There is a new website in town called www.biztalkevents.com. This site gives an overview in the worldwide organized BizTalk related events. If you want to add an event you can do that here.

In an earlier post I posted a PowerShell script that automatically deploys BizTalk applications:

http://www.biztalkadminsblogging.com/index.php/item/44-installation-script

This version of the script stops when a older version of a BizTalk application that you are installing is detected. I had some discussions with other BizTalk admins and most of them wanted a ‘overwrite’ feature. I added this to a newer version of the script.

In my scripts I regularly check the status of host instances on a BizTalk system. For example, if I want to start a host instance in a script, I first check if it isn’t in started state already.

To show how you can check the status of a host instance, I created a small script. The scripts returns the state of all host instances on all servers in the array servers:

$servers = ("BizTalk2010n1", "BizTalk2010n2")

I often perform BizTalk health checks for my customers. One of the checks I do is to see if they are using software that is still supported by Microsoft. I do not think it is per definition wrong to use software that is out of support. It is however a risk that they should know about, so that they can accept the risk or resolve it.

I had a discussion with some of the other bloggers (Sandro Pereira, Lex Hegt, Steef-Jan Wiggers and Tord Glad Nordahl) on this website about initial file sizes for BizTalk databases. This discussion was based on the following article:

http://www.biztalkadminsblogging.com/index.php/item/66-checking-database-autogrowth-settings

Imagine that you are looking for a BizTalk admin, and somehow, magically your recruiter found some great resumes and set you up with some interviews. What questions are you going to ask to get a good feeling about the candidates technical knowledge? Tord Glad Nordahl did some great work about that:

http://biztalkadmin.com/biztalk-administrator-interview-questions/

Ohhh, and p.s., if you are a BizTalk admin who lives in The Netherlands and you know all of these answers, or know a BizTalk admin like that, please let me know (jeroen AT BizTalkAdminsBlogging dot com). I can set you up with an great job opportunity (interesting work, nice colleagues and an excellent salary). :)

Yesterday I was performing a Health Check at a client. One of the checks is looking at the database autogrowth settings. In the operations guide Microsoft states the following about the BizTalk database autogrowth settings:

Pre-allocate space for BizTalk Server databases and define auto-growth settings for BizTalk Server databases to a fixed value instead of a percentage value

During Health Checks I check the file transfer speed between the BizTalk servers and the SQL server. To do that, I copy a 100 MB file from the BizTalk servers to the SQL server. Even though this is not an exact science, it gives a good indication about the network and disk speed.

I normally do not carry a 100 MB test file with me. Luckily it is easy enough to create one by using FSUTIL:
FSUTIL FILE CREATENEW 100MBTest.file 104857600

If you give the host instance where your file adapter is running under modify rights on a file location that a receive port is using that port will fail to start. You will see the following error in your log:

One of my clients asked for an easier way to stop and start BizTalk applications. I created a PowerShell script with a Windows forms GUI. You can use it to stop or start all host instances and or IIS on a server in a BizTalk group.