What’s New in BizTalk 2010?

The most obvious piece of new functionality for all BizTalk developers will be the mapper interface.

There is a new toolbar that has a number of features on it allowing for better navigation, smarter linking,

and an overall better user experience. Figure 1–1 shows this new toolbar.

Figure 1–1. The BizTalk 2010 mapper toolbar

Almost as important a question as asking “What’s new?” is considering “What’s gone?”

Several core pieces of functionality that have been removed in BizTalk 2010.

The most notable are the Health and Activity Tracking (HAT) application and the ability to do administration of ports and orchestrations directly from Visual Studio using BizTalk Explorer. These were both central to a developer’s everyday use of BizTalk, and in many respects, it is unfortunate that these tools are gone from Visual Studio.

Everything is now centralized in the BizTalk Administration Console, and all of the functionality of HAT and BizTalk Explorer are available in that console.

1.1                Using the Relevance Tree View

Problem:

You have complex schemas in your map, and you are having difficulty seeing what nodes are being used.

Solution:

By using the relevance tree view, only the nodes that are actually being used in mapping the active tab will be shown.

1.2                Navigating the Mapping Surface

Problem

You want to be able to access elements of the mapping surface as rapidly as possible and need to

Understand how to use the new functionality.

Solution

There are a number of new tools that can be used to move and view the mapping surface. These include

·          Panning

·          Zooming

·          Searching

Figure 1–8. Searching for a value in a functoid

Figure 1–9. Search resultsare highlighted

·          Grid preview

Figure 1–10. Using the grid preview functionality

Note: Make sure to comment your functoids so that you can use the search functionality to more easily find them. If you’ve got more than a handful of advanced scripting functoids, for example, you will find that by adding comments you will save a lot of time trying to figure out which ones contain the methods you are looking for.

1.3                Correcting Errors in Functoids

Problem

You have some complex mappings using various functoids, and you want to make sure you don’t have any obvious errors.

Solution

The new mapper brings intelligence to the functoids, showing errors prior to the testing of a map. This allows you to rapidly assess where incomplete mappings exist and eases development by indicating possible fixes to the errors. To see how this is done, follow these steps:

1. Open an existing map in Visual Studio.

2. Drop a functoid onto the mapping surface.

3. An exclamation mark will be on top of the functoid, indicating that an error exists. Roll your mouse cursor over the top of the functoid to see the details of the error (as shown in Figure 1–11).

Figure 1–11. Functoid error information

How It Works There are a number of upgrades to the coding of maps in addition to the quick overview of the error as shown in the solution to this recipe. Another valuable update is that the functoid interface actually forces the selection of required inputs (see Figure 1–12). For example, if there are two inputs required, they will appear in the functoid configuration window, and the functoid will continue to show an error until these are configured. You can scroll over the warning icons for each input to see the exception message.

Figure 1–12. Configuring the required inputs to the functoid

1.4                Indicating Matches in Maps

Problem

You want some help mapping the source schema nodes to the target schema nodes.

Solution

The mapper tries to find a match based largely on name, though it also looks at the structure of nodes in the source and target schemas. A related piece of new functionality allows for the auto-linking based on name or structure of the source nodes. This functionality appears when you drag a source schema record (not an element or attribute, but the record itself) and drop it on a target schema record. When the link is dropped, a context menu appears (as shown in Figure 1–14).

Figure 1–14. Linking by structure or name

1.5                Configuring Core Server Settings

1. Open the BizTalk Administration Console.

2. Right-click the BizTalk Server Group, and select Settings. In the BizTalk

Settings Dashboard that opens, you will notice a variety of properties that can

be set (see Figure 1–15).

A great deal of performance tuning is available through the use of the BizTalk Settings Dashboard. It centralizes all of the throttles, timeouts, thread handling, and other functionality that used to be manually configured. Take a look at the different properties available prior to deployment, and become familiar with the settings in order to better support your BizTalk environment.

1.6                Transferring Files Using SFTP

Problem

You need to use the BizTalk FTP adapter to transfer files using SFTP.

Solution

In previous versions of BizTalk Server, the FTP adapter did not support SFTP transactions. Now, support for SFTP is built into the standard adapter and can be easily configured using these steps:

1.       Open the BizTalk Administration Console, and right-click the Send Ports folder under a BizTalk application.

2.       Select New Static One-way Receive Port.

3.       On the General tab, select FTP for the Type property. Once selected, click the Configure button.

4.       There is a new section in the FTP Transport Properties configuration window called SSL (see Figure 1–16), which allows for the specification of the client certificate hash (among other things). Set the properties for the Firewall, FTP, and SSL Sections as needed, and save the settings.

 

Figure 1–16. Configuring the SSL settings for SFTP

How It Works

In addition to supporting SFTP, the FTP Adapter has some additional feature updates. These include

Support for the following:

·          Downloading files from read-only FTP sites: In previous versions, when BizTalk retrieved a file from an FTP site, it would automatically delete the file. This prevented the FTP adapter from being used successfully with read-only FTP sites.

·          Atomic ASCII-based file transfers: Previous versions only supported binary atomic transactions.

1.7                Accessing the EDI Version 5010 HIPAA Schemas. 
1.8       Configuring EDI Trading Partners.
             Problem:
You are developing an EDI solution, and you need to configure a new trading partner.Solution:
Trading partner management is the most significant new functionality presented in BizTalk Server 2010.
1.9       Zooming out on an Orchestration.
             Problem
You need to be able to zoom out on an orchestration to see more of the design surface.
Solution
Right-click the design surface of an orchestration, and select the Zoom option. Different levels of
zooming are available
1.10      Installing BizTalk Server RFID 2010
Problem
You want to insall BizTalk Server RFID (Radio-frequency identification) on the same server as BizTalk
Server 2010.