Congrats to the Connected Systems Division for getting BizTalk Server 2006 R2 out the door. Now that we’re done with that, here’s my humble “wish list” for BizTalk Server vNext. I realize that development is well under way, but, hopefully some of these requests can make it in.
Design Tools
- High level modeling tool. Nothing the team doesn’t know already, but I want a tool/view that let’s me architect the BizTalk solution at a broader level. Much like the BizTalk Server 2006 Administration Console introduced “application management”, I want a similar metaphor for “application architecture.”
- Modeling tools that support industry standards. The BizTalk team has done a great job in embracing industry standards for developed artifacts (e.g. XSD, XSLT, SOAP, WSDL, XML), and I’d love to see a similar embrace of the design environment. Specifically, UML and/or BPMN support in the above-mentioned higher level modeling toolset.
BizTalk Administration
- Option for subscriber throttling. I need to be able to pick any orchestration or any send port and tell the engine not to instantiate more than X number of them at one time. Many smart folks have come up with various solutions (e.g. singletons, ordered delivery, etc), but I can’t see why it’s too technically challenging to force the XLANG engine (or EPM) to verify running instances vs. throttle count prior to instantiating a new instance.
- Stronger dependency visibility. I’d like to be able to open the BizTalk Administration Console, view a host, and see every artifact that uses it. Likewise, I’d like to be able to view a schema and see each map that references it. I need more ways to find out which artifacts have dependencies on others so that I can better plan application upgrades or retirements.
- “Application” level permission controls. Right now, when our team adds someone to the “Operators” group, they have free reign over any application deployed in the environment. That makes me a tad nervous. Too easy to accidentally terminate someone else’s suspended messages, or see message content that they shouldn’t. I’d like the option to allow department-level administrators to own, manage and troubleshoot specific applications in the BizTalk environment.
- Web-based Administration Console. While it’s fairly simple to do a “Admin only” install of BizTalk on a desktop machine, I’d appreciate a web-based management console that let’s me perform a subset of standard tasks. Easier to provide access to multiple administrators (only if the isolated ownership point above is enacted), and if you wanted to get fancy, you’d AJAX the UI and provide near-real-time updates of running and suspended instances without a manual refresh.
- Better subscription analysis. It’s great that the Subscription Viewer is now part of the Admin Console, but I need more criteria to search for. For instance, I’d like to be able to search for any subscription built upon a particular message type. If I need to change a schema namespace, which subscriptions will it impact? Same with searching for subscriptions by port names, etc. Again it comes back to impact analysis of changes.
- Additional subscription operators. Right now, I can’t create a subscription based on a field NOT existing in the schema. I can only do “exists”. I’d also like subscriptions based on “contains” where I could route messages (without orchestrations) where a “customer ID” contains a particular substring.
- More health metrics in the Admin Console. Specifically, I would find it useful if there was a portion of the Administration Console where I would be notified if host throttling thresholds were approaching, if a particular application was backlogged, etc. I know that I can find out this information using performance counters, or MOM, but I’d like to have the Admin Console be more of a “one stop shop.”
Adapters
- Updated core adapters. It’d be great to refresh some of the core adapters with new capabilities. I’d like to see the FILE adapter support XPath-based file name tokens. If I want the output file name to contain a field from the message, it’d be much easier to manage this at the adapter level rather than introducing orchestrations or custom pipelines. For the SMTP adapter, it should be much easier to do dynamic addressing. To dynamically choose the “To:” address, I have to do an orchestration with a dynamic port. And instead of just setting the “To:” address, I also have to use the BRE or custom component to grab the SMTP Host, Subject, etc. Often, the only “dynamic” piece of the email is the address. Seems like lots of improvements are possible for the SQL adapter. I’d like an “after poll” process option (like the Oracle adapter), and support for querying tables/views instead of requiring a stored procedure (or updategram). Seems like the Oracle adapter has more features than the SQL Server one.
- More browsing, less typing. One of the top 5 improvements in BizTalk 2006 was the addition of the “browse” button in the FILE ports. Why am I still typing URLs in the SOAP/HTTP ports, or typing settings for the SharePoint adapter? Why can’t we browse more settings instead of relying on me to inevitably type the values incorrectly?
Development
- Refresh auto-generated schemas. I love that I can update a “web reference” in Visual Studio.NET with no problem, but I absolutely dread changes to auto-generated BizTalk schemas (SQL stored procedure, Siebel business object, etc) since I have to walk through the Generate Schemas wizard again even for a simple update to the data source. I’d love to right click on the Oracle database view XSD schema, and choose “refresh schema from source” and have the update automatically taken care of.
- Option to automatically GAC referenced assembly. I know that I could add post-build steps on my .NET component libraries which would GAC the component for me. But, how great would it be if the BizTalk project properties page had a choice to “GAC all referenced assemblies”?
- Orchestration unit test. I don’t know how you’d implement this, but even a simple test of an orchestration process involves a full deploy, build ports, etc. Sometimes I would like a quick process logic test without going through the whole deployment production.
- “Construct Blank Message” in orchestration. Seems that I often come across folks who use XmlDocument variables or maps to simply create a new, empty BizTalk orchestration message. For instance, I may want an empty message that I pass to the BRE, which in turn fills in all the fields I want. Or, I create an empty Oracle query schema, and use a distinguished field to actually set my query filter. I’d like a “construct blank message” which instantiates a message WITHOUT using a transform or “message1 = message2” assignment.
That’s all I’ve got for now. Thoughts? Any of those requests seem outlandish?
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