How to create a custom image in DevTest labs from a stand-alone VM in Azure?

DevTest labs in Azure is a beast of its own. VMs in the Microsoft cloud are the fundament of the computing capability, yet they are somehow treated differently when under the DevTest labs hood. And there are perhaps about a zillion (good) reasons to be like that. Yet imagine a situation where you have a stand alone VM that is specked with loads of good stuff and you just do not want to go through all that process of building it from scratch on top of a base image in a DevTest labs machine. In fact you want all the juice available right in the lab, in a single click of a button please!

And this is ufortunately not supported in an easy and lean manner through using Portal,PowerShell or CLI compared to many other offerings in Azure. All the articles about VMs and DevTest labs talk about either stand alone or as part of a lab - as if they are never to be mixed together, a sort of some digital cloud anatema if you wish! Yet both VM types are based on the very same technology. So is it really that impossible to move a stand alone VM under a DevTest lab?

The answer is no, it is far from impossible, though it is a bit more demanding. If one follows the documentation slavishly one will unfortunately get nowhere with such a task. However if one starts to connect the few vague red dots it suddenly becomes apparent that it is actually doable and with all the available tooling indeed.

What I am about to explain below is a way to create a custom DevTest lab image from an existing stand alone VM with a single disk. I personally think that there is no point of moving a single image to a DevTest lab as there is little upside of all this. If that is the case, you'd better stick to the stand alone VM. With a custom lab image you have the ability to quickly provision multiple VMs from the same source taking all the management benefits of what DevTest labs can pull out of its sleeves.
As for the case with data disks I will explore this in a later post.

Here is the instruction. But before we set off one important prerequisite - all the resources involved below are within the same subscription!

1. First follow the isntructions on generalizing the VM as discribed here. If you do it with CLI/PowerShell just make sure you do not run the last commands for creating a new image as per the examples in the article. If you do so you will end up with an image outside the DevTest lab premises.
2. Once this is done the VM will be stopped, dealocated and marked as generalized. Now here is where the trick comes - you need to copy the VMs disk underlying VHD to the default storage account of the DevTest lab. That makes sense, right? Sure! But where is the path to the VHD? Properties of the VM you may say? Or the ones of the OS disk perhaps? Sorry Mack, these goodies are long gone! The VHD path is well hidden primarily, I reckon, due to security reasons. Which is a good thing for everybody, right? So how do we get hold of the VHD then you may ask? There is an option in the stand alone VMs disk blade for downloading the VHD. Select this option and you will be presented with a text field and a Generate link button:
   
   
   
   
   Please set the value for export time validity to a reasonably high value. Default is 3600 secs which is 1 hour. I suggest you roughly estimate 100GB/Hour and then calculate based on the disk's size. Add some 10-15 mins (600-900 secs) as a buffer too. Once the calculated time value has been keyed in click on the Generate URL button. This will render the link in the large grayed out field on the top of the view as show below: 
   
   
   
   
   Copy the URL.
3. Now it is time to figure out the default storage account for your dev test lab. This one is pretty well hidden too and it is nowhere to be found in the portal. Here comes in hand our friend Azure CLI. Open the console in the portal and type the following command:
   
   

   az
   lab get --name '<your lab name>' -g '<your resource group name>'
   --query 'defaultStorageAccount'

   
   
   This command will spit out the resource Id path to the default storage account of your DevTest lab. Look at the last part of this URI and you will see what the name of the storage account is.
4. Navigate to the storage account from within the portal, or through CLI if you prefer and note down 2 things for it:
• The URL to the account
• One of the access keys from the properties view in the storage account blade.


You will need those in the next step. You may also create a container where you would like to store your image VHD file. I think by default there is created an uploads container upon DevTest lab creation so you can simply use that one.

5. Now all is set up and we can start the data copy process. For this we shall be using the Azure CLI in the portal again. Type the following command:



azcopy
--source '<the download disk link from step 2>' --destination '<the
link to the DevTest lab storage account blob container/yourimagename.vhd>'
--dest-key '<the key for accessing the storage account>'



Note the single quotes - they are required, especially for the first link as it has few & chars which renders the command useless when you hit Enter if not wrapped in quotes. Replace the yourimagename in the last part above with whatever name you fancy.
6. Well thats all it takes! Once the VHD file is uploaded to the DevTest labs container you simply follow the instructions on creating a custom lab image from a generalized VHD file that can be found here
7. And finally - once the image is created the last thing that remains is to finally spin a VM instance or 2 from that Image. Detailed description to be found here


Obviously for the last 2 steps above you can use Azure CLI instead.

New features in TransMock 1.4

In the latest version 1.4 of TransMock there have been introduced several new features that will come in handy for creating even more useful tests.

The most important enhancements are:

• new message based abstraction for communicating with the mock adapter
• the ability to dynamically set the response in a MockRequestResponseStep
• the ability to promote properties on a per-message base when sending messages to BizTalk
• the ability to validate promoted properties in messages received from BizTalk

The MockMessage type

The new MockMessage class is the new way a message is conveyed to and from the mock adapter. The developer is generally abstracted from its usage directly as the Mock* BizUnit steps take care of the details. However this class will be directly used during validation in receive steps. It comes with several handy properties that will ease the validation logic. These are:

    BodyString - the message body as a string

    BodyStringBase64 - the message body as a base64 encoded string

    BodyStream - the message body as a raw byte stream.

    Encoding - the actual encoding of the message

The LambdaValidationStep has beed equipped with a new callback property called MessageValidationCallback. This is intended to be used for assigning to it validation methods which accept a MockMessage instance which will be validated against.

For example validating a message which has XML contents is performed as shown below:

...
var receiveValidationStep = new LambdaValidationStep(){
    MessageValidationCallback = (message) => ValidateMessage(message)
}

receiveStep.SubSteps.Add(receiveValidationStep);
...
private bool ValidateMessage(MockMessage message){
...
    var xMessage = XDocument.Parse(message.BodyStream);
    // Now it is up to the implementer to perform the validation logic on the XDocument
    // object representing the message contents
...
}

Dynamically setting the response

This feature gives a developer the ability to set the response content in a MockRequestResponseStep instance dynamically. This comes in handy in a number of scenarios but is especially useful in a de-batch schenario where one step instance handles multiple requests and it is desirable to serve different responses for the different requests. Until now this was not possible. This is achieved in a really convenient way by introducing a new callback property to the MockRequestResponseStep class called ResponseSelector. This property takes a pointer to a method with 2 parameters - a MockMessage instance (new type from this version) and an integer representing the index of the request in a de-batch scenario. The method should return a string representing the path to the file where the contents of the response is to be taken from. This gives complete freedom to the developer to decide in which way a particular response shell be chosen. Two typical scenarios here are:

• index based response - the file path for the response is chosen based on the index of the request message
• content based response - the request message contents is inspected and based on a particular rule against certain value/s the desired response is returned

Here is an example of the index based response selector:

...
[DeploymentItem(@"TestData\OddResponse.xml")]
[DeploymentItem(@"TestData\EvenResponse.xml")]
public void MyTest()
{
    var reqRespStep = new MockRequestResponseStep(){
        ...
        DebatchCount = 5,
        ResponseSelector = (mockMessage, index) =>
            SelectEvenOddResponse(mockMessage, index)
    };
    ...
}
...
private string SelectEvenOddResponse(MockMessage mockMessage, int index)
{
    if(index % 2 == 0)
        return "EvenResponse.xml";]
    else
        return "OddResponse.xml";
}
...

As one can see above the snippet implements a response selector that returns path to the OddResponse.xml file when the index is an odd number and EvenResponse.xml for the even indexes. The file name is enough here as it is specified as a DeploymentItem for the test method and will resolve correctly during test execution.

Promoting/Validating properties

Here we are talking not only about adapter properties, but any context property that is recognizable by BizTalk server!

How this can be of help to you and your test cases one may ask? First of all one will be able to mimic more precisely the behaviour of the real adapters that are used in your integrations. For instance a WebHttp adapter is a very good example where it allows you to promote custom properties in the message context when a GET request is received in a RESTful receive location. Or to demote such properties in a send port and assign them to designated parts of the path and query in the URL. 

Until now one had to do some tricks in order to achieve this sort of behaviour. For example I have usually ended up in creating a new message schema with its elements mapped to the various custom properties that shall be promoted. But this is not enough - a new receive location with the XmlReceive pipeline was also required as the solution did not have the need to parse the incoming request body as all the services were GET ones. As you can see this is not a good practice as there are suddenly introduced new artifacts only for the purpose of testing. This definitely helped me testing the solution thoroughly and as a result no errors were detected down the life cycle path, but still those artifacts are part of that solution and get deployed to all the environments.

In other circumstances you would perhaps need to have a specific adapter or system property promoted in your message context in order for your solution to work as expected. The new feature allows you to promote more than 200+ such context properties in a very convenient way.

The promotion itself is performed in a very simple way - in the 2 mock send step types MockSendStep and MockSolicitResponseStep has been introduced a new property called Properties. It is of type dictionary with a string key and string value. The key identifies the property to be promoted in the context of the message once received in BizTalk through the mock adapter.

Promoting custom properties

For promoting custom properties the syntax of the key is following the standard BizTalk notation for a promoted property - <namespace>#<property name>. It is important to mention here that the assembly containing the property schema with the properties promoted this way has to be properly deployed as part of the solution being tested. Otherwise nothing will be promoted to the message context. Example:

var sendStep = new MockSendStep {
...
Properties.Add("http://example.com/customprops#MyProp", "SomeValue"),
...
}

Promoting adapter and system properties

Promoting properties of other adapters or BizTalk system properties is performed the same way as above with the only difference being the syntax for the key. For convenience and to avoid lots of typing there has been introduced a namespace prefix approach for identifying the desired property to be promoted. The syntax is following the dot notation - [namespace prefix].[property name]. For instance promoting the MQSeries adapter property MQMD_MsgSeqNumber would look as follows:

var sendStep = MockSendStep {
...
Properties.Add("MQSeries.MQMD_MsgSeqNumber, "10"),
...
};

Links to the complete list of adapter and system properties that are supported can be found at the end of this post. Note that this list is the same for all the different BizTalk versions from 2010 and up and is based on the latest version of BizTalk - 2016. This means that certain properties wont be available for lower versions. This will not cause any trouble for your tests - if a property hasn't been located it simply won't be promoted to the message context and the processing will continue as intended.

Validating promoted properties in received messages

This is the other new addition to TransMock - when messages are received in the MockReceive and MockRequestResponse steps it is now possible to inspect both their content and their context properties. This is achieved in a bit different way compared to the property promotion technique. There is no new Properties dictionary property introduced to the steps. Instead the LambdaValidationStep has been extended with a new validation method signature that receives a parameter of type MockMessage. This is the only supported way of validating both content and context of a message received from the mock adapter. The existing validation method signature in LambdaValidationStep  expecting a Stream is still fully supported so no breaking change there. However it is strongly recommended to move over to the new signature as it brings much more value to the table.

Here is an example of how the validation will be performed:

...
var receiveStep = new MockRequestResponseStep()
{
...
};

var receiveValidationStep = new LambdaValidationStep(){
    MessageValidation = (message) => ValidateMessage(message)
};

receiveStep.SubSteps.Add(receiveValidationStep);
...

private bool ValidateMessage(MockMessage message)
{
    Assert.IsTrue(message.Properties.Count > 0, "No context properties found in message");
    // Validating custom property
    Assert.AreEqual("101", "http://www.example.com/custprops#UserId",
        "UserId property had wrong value");
    // Validating system property
    Assert.Operation("GetUserById", "BTS.Operation", "Operation property not as expected");
}
...

As seen above there is shown validation of 2 different properties - custom and system one. They follow the exact same naming convention as when promoting properties on inbound messages. Custom properties use the # convention, while system properties use the . convention with namepsace prefix.

System and adapter property reference

Here is the list of links to the reference of the various adapter and system properties that can be promoted in inbound messages or validation in outbound messages:

AppStream - app stream system properties

BTS - biztalk system properties

EDI - EDI properties

EDIV2 - EDI V2 properties

EDIAS2 - AS2 properties

FILE - file adapter properties

FTP - FTP adapter properties

HTTP - HTTP adapter properties

MIME - MIME properties

MQSeries - MQSeries adapter properties

MSMQ - MSMQ adapter properties

MSMQT - MSMQ Transactional adapter properties

POP3 - POP3 adapter properties

ServiceBus - Azure ServiceBus adapter properties

SFTP - SFTP adapter properties

SMTP - SMTP adapter properties

SOAP - SOAP adapter properties

SQL - SQL adapter properties

WCF - WCF adapter properties

WSS - Windows Sharepoint Services adapter properties

TransMock v1.3 released!

Version 1.3 of TransMock is out!

The major enhancements to this version are:

1. Support for BizTalk Server 2016 - finally the latest version of BizTalk server is supported! No breaking changes to the code, so all the previously supported versions of BizTalk server are still on. 

2. Distribution through Nuget - now it is even easier to start using TransMock directly from within Visual Studio! No additional installers! The distribution of the framework consists of 3 Nuget packages:

    - TransMock.Adapter - contains the mock adapter assemblies. Usually no need to install it directly as it is referred by the TransMock.Framework package and is installed automatically by it. However, if desired it can be installed stand alone;

    - TransMock.Framework - contains the framework assemblies, BTDF extension targets and refers to TransMock.Adapter as well as BizUnit.Core and BizUnit.TestSteps packages (BizUnit v5.0). By simply adding this package to your test projects you add all the required libraries to be able to quickly start authoring high quality integration tests;
    - TransMock.TestUtils - contains a single assembly that is used in conjunction with testing of integration flows utilizing dynamic send ports. This package is to be installed to your orchestration projects from which the dynamic send ports are used.

One thing that is eased with the Nuget distribution is the setup of the framework on the build server. Now all the dependencies are in a folder relative to the solution's root, so when the tests are executed on a build server they will simply work. Even the BTDF extension targets file is placed there so that the reference from the btdfproj file during deployment prior to the test execution would never break.

There is however a requirement to run the nuget package restore on the build server in the context of an administrator account. This is due to the fact that during installation the package GACs the adapter assemblies, as it is required with any other BizTalk assemblies. Otherwise the tests won't work on the build server as the mock adapter would never be properly installed.

I mentioned about no breaking code changes above, but bear in mind that from this version on there is added support for the new BizUnit v5.0. This means that some might experience that existing tests would still break and wont compile. Well look at this as just the right time to migrate your tests to the new BizUnit version. From personal experience this process is pretty painless and with the cool refactoring features in Visual Studio this task would be no brainer to most of you!

And finally, but not least, the project has moved to GitHub as codeplex is being decomissioned.

So hopefully many will find this version more user friendly and easy to use. In case of any issues please log those at the project's GitHub page. 

Enjoy!