Powershell provider for BizTalk


During the last months I’ve become a big fan of Powershell. It is a great shell which allows you to do things in a very flexible manner. When it comes to BizTalk administration tasks however most of the time you end up writing scripts that use WMI to do things.

I would be great if BizTalk developers or administrators:

  • just could walk through the biztalk artifacts in the same way we do with file folders.
  • have a (rich) set of powershell cmdlets aimed at BizTalk.

In other words we need a: Powershell provider for BizTalk. Searching the internet resulted in nothing. I found one initiative but that did not seem to have started and there were also no downloadable bits.

Anyway I decided to code a BizTalk provider myself. I have copied the artifact hierarchy tree used in the BizTalk Administration Console as much as possible (see screenshots below). The provider also supports tab completion which makes it very easy to navigate through the BizTalk artifacts.

The screenshot below contains an example of a BizTalk cmdlet to stop a specific host.

Although I’ve been very, very busy with this in the last couple of weeks there is still a lot of work to be done. So why am I telling you about this when there are no downloadable bits yet. There are two reasons:

  • I hope there are BizTalkers out there that use Powershell and want to test my provider eventually. (If so drop a comment or e-mail).
  • I want to make a list of first release cmdlets that should be included. (Suggestions? Let me know!)

This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 at 12:07 pm and is filed under BizTalk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “Powershell provider for BizTalk”

  1. Anthony Janse Says:
    6 November 2008 at 10:11 pm | Reply

    Hallo Randal,

    Van Peter kreeg ik de link naar jouw blog.
    Graag maak ik kennis met de resultaten van jouw powershell werk. Zelf heb ik er wel aan willen beginnen, maar ben er (nog) niet aan toe gekomen. Komt jouw werk als free downloadable source beschikbaar?
    Thuis alles goed en iedereen gezond? Ik hoop het!
    gelukkig ben ik zelf weer met goede moed en ook veel plezier aan het werk!

    Met vriendelijke groeten,
    Anthony.

  2. Michael Says:
    3 February 2009 at 9:52 pm | Reply

    Hi Randal,

    This is a great idea! Before starting to roll my own PoSH scripts, I was poking around for some ways to manage BT apps, and this would have fit the bill. I would love to test this when you have enough code ready to release a version.

    Michael

    • Randal van Splunteren Says:
      4 February 2009 at 9:35 am | Reply

      Hi Micheal,

      Thanks for your comment. There is already a downloadable version of the PowerShell Provider for BizTalk here. From a functionality perspective it is a little limited. I’m working on the next version which will offer a lot more to manage BizTalk applications.

      Regards,

      Randal

  3. Cedric Says:
    21 April 2009 at 9:11 pm | Reply

    Hello Randal,
    I dont know the current condition of your project. But, I have solved the mystery of accessing a BizTalk Group with code. If you are interested, please drop me a line and I will share the code with you.

    Cedric

    • Randal van Splunteren Says:
      22 April 2009 at 11:02 am | Reply

      Thanks for your comment.

      I’m not sure what you mean by accessing a BizTalk Group with code. I mean one of the main functions of the BizTalk group is to access artifacts of a BizTalk group. So I think I already have to code. Can you elaborate a little more on what your code actually does? Thanks.

      • Cedric Says:
        18 May 2009 at 9:02 pm | Reply

        What I mean by access a BizTalk Group. The majority of the tools that I have seen on the internet, can c only access a single instance BizTalk group. I currently have five servers in a BizTalk Group and the code that I have allows you to access any of those servers by querying the management database.But, I would love to see how you created your provider and maybe I can offer a few tidbits of code to help you enhance it. I just finished writing some commandlets to create hosts, hosts instances and a few other artifacts.

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