Auckland Code Camp 2008 – Registration Now Open!

The 2008 installment of the Auckland Code Camp is set for 31 August 2008 (the day before TechEd). Registration is open!

Sign up now to learn all you need to know about WCF, .NET 3.5, Silverlight, and much more.

This year we will meet on 31 August 2008, the Sunday just before TechEd, at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in central Auckland.

It is a free event, including the presentations, lunch and coffee breaks. This year the event is sponsored by Datacom, Olympic Software, Intergen, and the Microsoft MVP programme.

Make sure you visit the official page to learn more about the event and register.

BizTalk BAM Portal 400 Bad Request

Ok, in the past few weeks I’ve been travelling a lot. One trip was amazing, my honeymoon, the other was very unexpected and sad, and after that there was a business trip for a new project.

Anyways, now that I am back and ready to blog again, I thought I’d talk about a peculiar issue I found about a month ago with the BAM Portal. All was working fine, and then suddenly BAM! It wasn’t (pun intended). Here is a printscreen of the portal page:

BAM Portal critical failure

Not a nice error to run into. Luckily this was still in QA. I had a look in the server’s event log, and found this error logged:

  (BAMPortal.navbar_ascx) Void OnPreRender(System.EventArgs):
System.Net.WebException: The request failed with HTTP status 400: Bad Request.
   at
System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.ReadResponse(SoapCl
ientMessage message, WebResponse response, Stream responseStream, Boolean asyncCall)
   at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.Invoke(String
methodName, Object[] parameters)
   at
Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.WebServices.ManagementService.BamManagementService
.GetViewSummaryForCurrentUser()
   at
Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.Portal.DataAccess.BamDefinition.BuildViewsCollecti
on()
   at
Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.Portal.DataAccess.BamDefinition.EnsureViewsCollect
ion()
   at Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.Portal.DataAccess.BamDefinition.get_Views()
   at BAMPortal.navbar_ascx.OnPreRender(EventArgs e)

 

I googled it, sure that there were tens of posts telling me what to do, but no luck there. So I started investigating, and eventually used bm.exe to get the configuration out of BAM. In a command prompt, browse to the Tracking folder under the usual BizTalk installation. Then run:

 

bm.exe get-config -FileName:bamconfig.xml

 

This extracts the BAM configuration and saves it in the specified file (bamconfig.xml in this case). On perusing the file I noticed the following global property:

 

<GlobalProperty Name=”BAMVRoot“>http://BTSVR1:80/BAM</GlobalProperty>

 

So what happened here was that the web site where the BAM portal is installed was changed to testintegration.clientname.co.nz and that is the URL we were using to browse to the portal. But after the change nobody bothered to tell BAM. I updated the global property in the XML file to:

<GlobalProperty Name=”BAMVRoot“>http://testintegration.clientname.co.nz:80/BAM</GlobalProperty>

 

 Then reimported the configuration file by running:

 

bm.exe update-config -FileName:bamconfig.xml

 

 And it all started working again. Hope this helps other poor souls.

Bora Bora

This is the view from our honeymoon hotel in Bora Bora, French Polynesia (Tahiti):