We recently upgraded our database server but in doing so, we broke all our NServiceBus-based Windows Services. Through the logs we noticed that the NServiceBus message handlers weren’t able to open database connections to our new SQL Server instance, instead throwing the following exception:

System.Transactions.TransactionException: The partner transaction manager has disabled its support for remote/network transactions. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8004D025) ---> System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException: The partner transaction manager has disabled its support for remote/network transactions. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8004D025)

   at System.Transactions.Oletx.ITransactionShim.Export(UInt32 whereaboutsSize, Byte[] whereabouts, Int32& cookieIndex, UInt32& cookieSize, CoTaskMemHandle& cookieBuffer)

   at System.Transactions.TransactionInterop.GetExportCookie(Transaction transaction, Byte[] whereabouts)

Turns out Microsoft has an excellent step-by-step tutorial on how to fix this issue. The exception was thrown because the database server didn’t have the network DTC access enabled, but after following the steps from the guide and restarting the server, the problem went away.

Microsoft TechNet: Enable Network DTC Access

Here’s the first NServiceBus Weekly of the 2011, containing links to interesting tutorials and community material from the last couple of months. Hope you enjoy.

Also note: More random release frequency for the new editions.

News

• NServiceBus 2.5 is now available.- Also, read the original announcement.
• NServiceBus and BizSpark – Excellent news from the Udi for those who are in the Microsoft’s BizSpark program. In his own words: “if you're company is in BizSpark, in addition to all the software
  you're getting for free from Microsoft, I'm happy to offer you a free
  NServiceBus Foundation license or $1500 off a Standard license. That includes support.”

Tutorials and Articles

• Debugging into NServiceBus so you can solve your own questions- Good introduction by David Craft on how to create and use the PDB-files from the NServiceBus source code. These help you to debug the inner details of NServiceBus.
• VDUNY Slidedeck: Introduction to NServiceBus – Adam Fyles, one of the most active NServiceBus persons on the net, gave an “Introduction to NServiceBus” presentation at the Visual Developers of Upstate New York. The slides used in the presentation are available from the SlideShare.
• NServiceBus 3.0: Fault management – It seems that the future version of NServiceBus will bring us many new tools for handling the situations where a message faults. Read on to find the details from Adam’s blog.
• Building an NServiceBus Timeout Manager using Quartz- Good write-up by  Stuart Cullinan on how he completely redesigned the NServiceBus’ timeout manager. His code has also been added to NServiceBus Contrib.

Community

• NServiceBus Contrib – NServiceBus Contrib has already come a long way in couple months. The contrib includes a Json serializer and RavenDB based saga persister, just to name a few.
• NServiceBus, NHibernate, and GuidComb – Interesting architectural question from the StackOverfow, with couple good answers.
• NServiceBus Publish() vs. Send() in website context – This question gets asked quite often and now the question was posted on the StackOverflow. Read on to find David Boike’s exhaustive take on the subject.
• Nservice bus - replying to message after publish – Adam has some problems when trying to Return back to the client but he got his question answered and the problem was sorted out.
• How to renew subscriptions after IISRESET?- Fixing ASP.NET applications with iisreset seems to be somewhat of an industry standard. But what should be taken on consideration if your web app relies on NServiceBus? Read on to find out more.

Have a nice new year!

Got an interesting NServiceBus related link? Did I miss something? Link not working? Please, send mail or contact @MikaelKoskinen.

Unfortunately, as most of you have probably noticed, I have failed miserably to to keep-up with the weekly release rate of NServiceBus Weekly. Because of this, I’m giving up the planned weekly release schedule but still still plan to publish new editions quite frequently. It’s my hope that I also find time to write couple NServiceBus tutorials in the near future.

And here’s one big NServiceBus related news item: NServiceBus 2.5 has been released (some time ago) and it has a homepage with a new design.

Finally got my blog problems sorted out and hopefully you enjoy this week’s NServiceBus Weekly.

News

• Project Changes: It seems that the Kristian Kristensen’s colored log4net logging has made its way into NServiceBus. This is an excellent small improvement to the product.

Tutorials and Articles

• Sydney’s ALT.NET Group – November Meeting – Recorder for your pleasure – Udi Dahan attended the Sydney’s ALT.NET user group meeting and the meeting was recorded. The video includes some discussion about the NServiceBus.
• Sydney Alt.NET with Udi Dahan and NServiceBus Commercial Support – Philip Haydon summarizes the new commercial support for NServiceBus quite nicely.

Community

• New Series Announcement: NServiceBus 3.0 – After finishing his “Getting Started” guide, Adam Fyles’ is planning to start writing about the new features in NServiceBus 3.0. Make sure to follow his posts to get all the details about the upcoming release.
• NServiceBus design help (Initializing a service instance with messages) – Here’s an interesting question asked by Brian. Is this something NServiceBus should be able to handle or is there a problem with his architecture? Read on the get all the details.
• nServiceBus deployment approach on a single machine – Sean Kearon asks for some clarification about deploying NServiceBus on a single machine.
• Windows Service – Interested in running NServiceBus subscriber as a Windows service? NServiceBus generic host has this feature built-in. The answers to this question contain all the required info on how the get things running.
• Shutting down a worker node – Roy has an interesting real world architectural question about the NServiceBus distributor and its worker nodes.

Have a nice week!

Got an interesting NServiceBus related link? Did I miss something? Link not working? Please, send mail or contact @MikaelKoskinen.

It has been long time coming but here it is: The 11th edition of the NServiceBus Weekly. Since the last edition the NServiceBus project has changed quite dramatically: It’s now hosted on a different source control service.

News

• NServiceBus’ source code has moved to GitHub! This is a change I personally like very much, excellent news!
• Project Changes – As usual, the NServiceBus team has brought us a great deal of new commits. For example, there has been changes to the extensibility of configuration sources. Click the link to find out more information.

Tutorials and Articles

• Getting Started with NServiceBus Part 9: Horizontal Scaling with the Distributor – Adam Fyles continues his great series of NServiceBus related tutorials. This time he takes a closer look to the NServiceBus distributor.
• Getting Colors in the log4net output from NServiceBus – Kristian Kristensen has posted a detailed tutorial on how to get colored output from log4net when using NServiceBus.
• NServiceBus: w3wp.exe Processes Crashing- If you’re having problems using NServiceBus in a web application this post by Jonathan Oliver may help you.

Community

• NServiceBus: Message level encryption – Interested in encrypting the NServiceBus messages and don’t want to use the WireEncryptedString? Read on to find out the alternatives.
• NServiceBus: GridInterceptingMessageHandler – Ever wondered what is “GridInterceptingMessageHandler”? Adam Fyles offers you the answer.
• NServiceBus appropriate for load distribution of periodic tasks – Udi answers to jlew’s question about using NServiceBus as a scheduled background worker.
• NServiceBus-Contrib Json serializer – It seems that Json serializer has been added to the contrib project of NServiceBus. I haven’t personally tried the new serializer but if you have, please let me know how it works.

Thanks for reading and please let me know if I missed something. This time we had more timeline to cover so it’s more possible than before that some interesting articles or news has slipped under the radar.

Got an interesting NServiceBus related link? Did I miss something? Link not working? Please, send mail or contact @MikaelKoskinen.