Robust Error Handling for BizTalk Solutions
Matt Meleski, MVP / Senior Consultant, Objectsharp Consulting

Matt’s presentation covered planning and designing to handle exceptions that occur in pipelines and orchestrations. He covered the following techniques:

• Central Exception Handling using the Exception Management Framework in the ESB Toolkit
• Using Compensation in Orchestrations
• Pipeline and Orchestration Retry Patterns leveraging built in Message Box persistence

Matt broke exceptions into the following two types (with their origins):

1. .Net Exceptions
   • Receive Adapter
   • Receive Pipeline
   • Maps
   • Orchestration
   • Send Pipeline
   • Send Adapter
2. Messaging Failures
   • Publish to Message Box
   • Subscribe from Message Box
   • Orchestration not enlisted/started

BizTalk exception can then be handled in the following two ways:

1. Rely on BTS MessageBox & BizTalk framework
   • Suspend/retry using console
   • Handle errors in pipe comps (Try/Catch)
   • Failed message routing
   • Use MOM or custom technique to be alerted and resend the error messages
2. Route to file share, database, SharePoint
   • Custom processing for failed messages
   • Failed messages not in MessageBox

Matt did a couple of demos covering the following topics:

• Looking at MOM for notification of errors
• Making use of “Enabled Routing” flag for Failed Messages
• Dead letter drops - resume pattern
• ESB Exception Management Framework
• Compensation shape
• Distributed transaction (System.Transactions with Atomic Scope shapes)
• ESB Exception Management Framework
• Resume pattern

The presentation was very interesting especially the part around using the Exception Management Framework in the ESB Toolkit which can be installed separately from the rest of the ESB Toolkit - a great idea for firms not interested in the developing an ESB but wanting to take advantage of a centralized error handling process.

Link:
The ABCs of .Net - Matt Meleski
ESB Guidance Toolkit

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 for SOA & BPM
Ofer Ashkenazi, Senior Technical Product Manager, Connected Systems Division

Ofer’s presented a structured tour of the BizTalk capabilities and their benefits in implementing complex SOA and BPM solutions. He used the BizTalk Capabilities Categorization poster as the starting point for the discussion.

Links to the posters:
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Capabilities Poster
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Runtime Architecture Poster
BizTalk Server 2006 Legacy Modernization with HIS 2006 Poster

It was a good high level overview of all of BizTalk’s capabilities. His slide deck would be very useful in some of the pre-sales presentations that I have had to make in the past. I may have to get my hands on them for future use - watch this space.

Architecture of the Microsoft Enterprise Service Bus Guidance
Marty Waznicky, Principle Program Manager, Connected Systems

Marty led the presentation on the ESB Guidance toolkit. He started by giving his preferred defintion of SOA:
SOA enables loose coupling interoperability, management of change, operation of business services, in a governable environment. Business Services operating in a well run SOA can be complesed into business process that align IT with business.

He then summarized a few of the capabilities of the toolkit:

1. Messaging Infrastructure
   • Supports WS*
   • Supports existing applications
   • Supports partner 3rd party vendors
   • Supports B2B
   • Pub-Sub infrastructure
2. End point management
   • Decouple consumer from service
   • Registry/repository integration
   • Integration with SOA governance solutions
3. Operation support
   • End-to-end visibility
   • Exception mediations
   • Quality of service
4. Invocation patterns
• Itinerary process
• Common Messaging patterns
• Route, transform, validate, route and mediate on exception

Benefits of the ESB Guidance Tookit include:

• Loosely coupled message environment
• Policy driven level routing and mediation
• Itinerary based routing
• Code reuse

Top 5 Features of the ESB Guidance:

1. Dynamic Service Invocation
2. Unified Exception Management
3. ESB Management Portal
4. Itinerary Processing
5. SOA Governance Integration

Following the introduction there was a demo of the AmberPoint SOA Governance product which seemed impressive to say the least.

The final part of the presentation was Marty installing the ESB Guidance toolkit and showing what was coming in the new release slated for later this week.

Links:
ESB Guidance Toolkit
Marty Wasznicky - Regional BizTalk Rants

Microsoft, Microsoft SOA Conference, BizTalk,  Enterprise Service Bus Guidance, ESB Guidance Toolkit

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