.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ChannelDispatcher.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostBase.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.SocketConnectionTransportManager.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.TransportManager.Open(TimeSpan timeout, TransportChannelListener channelListener)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.TransportManagerContainer.Open(TimeSpan timeout, SelectTransportManagersCallback selectTransportManagerCallback)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.SocketConnectionChannelListener`2.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ChannelDispatcher.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostBase.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment.HostingManager.ActivateService(String normalizedVirtualPath)   at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment.HostingManager.EnsureServiceAvailable(String normalizedVirtualPath)   --- End of inner exception stack trace ---   at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment.HostingManager.EnsureServiceAvailable(String normalizedVirtualPath)   at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment.EnsureServiceAvailableFast(String relativeVirtualPath)Process Name: w3wpProcess ID: 8056As recommended by the error message I checked everything about the application configuration and also the keys and eventually I found the problem.When I set the permissions in the ACS rule group I had copied and pasted the claim name for net.windows.servicebus.action from the Azure portal and hadnt spotted the <space> character on the end of it like you sometimes pick up when copying text in the browser.  This meant that the listen and send permissions were not setup correctly which is why (as you would expect) my two applications could not connect to the service bus.So lesson learnt here, if you do copy and paste into the ACS rules just be careful you dont leave a space on the end of anything otherwise it will be difficult to spot that its configured incorrectly

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• Combining Shared Secret and Username Token – Azure Service Bus

  - by Michael Stephenson

  As discussed in the introduction article this walkthrough will explain how you can implement WCF security with the Windows Azure Service Bus to ensure that you can protect your endpoint in the cloud with a shared secret but also flow through a username token so that in your listening WCF service you will be able to identify who sent the message. This could either be in the form of an application or a user depending on how you want to use your token. Prerequisites Before going into the walk through I want to explain a few assumptions about the scenario we are implementing but to keep the article shorter I am not going to walk through all of the steps in how to setup some of this. In the solution we have a simple console application which will represent the client application. There is also the services WCF application which contains the WCF service we will expose via the Windows Azure Service Bus. The WCF Service application in this example was hosted in IIS 7 on Windows 2008 R2 with AppFabric Server installed and configured to auto-start the WCF listening services. I am not going to go through significant detail around the IIS setup because it should not matter in relation to this article however if you want to understand more about how to configure WCF and IIS for such a scenario please refer to the following paper which goes into a lot of detail about how to configure this. The link is: http://tinyurl.com/8s5nwrz   The Service Component To begin with let's look at the service component and how it can be configured to listen to the service bus using a shared secret but to also accept a username token from the client. In the sample the service component is called Acme.Azure.ServiceBus.Poc.UN.Services. It has a single service which is the Visual Studio template for a WCF service when you add a new WCF Service Application so we have a service called Service1 with its Echo method. Nothing special so far!.... The next step is to look at the web.config file to see how we have configured the WCF service. In the services section of the WCF configuration you can see I have created my service and I have created a local endpoint which I simply used to do a little bit of diagnostics and to check it was working, but more importantly there is the Windows Azure endpoint which is using the ws2007HttpRelayBinding (note that this should also work just the same if your using netTcpRelayBinding). The key points to note on the above picture are the service behavior called MyServiceBehaviour and the service bus endpoints behavior called MyEndpointBehaviour. We will go into these in more detail later.   The Relay Binding The relay binding for the service has been configured to use the TransportWithMessageCredential security mode. This is the important bit where the transport security really relates to the interaction between the service and listening to the Azure Service Bus and the message credential is where we will use our username token like we have specified in the message/clientCrentialType attribute. Note also that we have left the relayClientAuthenticationType set to RelayAccessToken. This means that authentication will be made against ACS for accessing the service bus and messages will not be accepted from any sender who has not been authenticated by ACS.   The Endpoint Behaviour In the below picture you can see the endpoint behavior which is configured to use the shared secret client credential for accessing the service bus and also for diagnostic purposes I have included the service registry element. Hopefully if you are familiar with using Windows Azure Service Bus relay feature the above is very familiar to you and this is a very common setup for this section. There is nothing specific to the username token implementation here. The Service Behaviour Now we come to the bit with most of the username token bits in it. When you configure the service behavior I have included the serviceCredentials element and then setup to use userNameAuthentication and you can see that I have created my own custom username token validator.   This setup means that WCF will hand off to my class for validating the username token details. I have also added the serviceSecurityAudit element to give me a simple auditing of access capability. My UsernamePassword Validator The below picture shows you the details of the username password validator class I have implemented. WCF will hand off to this class when validating the token and give me a nice way to check the token credentials against an on-premise store. You have all of the validation features with a non-service bus WCF implementation available such as validating the username password against active directory or ASP.net membership features or as in my case above something much simpler.   The Client Now let's take a look at the client side of this solution and how we can configure the client to authenticate against ACS but also send a username token over to the service component so it can implement additional security checks on-premise. I have a console application and in the program class I want to use the proxy generated with Add Service Reference to send a message via the Azure Service Bus. You can see in my WCF client configuration below I have setup my details for the azure service bus url and am using the ws2007HttpRelayBinding. Next is my configuration for the relay binding. You can see below I have configured security to use TransportWithMessageCredential so we will flow the username token with the message and also the RelayAccessToken relayClientAuthenticationType which means the component will validate against ACS before being allowed to access the relay endpoint to send a message.     After the binding we need to configure the endpoint behavior like in the below picture. This is the normal configuration to use a shared secret for accessing a Service Bus endpoint.   Finally below we have the code of the client in the console application which will call the service bus. You can see that we have created our proxy and then made a normal call to a WCF service but this time we have also set the ClientCredentials to use the appropriate username and password which will be flown through the service bus and to our service which will validate them.     Conclusion As you can see from the above walkthrough it is not too difficult to configure a service to use both a shared secret and username token at the same time. This gives you the power and protection offered by the access control service in the cloud but also the ability to flow additional tokens to the on-premise component for additional security features to be implemented. Sample The sample used in this post is available at the following location: https://s3.amazonaws.com/CSCBlogSamples/Acme.Azure.ServiceBus.Poc.UN.zip

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• Should I get my masters in Game Design and Development or Computer Science?

  - by Christopher Stephenson

  I am a recent grad with a B.S. in IT while I didn't minor in Game Desgin and development, I took few classes in it. During my job search I have seen that most gaming companies seems to want someone that majored in C.S, mathematics, or physics. During my undergrad I never had to take physics nor did I learn much about data structures and algorithms. These seem to be really important when searching for a job in game development. So I am thinking about going back to school to get my masters in either CS, or GDD. The problem though is which one? I am really not looking to create my own games, I just want to work on games.

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• BizTalk & NService Bus Whitepaper

  - by Michael Stephenson

  My whitepaper discussing BizTalk and NService Bus is not available on MSDN http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=b57b7625-7316-4f56-b88e-1fb685efae5b Thanks to Steve Lemkau for his contribution and to Udi Dahan and the NServiceBus User Forums for help with a few questions I had.

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• Testing Reference Data Mappings

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Background Mapping reference data is one of the common scenarios in BizTalk development and its usually a bit of a pain when you need to manage a lot of reference data whether it be through the BizTalk Cross Referencing features or some kind of custom solution. I have seen many cases where only a couple of the mapping conditions are ever tested. Approach As usual I like to see these things tested in isolation before you start using them in your BizTalk maps so you know your mapping functions are working as expected. This approach can be used for almost all of your reference data type mapping functions where you can take advantage of MSTests data driven tests to test lots of conditions without having to write millions of tests. Walk Through Rather than go into the details of this here, I'm going to call out to one of my colleagues who wrote a nice little walk through about using data driven tests a while back. Check out Callum's blog: http://callumhibbert.blogspot.com/2009/07/data-driven-tests-with-mstest.html

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• Cleaning your BizTalk Build Server

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Just a little note for myself this one.At one of my customers where it is still BizTalk 2006 one of the build servers is intermittently getting issues so I wanted to run a script periodically to clean things up a little.  The below script is an example of how you can stop cruise control and all of the biztalk services, then clean the biztalk databases and reset the backup process and then click everything off again.This should keep the server a little cleaner and reduce the number of builds that occasionally fail for adhoc environmental issues.REM Server Clean ScriptREM =================== REM This script is ran to move the build server back to a clean state echo Stop Cruise Controlnet stop CCService echo Stop IISiisreset /stop echo Stop BizTalk Servicesnet stop BTSSvc$<Name of BizTalk Host><Repeat for other BizTalk services> echo Stop SSOnet stop ENTSSO echo Stop SQL Job Agentnet stop SQLSERVERAGENT echo Clean Message Boxsqlcmd -E -d BizTalkMsgBoxDB -Q "Exec bts_CleanupMsgbox"sqlcmd -E -d BizTalkMsgBoxDB -Q "Exec bts_PurgeSubscriptions"  echo Clean Tracking Databasesqlcmd -E -d BizTalkDTADb -Q "Exec dtasp_CleanHMData" echo Reset TDDS Stream Statussqlcmd -E -d BizTalkDTADb -Q "Update TDDS_StreamStatus Set lastSeqNum = 0" echo Force Full Backupsqlcmd -E -d BizTalkMgmtDB -Q "Exec sp_ForceFullBackup" echo Clean Backup Directorydel E:\BtsBackups\*.* /q  echo Start SSOnet start ENTSSO echo Start SQL Job Agentnet start SQLSERVERAGENT echo Start BizTalk Servicesnet start BTSSvc$<Name of BizTalk Host><Repeat for other BizTalk services> echo Start IISiisreset /start echo Start Cruise Controlnet start CCService

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• More on Map Testing

  - by Michael Stephenson

  I have been chatting with Maurice den Heijer recently about his codeplex project for the BizTalk Map Testing Framework (http://mtf.codeplex.com/). Some of you may remember the article I did for BizTalk 2009 and 2006 about how to test maps but with Maurice's project he is effectively looking at how to improve productivity and quality by building some useful testing features within the framework to simplify the process of testing maps. As part of our discussion we realized that we both had slightly different approaches to how we validate the output from the map. Put simple Maurice does some xpath validation of the data in various nodes where as my approach for most standard cases is to use serialization to allow you to validate the output using normal MSTest assertions. I'm not really going to go into the pro's and con's of each approach because I think there is a place for both and also I'm sure others have various approaches which work too. What would be great is for the map testing framework to provide support for different ways of testing which can cover everything from simple cases to some very specialized scenarios. So as agreed with Maurice I have done the sample which I will talk about in the rest of this article to show how we can use the serialization approach to create and compare the input and output from a map in normal development testing. Prerequisites One of the common patterns I usually implement when developing BizTalk solutions is to use xsd.exe to create .net classes for most of the schemas used within the solution. In the testing pattern I will take advantage of these .net classes. The Map In this sample the map we will use is very simple and just concatenates some data from the input message to the output message. Hopefully the below picture illustrates this well. The Test In the test I'm basically taking the following actions: Use the .net class generated from the schema to create an input message for the map Serialize the input object to a file Run the map from .net using the standard BizTalk test method which was generated for running the map Deserialize the output file from the map execution to a .net class representing the output schema Use MsTest assertions to validate things about the output message The below picture shows this: As you can see the code for this is pretty simple and it's all strongly typed which means changes to my schema which can affect the tests can be easily picked up as compilation errors. I can then chose to have one test which validates most of the output from the map, or to have many specific tests covering individual scenarios within the map. Summary Hopefully this post illustrates a powerful yet simple way of effectively testing many BizTalk mapping scenarios. I will probably have more conversations with Maurice about these approaches and perhaps some of the above will be included in the mapping test framework.   The sample can be downloaded from here: http://cid-983a58358c675769.office.live.com/self.aspx/Blog%20Samples/More%20Map%20Testing/MapTestSample.zip

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• Combining Shared Secret and Certificates

  - by Michael Stephenson

  As discussed in the introduction article this walkthrough will explain how you can implement WCF security with the Windows Azure Service Bus to ensure that you can protect your endpoint in the cloud with a shared secret but also combine this with certificates so that you can identify the sender of the message.   Prerequisites As in the previous article before going into the walk through I want to explain a few assumptions about the scenario we are implementing but to keep the article shorter I am not going to walk through all of the steps in how to setup some of this. In the solution we have a simple console application which will represent the client application. There is also the services WCF application which contains the WCF service we will expose via the Windows Azure Service Bus. The WCF Service application in this example was hosted in IIS 7 on Windows 2008 R2 with AppFabric Server installed and configured to auto-start the WCF listening services. I am not going to go through significant detail around the IIS setup because it should not matter in relation to this article however if you want to understand more about how to configure WCF and IIS for such a scenario please refer to the following paper which goes into a lot of detail about how to configure this. The link is: http://tinyurl.com/8s5nwrz   Setting up the Certificates To keep the post and sample simple I am going to use the local computer store for all certificates but this bit is really just the same as setting up certificates for an example where you are using WCF without using Windows Azure Service Bus. In the sample I have included two batch files which you can use to create the sample certificates or remove them. Basically you will end up with: A certificate called PocServerCert in the personal store for the local computer which will be used by the WCF Service component A certificate called PocClientCert in the personal store for the local computer which will be used by the client application A root certificate in the Root store called PocRootCA with its associated revocation list which is the root from which the client and server certificates were created   For the sample Im just using development certificates like you would normally, and you can see exactly how these are configured and placed in the stores from the batch files in the solution using makecert and certmgr.   The Service Component To begin with let's look at the service component and how it can be configured to listen to the service bus using a shared secret but to also accept a username token from the client. In the sample the service component is called Acme.Azure.ServiceBus.Poc.Cert.Services. It has a single service which is the Visual Studio template for a WCF service when you add a new WCF Service Application so we have a service called Service1 with its Echo method. Nothing special so far!.... The next step is to look at the web.config file to see how we have configured the WCF service. In the services section of the WCF configuration you can see I have created my service and I have created a local endpoint which I simply used to do a little bit of diagnostics and to check it was working, but more importantly there is the Windows Azure endpoint which is using the ws2007HttpRelayBinding (note that this should also work just the same if your using netTcpRelayBinding). The key points to note on the above picture are the service behavior called MyServiceBehaviour and the service bus endpoints behavior called MyEndpointBehaviour. We will go into these in more detail later.   The Relay Binding The relay binding for the service has been configured to use the TransportWithMessageCredential security mode. This is the important bit where the transport security really relates to the interaction between the service and listening to the Azure Service Bus and the message credential is where we will use our certificate like we have specified in the message/clientCrentialType attribute. Note also that we have left the relayClientAuthenticationType set to RelayAccessToken. This means that authentication will be made against ACS for accessing the service bus and messages will not be accepted from any sender who has not been authenticated by ACS.   The Endpoint Behaviour In the below picture you can see the endpoint behavior which is configured to use the shared secret client credential for accessing the service bus and also for diagnostic purposes I have included the service registry element.     Hopefully if you are familiar with using Windows Azure Service Bus relay feature the above is very familiar to you and this is a very common setup for this section. There is nothing specific to the username token implementation here. The Service Behaviour Now we come to the bit with most of the certificate stuff in it. When you configure the service behavior I have included the serviceCredentials element and then setup to use the clientCertificate check and also specifying the serviceCertificate with information on how to find the servers certificate in the store.     I have also added a serviceAuthorization section where I will implement my own authorization component to perform additional security checks after the service has validated that the message was signed with a good certificate. I also have the same serviceSecurityAudit configuration to log access to my service. My Authorization Manager The below picture shows you implementation of my authorization manager. WCF will eventually hand off the message to my authorization component before it calls the service code. This is where I can perform some logic to check if the identity is allowed to access resources. In this case I am simple rejecting messages from anyone except the PocClientCertificate.     The Client Now let's take a look at the client side of this solution and how we can configure the client to authenticate against ACS but also send a certificate over to the service component so it can implement additional security checks on-premise. I have a console application and in the program class I want to use the proxy generated with Add Service Reference to send a message via the Azure Service Bus. You can see in my WCF client configuration below I have setup my details for the azure service bus url and am using the ws2007HttpRelayBinding.   Next is my configuration for the relay binding. You can see below I have configured security to use TransportWithMessageCredential so we will flow the token from a certificate with the message and also the RelayAccessToken relayClientAuthenticationType which means the component will validate against ACS before being allowed to access the relay endpoint to send a message.     After the binding we need to configure the endpoint behavior like in the below picture. This contains the normal transportClientEndpointBehaviour to setup the ACS shared secret configuration but we have also configured the clientCertificate to look for the PocClientCert.     Finally below we have the code of the client in the console application which will call the service bus. You can see that we have created our proxy and then made a normal call to a WCF in exactly the normal way but the configuration will jump in and ensure that a token is passed representing the client certificate.     Conclusion As you can see from the above walkthrough it is not too difficult to configure a service to use both a shared secret and certificate based token at the same time. This gives you the power and protection offered by the access control service in the cloud but also the ability to flow additional tokens to the on-premise component for additional security features to be implemented. Sample The sample used in this post is available at the following location: https://s3.amazonaws.com/CSCBlogSamples/Acme.Azure.ServiceBus.Poc.Cert.zip

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• Connected Systems User Group Meeting tomorrow

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Just wanted to pass out a reminder about tomorrow nights user group meeting with Udi Dahan Registration link:http://sbugmay2010.eventbrite.com/ User group link: http://ukconnectedsystemsusergroup.org

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• Multi-Part Map Troubleshooting

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Scenario I came across a nice little one with multi-part maps the other day. I had an orchestration where I needed to combine 4 input messages into one output message like in the below table:   Input Messages Output Messages Company Details Member Details Event Message Member Search Member Import   I thought my orchestration was working fine but for some reason when I was trying to send my message it had no content under the root node like below <ns0:ImportMemberChange xmlns:ns0="http://---------------/"></ns0:ImportMemberChange>   My map is displayed in the below picture. I knew that the member search message may not have any elements under it but its root element would always exist. The rest of the messages were expected to be fully populated. I tried a number of different things and testing my map outside of the orchestration it always worked fine. The Eureka Moment The eureka moment came when I was looking at the xslt produced by the map. Even though I'd tried swapping the order of the messages in the input of the map you can see in the below picture that the first part of the processing of the message (with the red circle around it) is doing a for-each over the GetCompanyDetailsResult element within the GetCompanyDetailsResponse message. This is because the processing is driven by the output message format and the first element to output is the OrganisationID which comes from the GetCompanyDetailsResponse message. At this point I could focus my attention on this message as the xslt shows that if this xpath statement doesn’t return the an element from the GetCompanyDetailsResponse message then the whole body of the output message will not be produced and the output from the map would look like the message I was getting. <ns0:ImportMemberChange xmlns:ns0="http://---------------/"></ns0:ImportMemberChange> I was quickly able to prove this in my map test which proved this was a likely candidate for the problem. I revisited the orchestration focusing on the creation of the GetCompanyDetailsResponse message and there was actually a bug in the orchestration which resulted in the message being incorrectly created, once this was fixed everything worked as expected. Conclusion Originally I thought it was a problem with the map itself, and looking online there wasn’t really much in the way of content around troubleshooting for multi-part map problems so I thought I'd write this up. I guess technically it isn't a multi-part map problem, but I spend a good couple of hours the other day thinking it was.

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• Testing what is happening inside your BizTalk solution

  - by Michael Stephenson

  As BizTalk developers we all know that one of the common challenges is how to test your BizTalk solution once it is deployed to BizTalk. Hopefully most of us are using the BizUnit framework for testing, but we still have the limitation that it's a very Black Box test. I have put together a sample and video to show a technique where I'm using the Logging Framework from the BizTalk CAT Team at Microsoft and where by BizUnit test is able to make assertions against the instrumentation going through the framework. This means that I can test for things happening such as the fact a component was executed or which branch of an orchestration was executed by simply using my normal instrumented code. I've put the sample and video for this on the following codeplex site: http://btsloggingeventsinbi.codeplex.com/ The video should also be on cloud casts fairly soon too.

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• Monitoring Windows Azure Service Bus Endpoint with BizTalk 360?

  - by Michael Stephenson

  I'm currently working with a customer who is undergoing an initiative to expose some of their line of business applications to external partners and SAAS applications and as part of this we have been looking at using the Windows Azure Service Bus. For the first part of the project we were focused on some synchronous request response scenarios where an external application would use the Service Bus relay functionality to get data from some internal applications. When we were looking at the operational monitoring side of the solution it was obvious that although most of the normal server monitoring capabilities would be required for the on premise components we would have to look at new approaches to validate that the operation of the service from outside of the organization was working as expected. A number of months ago one of my colleagues Elton Stoneman wrote about an approach I have introduced with a number of clients in the past where we implement a diagnostics service in each service component we build. This service would allow us to make a call which would flex some of the working parts of the system to prove it was working within any SLA. This approach is discussed on the following article: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2011/12/12/the-value-of-a-diagnostics-service.aspx In our solution we wanted to take the same approach but we had to consider that the service clients were external to the service. We also had to consider that by going through Windows Azure Service Bus it's not that easy to make most of your standard monitoring solutions just give you an easy way to do this. In a previous article I have described how you can use BizTalk 360 to monitor things using a custom extension to the Web Endpoint Manager and I felt that we could use this approach to provide an excellent way to monitor our service bus endpoint. The previous article is available on the following link: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2012/09/12/150696.aspx   The Monitoring Solution BizTalk 360 currently has an easy way to hook up the endpoint manager to a url which it will then call and if a successful response is returned it then considers the endpoint to be in a healthy state. We would take advantage of this by creating an ASP.net web page which would be called by BizTalk 360 and behind this page we would implement the functionality to call the diagnostics service on our Service Bus endpoint. The ASP.net page could include logic to work out how to handle the response from the diagnostics service. For example if the overall result of the diagnostics service was successful but the call to the diagnostics service was longer than a certain amount of time then we could return an error and indicate the service is taking too long. The following diagram illustrates the monitoring pattern.   The diagnostics service which is hosted in the line of business application allows us to ping a simple message through the Azure Service Bus relay to the WCF services in the LOB application and we they get a response back indicating that the service is working fine. To implement this I used the exact same approach I described in my previous post to create a custom web page which calls the diagnostics service and then it would return an HTTP response code which would depend on the error condition returned or a 200 if it was successful. One of the limitations of this approach is that the competing consumer pattern for listening to messages from service bus means that you cannot guarantee which server would process your diagnostics check message but with BizTalk 360 you could simply add multiple endpoint checks so that it could access the individual on-premise web servers directly to ensure that each server is working fine and then check that messages can also be processed through the cloud. Conclusion It took me about 15 minutes to get a proof of concept of this up and running which was able to monitor our web services which had been exposed via Windows Azure Service Bus. I was then able to inherit all of the monitoring benefits of BizTalk 360 to provide an enterprise class monitoring solution for our cloud enabled API.

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• TransportWithMessageCredential & Service Bus – Introduction

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Recently we have been working on a project using the Windows Azure Service Bus to expose line of business applications. One of the topics we discussed a lot was around the security aspects of the solution. Most of the samples you see for Windows Azure Service Bus often use the shared secret with the Access Control Service to protect the service bus endpoint but one of the problems we found was that with this scenario any claims resulting from credentials supplied by the client are not passed through to the service listening to the service bus endpoint. As an example of this we originally were hoping that we could give two different clients their own shared secret key and the issuer for each would indicate which client it was. If the claims had flown to the listening service then we could check that the message sent by client one was a type they are allowed to send. Unfortunately this claim isn't flown to the listening service so we were unable to implement this scenario. We had also seen samples that talk about changing the relayClientAuthenticationType attribute would allow you to authenticate the client within the service itself rather than with ACS. While this was interesting it wasn't exactly what we wanted. By removing the step where access to the Relay endpoint is protected by authentication against ACS it means that anyone could send messages via the service bus to the on-premise listening service which would then authenticate clients. In our scenario we certainly didn't want to allow clients to skip the ACS authentication step because this could open up two attack opportunities for an attacker. The first of these would allow an attacker to send messages through to our on-premise servers and potentially cause a denial of service situation. The second case would be with the same kind of attack by running lots of messages through service bus which were then rejected the attacker would be causing us to incur charges per message on our Windows Azure account. The correct way to implement our desired scenario is to combine one of the common options for authenticating against ACS so the service bus endpoint cannot be accessed by an unauthenticated caller with the normal WCF security features using the TransportWithMessageCredential security option. Looking around I could not find any guidance on how to implement this correctly so on the back of setting this up I decided to write a couple of articles to walk through a couple of the common scenarios you may be interested in. These are available on the following links: Walkthrough - Combining shared secret and username token Walkthrough – Combining shared secret and certificates

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• Build & Deployment Guide for Service Bus Relay Project

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Ive recently published a sample guide based on a real-world project where we implemented an on-premise WCF routing solution to connect SAAS applications to our on premise line of business applications. The guide will discuss: How we configured and setup the infrastructure How we setup the on-premise server to listen to the service bus What software we used How we configured Windows Azure This contains some useful contextual information around the reference scenario and hopefull this will be very useful to others undertaking similar projects. Ive also included this on the technet wiki page for Windows Azure Service Bus resources: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/13825.windows-azure-service-bus-resources.aspx

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• API Management Video

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2014/08/03/157900.aspxJust wanted to put the word out that the API Management video from the recent user group meeting is available.  The page on the below link has resources from that meeting:http://ukcsug.co.uk/past-events/2014-07-07/ Also we have out next two meetings available for registration at the following links:Hybrid Connectionshttps://www.eventbrite.com/e/azure-biztalk-services-hybrid-connections-tickets-12216617231?aff=eorg Hybrid Integration with Dynamics CRMhttps://www.eventbrite.com/e/hybrid-integration-with-microsoft-dynamics-crm-tickets-12398067955?aff=eorg

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• Service Bus random thought for the day

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Its been really nice to see that over the last few weeks since we implemented our Dynamics CRM connecting via Azure Service Bus to backend line of business applications solution how much interest this has sparked within the rest of the organisation and other subsiduaries and how many people are coming up with ideas elsewhere on how they can leverage what we did and how simple it could be to connect their applications to the cloud. Im currently working with one of these companies and its refreshing to see how much interest can be spread by a good success story.

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• WCF Routing Service Filter Generator

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Recently I've been working with the WCF routing service and in our case we were simply routing based on the SOAP Action. This is a pretty good approach for a standard redirection of the message when all messages matching a SOAP Action will go to the same endpoint. Using the SOAP Action also lets you be specific about which methods you expose via the router. One of the things which was a pain was the number of routing rules I needed to create because we were routing for a lot of different methods. I could have explored the option of using a regular expression to match the message to its routing but I wanted to be very specific about what's routed and not risk exposing methods I shouldn't via the router. I decided to put together a little spreadsheet so that I can generate part of the configuration I would need to put in the configuration file rather than have to type this by hand. To show how this works download the spreadsheet from the following url: https://s3.amazonaws.com/CSCBlogSamples/WCF+Routing+Generator.xlsx In the spreadsheet you will see that the squares in green are the ones which you need to amend. In the below picture you can see that you specify a prefix and suffix for the filter name. The core namespace from the web service your generating routing rules for and the WCF endpoint name which you want to route to. In column A you will see the green cells where you add the list of method names which you want to include routing rules for. The spreadsheet will workout what the full SOAP Action would be then the name you will use for that filter in your WCF Routing filters. In column D the spreadsheet will have generated the XML snippet which you can add to the routing filters section in your configuration file. In column E the spreadsheet will have created the XML snippet which you can add to the routing table to send messages matching each filter to the appropriate WCF client endpoint to forward the message to the required destination. Hopefully you can see that with this spreadsheet it would be very easy to produce accurate XML for the WCF Routing configuration if you had a large number of routing rules. If you had additional methods in other services you can simply copy the worksheet and add multiple copies to the Excel workbook. One worksheet per service would work well.

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• UK Connected Systems User Group - Update and next meeting

  - by Michael Stephenson

  For those in the UK Connected Systems User Group, the content from our last meeting is in the below linked skydrive folder: http://cid-40015ea59a1307c8.office.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/SBUG/SBUG%20Meetings/2010%20December We are currently preparing the next event for Tuesday 15th Febuary to again be at EMC in London Bridge.  We are still formalising the details of the event but it is now open for registration. http://ukcsugfeb2011.eventbrite.com/

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• iPad UIViewController loads as portrait when device is in landscape

  - by jud

  I have an application with 3 view controllers. They are all have shouldAutoRotateToInterfaceOrientation returning YES. The first two, my main menu and my submenu both autorotate just fine. The third viewcontroller, which programatically loads a UIImageView from a jpg file in the program's bundle, will only display in portrait. In the viewcontroller containing the image, i have this: NSString *imageName = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@-00%d.jpg",setPrefix,imageNumber]; UIImageView *pictureView = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:[UIImage imageNamed:imageName]]; pictureView.frame = CGRectMake(0, 0, 1024, 768); [self.view addSubview:pictureView]; and again, I have shouldAutoRotateToInterfaceOrientation returning YES for all orientations. My image shows up, but is sideways, and the 0,0,1024,768 values I used to make my rectangle start from the top right corner going down, instead of starting at the top left and going across (holding in landscape). Am I missing a parameter I need to set in order to ensure the imageview shows up in landscape instead of portrait?

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• Compile OpenSSH for use in iphone application

  - by Jud Stephenson

  I am trying to create an application to take advantage of OpenSSH to create an sFtp client for the iphone. I know that it is possible to create ssh clients for iPhone (iSSH, TouchTerm, etc) and I also assume they are using openssh as a base. Would I just need to create a static library?

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• Loop through hex variable in C

  - by Jud Stephenson

  I have the following code in a project that write's the ascii representation of packet to a unix tty: int written = 0; int start_of_data = 3; //write data to fifo while (length) { if ((written = write(fifo_fd, &packet[start_of_data], length)) == -1) { printf("Error writing to FIFO\n"); } else { length -= written; } } I just want to take the data that would have been written to the socket and put it in a variable. to debug, I have just been trying to printf the first letter/digit. I have tried numerous ways to get it to print out, but I keep getting hex forms (I think). The expected output is: 13176 and the hex value is: 31 33 31 37 36 0D 0A (if that is even hex) Obviously my C skills are not the sharpest tools in the shed. Any help would be appreciated.

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• Looping through values in NSDictionary throws fault

  - by jud

  I have a plist file that I am loading into an NSDictionary *setDictionary that contains a set of fields, pictureDesc1, pictureDesc2, etc. Once the NSDictionary is loaded, I can retrieve a value using [setDictionary objectForKey:@"pictureDesc1"]; But I cannot do a loop like this: for (int i=1; i<=numberOfPictures; i++) { NSString *keyName = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"pictureDesc%d",i]; NSString *description = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@", [setDictionary objectForKey:keyName]]; } Is there a different way to dynamically call keys from within an NSDictionary?

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• Microsoft MVP Award

  - by EltonStoneman

  [Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman] I learned over Easter that I have been awarded a BizTalk MVP by Microsoft for 2010, which is great news. It's all a bit shadowy, but I suspect Michael Stephenson had a hand in it – so thanks Mike.

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• Windows 7 hangs after going into sleep a second time

  - by Brian Stephenson

  I've searched everywhere around Google and can't figure out why this is happening so I decide to ask here to see if anyone has a problem like this. Like it says in the title, whenever I sleep ONCE I'm able to wake the system, but going back to sleep again AFTER waking up for the first time results in it hanging on no input and no output, with the fan spinning as fast as possible and alot of heat being spewed out by the fan as well. I've tried various things like setting all USB Hub Root's to not get switched off for power saving, disabling USB selective suspend, disabling PCI-e link state power management, and even unplugging ALL USB devices and it wont wake up after the second attempt. And I've even waited up to a full hour of the CPU fan spinning loudly and it's still stuck trying to wake up. The only USB devices I use are a Microsoft USB Comfort Curve Keyboard 2000 (IntelliType Pro) and a generic HID compliant mouse from Creative model number OMC90S "CREATIVE MOUSE OPTICAL LITE". My other devices like external drives and controllers are unplugged when I'm not using them as having too many USB devices plugged in at a time causes a deadlock on almost all of the ports I have. Here's my system specifications (Most of these are from CPU-Z): Brand: Gateway DX4300-19 Mainboard: Gateway RS780 Chipset: AMD 780G Rev 00 Southbridge: AMD SB700 Rev 00 LPCIO: ITE IT8718 BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. ver P01-A4 09/15/2009 CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 810 at 2.60 GHz RAM: 8.0 GB DDR2 Dual Channel Ganged Mode at 400 MHz GPU: ATI Radeon HD3200 Graphics Intergrated - RS780 OS: Windows 7 Home Premium x64 OEM (Acer Group) HDD: WDC WD10EADS-22M2B0 1.0 TB (Western Digital Green Caviar) My BIOS has absolutely no control over how I setup the sleep mode to be either S1 or S3. So I can't check these settings or even change them. Hybrid sleep is also disabled, I can successfully go into hibernation and wake from hibernation but this is painfully slow due to a harddrive problem I'm having with this "Green Drive". (Hibernation takes over ~3 minutes to complete) Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

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