Hello,

I did recently a webcast about MBV for the UK SOA/BPM User Group (SBUG)

Link to the video is available here : http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2009/10/13/135448.aspx

I would like to thank Michael Stephenson for this web cast invitation which was a good opportunity for me to explain MBV goal and its usage and do some Q&A with participants !

JP

Several customers and MS engineers reported me recently some very long collect statements scenarios using version 10.15 and sometimes infinite ones.

1) Some bugs were indeed identified in some VBS queries which might create looping scenarios in some VBS query execution .
These bugs were so fixed.

2) A long collect statement can occur also when .VBS queries (belonging mainly to the “Server Info” query category) are running too long time.

MBV 10.15 enumerates indeed in some .VBS queries some registry keys or registry values, and when targeting several remote servers of the BizTalk group it can be sometimes long.

I decided so to implement a timeout mecanism to stop a VBS, .BAT, or .CMD query after 30 secs by default.
This timeout value can be changed of course in the MBV UI via the "VBS/BAT/CMD Query Timeout" Global Option.

3) When you have a long query situation or infinite one, please do the following :

-  Note in the status bar of MBV UI  the pending query (it will  be also logged in the Status log file)

-  Kill MBV (as stopping via the UI the collect statement during a query execution will NOT work,  I don’t want to kill my query execution thread)

-  Keep the generated status log file and send it to me later (it is precious for me to know what happened before MBV was killed)

-  Restart MBV and then uncheck the queries which seem to run too long or infinite and then start a new collect statement (usually these queries should belong to the “Server Info” category) to exclude them from the  collect statement

Current build 10.15.7777 available on this blog contain both the VBS queries fix and the VBS Query Timeout implementation. 

Sorry for these introduced regressions and continue to send me your feedbacks or possible bugs found

JP.

Hello,

I just made available version 10.15 of MBV  : http://blogs.technet.com/jpierauc/pages/msgboxviewer.aspx

This build fixes some bugs of version 10.14 of course but provides also lot of new queries & rules and use now some VBS queries like "MSDTC Setting" , "RPC Settings"', 'TCP Settings", etc...

Using VBS script with WMI calls in these queries allow to target correclty this time 64bits registries on 64 bits Servers.
As you probably now, a 32 bits tool like  MBV using .NET remote registry functions can target only the 32 bits version of registry on a 64 bit server (by design with .NET) , so until now MBV returned sometimes invalid MSDTC settings for example when targeting 64 bits servers.
Using WMI in VBS script can workaround this limitation specifying the type of provider to load (32 bits or 64 bits).

I added also some new queries and one interesting query I added is the "Artifacts per host" one which list all artifacts used by each host.
For our Support teams for example, it is indeed critical to see very quickly which host manage which type of artifacts.

I also identify now what we name COM+ or MSDTC "Rollup package" from the software layers found on each server. We have again some dependencies with COM+ and obviously MSDTC so it is is important to know which COM+ or MSDTC version is installed on each server before to decide to apply possible COM+/MSDTC hotfixes.

You will find the list of new features in this version here :  http://blogs.technet.com/jpierauc/pages/msgboxviewer.aspx

Feel free to report me your comments, suggestions, and of course the bug  you could find ;-)

Thanks

JP