Thomas F. Abraham – On Technology

The Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference is coming soon.  This is a great 4-day conference held at the Microsoft campus at an awesome price – only $199!  Consider that TechEd costs nearly $2,000!  Of course you have to pay to get there, but really, this is still a terrific deal.

The conference features four tracks, three technical and one business:

• Service Oriented Architecture (incl. BizTalk 2006, WCF, WF, HIS and more)
• Connected Systems Technology and Products (.NET 3.0 and BizTalk 2006)
• Business Process Management (Office System 2007 and BizTalk 2006 R2)
• Business Value (Why care and what are the opportunities)

The agenda and sessions are still being finalized, so keep checking the conference website for updates.

I’m pleased to announce that I will be presenting the following session in the SOA track, so I hope to see you there!

Effective Techniques for Working with Large Messages in a Service-Oriented Architecture

In a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), small messages are easy to work with and don’t create extra challenges of their own, but various issues arise when the message size grows to megabytes in size. This session will identify the issues you should consider and then explore specific techniques that you can use to work effectively with large messages in ASP.NET 2.0 Web services and BizTalk Server 2006.

I’ve been doing my best to procrastinate taking all of these certification exams, so I finally had to just schedule and go, ready or not.  So, a week after the 70-536 .NET exam and feeling a bit rusty with BizTalk 2004, I took 74-135, the BizTalk Server 2004 TS exam.  Passing is 700, there are 40 questions and you have two hours max.

Fresh hands-on experience definitely helps with this test, as well as a lot of facts and useless knowledge like the command-line parameters to the management tools.  Microsoft’s expert test writers seem to believe that one will not have access to the product documentation to simply LOOK UP command-line parameters!

Having not laid a hand on BizTalk (2004) for at least three months, and having procrastinated studying again, I wasn’t looking forward to test day, but I passed and it’s done, so it was worth the trouble.

So how did I prepare (or not, in this case)?  I read the first 300 pages of BizTalk 2004 Unleashed in the three evenings prior as a refresher.  Beyond that I relied on my brief experience of 6-8 weeks earlier this year developing with BizTalk messaging and orchestrations, and I have done many BizTalk installs with both 2004 and 2006, not to mention debugging other peoples’ BizTalk solutions.

The test manages to hit almost every aspect of BizTalk, including Messaging, Orchestrations, HWS, BAM, BAS, installation and management.  That’s why the hands-on experience is so important.

After many (many) technical and licensing discussions, my current client is moving forward to BizTalk 2006 from BizTalk 2004.  We’re excited to finally be able to dump the last SQL Server 2000 and VS.NET 2003 installs and go pure-2.0.

That said, I’ve been busy with BTS 2004 to 2006 upgrades and new installs lately.  I found that BizTalk 2006 requires MMC (Microsoft Management Console) 3.0 — but the new and improved BTS installer doesn’t appear to check for it, nor does it install it if you don’t have it!  After installing 2006, I tried to open some of the BizTalk MMC snap-ins and was informed that I didn’t have MMC 3.0.  Hmm… so much for the dependency checker and automatic download and install of “all” of the software prerequisites.  It’s still better than 2004, but how could they miss this??

Save yourself a few minutes and just install MMC 3.0 beforehand.  There are different installers for each OS variant, so you can search Microsoft Downloads for “MMC 3.0″ to find what you need.  This search link might get you there quicker.

[5/18/06 Update] – Evidentally the Enterprise SSO Admin snap-in is the only one that requires MMC 3.0, so you can get away with 2.0 for most of your tasks.  However, I’d still advise upgrading to 3.0 to avoid the day when you need that snap-in, the server is in production, you can’t open it, you can’t restart the server, and you throw the keyboard across the room in frustration!

Helpful hint du jour — if you know what’s good for you, don’t change the service account of your master BizTalk 2004/06 Enterprise Single Sign On service.  If you insist on doing so, make SURE you have backed up your master secret first!  As you may know, BizTalk Server 2004/06 stores much of its own configuration in the encrypted SSO database.  If you change the service account, or even, I believe, its password, the service modifies the SSO database and will render your entire BizTalk group useless.  Supposedly, after you change the account you can restore the master secret from your backup to fix the destruction, but I think it depends how lucky you feel.  Go make sure your service account is set to “password never expires!”

One of my clients made this mistake, but thankfully the BTS group was not yet in production!

This Thursday is the latest Twin Cities BizTalk User Group meeting at Microsoft Bloomington at 6:30 PM.  Please join us!

Updated 08-28-2006

I suspect that Enterprise SSO uses DPAPI or the broader CryptoAPI for data encryption, and also probably to encrypt the master key itself in the service account user profile.  This explains why changing the service account causes the service to be unable to read the database.  The master key remains with the original user profile and does not exist in the new one.  I do not think that changing the service account password will have any effect, as long as you remember to update the password in the SSO service configuration.

The solution, as I originally mentioned, is to restore the master key while the service is running under the new service account.  This has the effect of copying the master key from the original service account user profile to the new user profile.

If you changed the service account and did not have a backup of the master key, you might have a chance of saving your configuration by switching back to the original account.  If that doesn’t work, you will have no choice but to completely reconfigure your BizTalk installation.

Here is a Microsoft KB describing the procedure to change the SSO service account.  This process works in 2004 or 2006.  The difference in 2006 is that you may choose to backup and restore the master key through the SSO Administration MMC snap-in (requires MMC 3.0).