Andy's Warhole

Just back from holidays, I needed to debug a c# component used in one of our orchestrations. Since we introduced some additional host instances, I needed to to determine to which host instance (service) to attach to. In the Attach to Process dialog it is not possible to see to which host instance the pid belongs, they, in this example, both show as  BTSNTSvc.exe.

However, by executing the tasklist command using the command prompt you are able to determine where to attach to.
Execute the following command (on a 32 bit server):

tasklist /svc /fi "imagename eq btsntsvc.exe"

• tasklist
  Displays a list of applications and services with their Process ID (PID) for all tasks.
• /svc
  Lists all the service information for each process without truncation.
• /fi <filter name>
  Specifies the types of process(es) to include in or exclude from the query. The eq is equals.

The result after executing the command will be something like:

As the orchestrations are run within the BtsProcessingHost, the belonging PID can now easily be found and the component attached the corresponding BizTalk service.

There was a failure executing the receive pipeline: "Microsoft.BizTalk.DefaultPipelines.XMLReceive, Microsoft.BizTalk.DefaultPipelines, Version=3.0.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" Source: "XML disassembler" Receive Port: "Load ..." URI: "D:\In\XML\*.xml" Reason: Cannot convert "SomeID" to "long" because the type is not supported.

When you define an element with data type xs:decimal, there is no way that you can control the digits using the XSD schema editor in Visual Studio. However, you can still add the fractionDigit facet, by editing the BizTalk schema in a text/xml editor. Just add the following code under the xs:decimal data type element:

<xs:simpleType>
            <xs:restriction base="xs:decimal">
                        <xs:fractionDigits value="3" />
            </xs:restriction>
</xs:simpleType>

If you than validate an instance the error nicely refers to the fractionDigits facet specified:

The '….' element is invalid - The value '169.5652174' is invalid according to its datatype 'Decimal' - The FractionDigits constraint failed.

Nice feature!

While searching the internet I found this article by Stephen Kaufman describing the fractionDigit feature. It was written before BizTalk 2006 was even there. I'm wandering why this feature was not incorporated in BizTalk Server 2006 (R#).

 tf workspace /delete /server:http://<server>:8080 <computer>;<domain>\<client>