Stop and start a BizTalk 2009 application programmatically? - biztalk

Is there a way to stop and start a BizTalk application programmatically?
Ideally something that can be run in a script or batch file and as simple as possible?
I've looked at WMI, but from what I read it isn't able to stop and start Applications? Is this true?
I've also looked at ExplorerOM, but does it work in 64-bit environments?

If your goal is to run it via script or batch file the PowerShell provider for BizTalk should be a good fit for you.

Related

Using Airflow to Run .bat file or PowerShell program located in remote Windows Box

Currently some of the jobs are running in different Windows VM's.
for eg.,
Task Scheduler to run
Powershell files
.bat files
python files.
Sql Agent jobs
To run SSIS packages
We are planning to use Airflow to trigger all these jobs to have better visibility and manage dependencies.
Our Airflow in Ubuntu.
I would like know if there is any way to trigger above mentioned jobs in Windows via Airflow.
Can I get some examples on how to achieve my objectives? Please suggest what packages/libraries/plugins/operators I can use.
Yes there is. I would start by looking into the winrm operator and hook that you find in under Microsoft in providers:
http://airflow.apache.org/docs/apache-airflow-providers-microsoft-winrm/stable/index.html
and maybe also:
https://github.com/diyan/pywinrm

Quartz.Net (2.2.3) Scheduling New Jobs

I am running the Quartz.Net server as a Windows service, like described in the documentation. I am trying to understand how I can create new jobs for Quartz to schedule, without the need to rebuild the Quaretz.net server application everytime.
I would like to be able to add new jobs from an exe, dll, or other options welcome. This way I can add jobs dynamically. From what I can tell it seems all jobs must be defined up front and built into the server. From there the user can pass parameters and enable triggers via XML file. I am using MS SQL Server instead of XML file for persistence layer.
My use case is I need to generate reports at particular times, but the users can create new reports after launch of my application. I am using Dev Express for my reporting (not sure if this matters).
Any guidance is very appreciated.
You should check out the work Tolis Bekiaris did on the eXpand Framework's JobScheduler. It's a module for DevExpress's XAF and Quartz.NET which should give you plenty of sample code, especially if you are already using XPO for your data.
You can get the source code here.
Or alternatively, it's on Github.
You'll find the job scheduler code in eXpand/Xpand/Xpand.ExpressApp.Modules/JobScheduler.

Deploying an ASP.NET web site to a remote VPS with Jenkins

I am just starting to get my head wrapped around continuous deployment with Jenkins, but I am running into some roadblocks and I haven't really found very many good, definitive resources on the topic in regards to ASP.NET applications.
I have set up a local build server than successfully pulls down code from a SVN repo, and builds it OK with MSBuild. This works well so far, but now I'd like to automate pushing this compiled code to a development server.
My problem is this - from what I gather based on what I read (which may be an incorrect assumption...) is that the staging server is typically within the same network as the build server, meaning you can share network resources, servers, etc.
In my case, I want to run the Jenkins server on a remote VPS, then deploy to other remote VPSes (so, essentially individual isolated machines communicating with each other).
I have seen alot of terms, but I am very new in my Sys Admin / DevOps type skills.
So, my question is this:
Is it even possible to, using Jenkins on a VPS, to then deploy to any particular server I choose? (I have full access to all of them, so if its a security thing, I can fix that... but they are not within the same network/domain)
What is the method to achieve this? I've seen xcopy, Web Deployment Packages (msdeploy), batch scripts, etc. mentioned, but not really a guidance behind what to use in what situations. Are any of these methods useful to achieve my goal?
Thanks for any help or guidance!
How is your Powershell? ;) You should check out psake.
psake is a build automation tool written in PowerShell. It avoids the
angle-bracket tax associated with executable XML by leveraging the
PowerShell syntax in your build scripts. psake has a syntax inspired
by rake (aka make in Ruby) and bake (aka make in Boo), but is easier
to script because it leverages your existent command-line knowledge.
psake is pronounced sake – as in Japanese rice wine. It does NOT rhyme
with make, bake, or rake.
You can deploy your files to the target server through SSH. Jenkins do support transfers through SSH. All you need to do is setting up a SSH server ex : CopSSH and a user account with admin permissions. and configuring the Jenkins to transfer through SSH.
Create host configurations in the main Jenkins configuration
Add an SSH Server
Add the public key to the remote server (the build server)
Click "Test Configuration"
Save
Configure a job to Publish Over SSH (Post Build Action)
Add Transfer Set.
Refer Publish Over SSH For More details

How to use a virtual machine with automated tests?

I am attempting to setup automated tests for our applications using a virtual machine environment.
What I would like to have is something like the following scenario:
Build server is automatically triggered to start an automated test for the application
A "build" script is then run which consist of:
Copy application files and a test script to a location accessible by the VM
Start the VM
In the VM, a special application looks in the shared folder and start the test script
The tests script do its job, results are output to shared folder
Test script ends
The special application then delete the test script
The special application somehow have the VM manager close the VM and revert to the previous snapshot
When the VM has exited, process the result and send to build server.
I am using TeamCity if that matters.
For virtual machines, we use VirtualBox but we are open to any other if needed.
Is there any applications/suite that would manage this scenario?
If there are none then I would then code it myself, should be easy but the only part I am not sure is the handling of the virtual machine.
What I need to be able to do is to have the VM close itself after the test and revert to a previous snapshot since I want it to be in a known state for the next test.
Any pointers?
I have a similar setup running and I chose to use Vagrant as its the same thing our developers where using for normalizing the development environment.
The initial state of the virtualmachine was scripted using puppet, but we didn't run the deployment scripts from scratch on each test, only once a day.
You could use puppet/chef for everything, but for all other operations on the VM, we would use Fabric scripts, as they were used for the real deployment too, and somehow fitted how we worked better. In sum the script would look something like the following:
vagrant up # fire up the vm, and run the puppet provisioning tool
fab vm run_test # run tests on vm
fab local process_result # process results on local shared folder
vagrant destroy # destroy the vm
The advantage is that your developers can also use vagrant to mimic your production environment without having to take care of that themselves (i.e. changes to your database settings get synced to all your developers vm's wherever they are) and the same scripts can be used in production too.
VirtualBox does have a COM API. I have no experience with it, but it may be possible to use that. One option would be to have TeamCity fire off a script to do this. I'd suggest starting with NAnt (supported natively by TeamCity) and possibly executing PowerShell if necessary.
Though I don't have any experience with either, I happen to have heard of a couple applications in this space recently:
http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/05/virtual_machine_test_harness
http://www.automatedqa.com/techpapers/testcomplete/automated-testing-in-virtual-labs/

Is there a good way to create a recurring import for an ASP.NET site?

The site I'm working on is running Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 8 (2000?), and ASP.NET 3.5.
I need to have some sort of script or application run to import data from an FTP'd text file, into the database. There is already a site running on the machine, that uses the current database. Can I use a scheduled task to reliably kick off some sort of .aspx page that will import the data? Or is there a better approach?
What about making sure that no one else can access the page that runs the import? I don't want random users running the import!
Thanks in advance!
P.S. some processing needs to occur on the data before its inserted. i.e. lookups, conditionals, etc, so the DB tools aren't robust enough (I think). I hate DTS, and I SSIS is not available in this version I think.
If you want to have a C# App handle your import I would suggest a windows application (exe) w/o a form (better than a console app because it does not pop up any UI whenever it runs). Have it run every so often (every minute) by a scheduled task.
Why would you use ASP.NET? Depending on the complexity of the job you could either load it directly to the database (BULK LOAD) or use DTS (SQL Server 2000) or SSIS (SQL Server 2005/2008) if more complex processing is needed.
DTS and stored procedures in a job.
BCP and stored procedures in a job.
You say you need to do alot of lookups and conversions? SQL is good at that - and good at doing it fast. It can seem a little intimidating at first, but it's not hard.
run a BULK INSERT or bcp to import the data instead, see here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa173839(SQL.80).aspx
I'll echo other people here - you don't want to have a scheduled task hit a web page. SQL Server provides some good data import options, or you could just write a simple windows program and run it as a scheduled task.
Another option would be to write a windows service that watches your FTP directory and does the import.
As others have said, probably a separate console application (triggered by a scheduled task) or a windows service would be the best option for this scenario.
On the other hand, if you already have all the required functionality available in the web app running on the server, then you could probably set up a scheduled task, that starts a script (VBscript, JScript), which in turn calls a page of the web app.
To have some sort of security (e.g. preventing that any user can call that page), you could add some code to the page, that checks if the page was called with http://localhost. This would at least prevent the page from being called from a remote client.

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