Business Rules Manager 1.4.0.20 showing the new enhancements in the Interactive Rule Map.
Discovery of new galaxies?
Monday, November 06, 2006
Rule Animation
Business Rules Manager 1.4.0.20 showing the new enhancements in the Interactive Rule Map.
Discovery of new galaxies?
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
New Policy Verificator release
Acumen Business has just released the beta version of the new Policy Verificator that supports BizTalk 2006.
Major enhancements are made in the Interactive Rule Map (rule spider). There is a new free text search. And of course all the previous functions of Printing BizTalk Rules and Merging Vocabularies are available.
Major enhancements are made in the Interactive Rule Map (rule spider). There is a new free text search. And of course all the previous functions of Printing BizTalk Rules and Merging Vocabularies are available.
Saturday, January 14, 2006
BizTalk v.s. Windows Workflow Foundation
I just got the MSDN in the snail mail box and was reading this morning about the new Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF). There is a strong similarity with Biztalk in regards to the Workflow part of BizTalk.
There are some other comments about this comparison. See Darren . Combine this with the news that Scott Woodgate has left the project, I wonder where the BizTalk product is heading to.
Brian Loesgen has published a nice comparison table of BizTalk features v.s. Windows Workflow Foundations.
There are some other comments about this comparison. See Darren . Combine this with the news that Scott Woodgate has left the project, I wonder where the BizTalk product is heading to.
Brian Loesgen has published a nice comparison table of BizTalk features v.s. Windows Workflow Foundations.
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
New functions in BizTalk 2006 Rule Editing
There is an excellent blog article writen by Richard Seroter on how to enable static methods in the BizTalk 2006 rule engine. Seems that for the time being you have to get into the registry. I wonder why these essential functions are always hidden? Are there any caveats?
You can read it here
Let's see if it will make it into the the final release. This would eliminate the need for all these simple .NET conversion functions that are needed currently with BizTalk 2004. No need to wrap it in an IFactCreator, and no need to create an instance to test the rules.
You can read it here
Let's see if it will make it into the the final release. This would eliminate the need for all these simple .NET conversion functions that are needed currently with BizTalk 2004. No need to wrap it in an IFactCreator, and no need to create an instance to test the rules.
Monday, November 14, 2005
New features in the Policy Verificator
Acumen Business has announced the next release of the Policy Verificator. The 1.3 release contains some interesting new features
1. Generation of a full rule dependency network graph.
2. Interactive rule dependency Graph
There is also a gettingstarted page that guides you through one of the examples.
You can download the product here
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
RPC server is unavailable
SSO -> RPC server is unavailable.
I had problems with the Single Sign On (SSO) to get authentication to execute a SOAP request (or so I thought)
In one of my actions of trying to resolve it, I tried to reset the SSO server name to the machine name. This is something I absolutely should not have done!
This did result in the error “The RPC server is unavailable” for almost all of the ssomanage.exe and ssoconfig.exe commands:
The google searches on “RPC server is unavailable” and “BizTalk” or “SSO” did not give me any clue what kind of trouble I just created. So here is my little contribution for others:
I thought the SSO server name would be my machine name, but after hours (almost days) I found out that the original sso server name was not my machine name, but the IP address!
I found this by running the rpcdump.exe utility. After resetting the SSO server name to the IP address for –serverall and –server, I had it up and running again.
Sent the rpddump.exe to a output.txt file, and you can examine the dump with notepad.
Or look specific at an IP address and notice the SSO servers
I had problems with the Single Sign On (SSO) to get authentication to execute a SOAP request (or so I thought)
In one of my actions of trying to resolve it, I tried to reset the SSO server name to the machine name. This is something I absolutely should not have done!
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Enterprise Single Sign-On>ssomanage.exe –serverall Namgang
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Enterprise Single Sign-On>ssomanage.exe –server Namgang
This did result in the error “The RPC server is unavailable” for almost all of the ssomanage.exe and ssoconfig.exe commands:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Enterprise Single Sign-On>ssomanage.exe -displaydb
Using SSO server : sso
SQL Server : namgang
SSO database : ssodb
ERROR: 0x800706BA : The RPC server is unavailable.
The google searches on “RPC server is unavailable” and “BizTalk” or “SSO” did not give me any clue what kind of trouble I just created. So here is my little contribution for others:
I thought the SSO server name would be my machine name, but after hours (almost days) I found out that the original sso server name was not my machine name, but the IP address!
I found this by running the rpcdump.exe utility. After resetting the SSO server name to the IP address for –serverall and –server, I had it up and running again.
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Enterprise Single Sign-On>ssomanage.exe -server 192.168.1.101
The operation completed successfully.
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Enterprise Single Sign-On>ssomanage.exe -serverall 192.168.1.101
The operation completed successfully.
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Enterprise Single Sign-On>ssomanage.exe -displaydb
Using SSO server : 192.168.1.101
SQL Server : namgang
SSO database : ssodb
SSO secret server name : NAMGANG
SSO Admin account name : SSO Administrators
SSO Affiliate Admin account name : SSO Affiliate Administrators
Size of audit table for deleted applications : 1000
Size of audit table for deleted mappings : 1000
Size of audit table for external credential lookups : 1000
Ticket timeout (in minutes) : 2
Credential cache timeout (in minutes) : 60
SSO status : Enabled
Tickets allowed : No
Validate tickets : Yes
Sent the rpddump.exe to a output.txt file, and you can examine the dump with notepad.
C:\Program Files\Resource Kit>rpcdump.exe /V > output.txt
Or look specific at an IP address and notice the SSO servers
C:\Program Files\Resource Kit>rpcdump.exe /s 192.168.1.101
Querying Endpoint Mapper Database...
78 registered endpoints found.
ncacn_ip_tcp(Connection-oriented TCP/IP)
192.168.1.101[1030] [1b6a54d8-0f2a-47b2-b934-e876b711eb19] SSOSecretServer :NOT_PINGED
192.168.1.101[1030] [87632da4-2f1c-4e92-953a-41306b36c095] SSOCSServer :NOT_PINGED
192.168.1.101[1030] [87a18bff-b7a4-4d79-a996-b9811cd73c94] SSOLookupServer :NOT_PINGED
192.168.1.101[1030] [416767be-be19-433e-91c3-4ad2ed88dede] SSOAdminServer :NOT_PINGED
192.168.1.101[1030] [906b0ce0-c70b-1067-b317-00dd010662da] :NOT_PINGED
192.168.1.101[1030] [fe1bcf2e-700c-47ca-b47b-7d1c8688307f] SSOMappingServer :NOT_PINGED
192.168.1.101[1025] [82ad4280-036b-11cf-972c-00aa006887b0] :NOT_PINGED
[…deleted…]
rpcdump.exe completed sucessfully after 1 seconds
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Scalable Vector Graphs
I've been searching a long time how to draw a diagonal line with just standard Web features (HTML, CSS, DIV, etc). Most of the time I end up at Scalable Vector Graph (SVG). However there has not been a wide spread support for this technology on the client side. Microsoft is betting it's money on it's 'own' standard Avalon.
The W3C has one little note, that diagonal layout might be done without SVG, but the follow up link to these details is broken.
Today to my pleasant surprise, I stumbled on the information that Mozila has native support for SVG! This is opening a big door to get .SVG files to the clients desktop. Here is a view of a rule network dependency graph. Probably of more interest is the automatic detected rule contradiction. This rule anomaly was detected by the Policy Verificator that supports rendering SVG files.
For those stuck with Internet Explorer: you can view .SVG files with the Adobe plugin.
The W3C has one little note, that diagonal layout might be done without SVG, but the follow up link to these details is broken.
Today to my pleasant surprise, I stumbled on the information that Mozila has native support for SVG! This is opening a big door to get .SVG files to the clients desktop. Here is a view of a rule network dependency graph. Probably of more interest is the automatic detected rule contradiction. This rule anomaly was detected by the Policy Verificator that supports rendering SVG files.
For those stuck with Internet Explorer: you can view .SVG files with the Adobe plugin.
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
BizTalk Rules engine scalibility
When exploring different rule base vendors, you probably encounter references to the RETE algorithm by Charles Forgy. This algorithm has proven itself to scale well for very large ruleset.
In all my years of experience, I've never encountered a client with more than 500 rules in a single rule policy. The reason is not any scalability issues on inference engines. The reason is simple. It is difficult for a business expert to
As with any complexity, the divide and conquer strategy works very well. Split the large policy into smaller parts.
But for those who like to push the limits and see how well the BizTalk inference engine scales, you might like to read the article Microsoft'’s Rule Engine Scalability Results - A comparison with Jess and Drools, by Charles Young.
In all my years of experience, I've never encountered a client with more than 500 rules in a single rule policy. The reason is not any scalability issues on inference engines. The reason is simple. It is difficult for a business expert to
- manage a very large rule policy
- maintain a very large rule policy
- verify and validate a large rule policy
As with any complexity, the divide and conquer strategy works very well. Split the large policy into smaller parts.
But for those who like to push the limits and see how well the BizTalk inference engine scales, you might like to read the article Microsoft'’s Rule Engine Scalability Results - A comparison with Jess and Drools, by Charles Young.
BizTalk Throughput and Capacity Tester
In the category essential tools for the BizTalk consultant; here we have the Throughput and Capacity Tester made by Larry Beck. What else can we ask for?
Update: The new release has been renamed to BTSPerfTester 1.0
Update: The new release has been renamed to BTSPerfTester 1.0
The BizTalk Performance Tester (the Tester) is an application intended to assist architects and developers quantify the performance characteristics of their BizTalk solutions. The application meets this objective by performing stress tests against the target solution and monitoring the application performance.
Saturday, April 16, 2005
Policy Verificator 1.1 released
Acumen Business released the Policy Verificator version 1.1. An all new UI is designed what should significantly increase the usability issues from the initial release. Specially of interest is the inclusion of Datetime support for rule verification as well as support for the standard Microsoft Biztalk functions and predicates.
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