Provider Certification Tool Question

Greg,

1) In the Device Information, what DeviceSimulator is supposed to be used? There is one in the bin folder (DeviceSimulator.exe), but is that one specific for the Acme sample provider? Does each provider have to write their own DeviceSimulator in order to pass the tests?

A: Devicesimulator.exe is the one which is supposed to be used here and it is not specific to acme provider. You can use the classes in the Device Simulator Interface to develop device simulators for various devices and you can write translators to simulate devices in addition to the basic framework that contains the common device functionality. For more on this topic please go through Microsoft BizTalk RFID Documentation > RFID Device Providers > Testing Providers> Developing Device Simulators by Using the Device Simulator Framework section in %rfidinstalldir%\Documentation\BizTalkRFID.chm

2) One of the tests that failed is the following: Simulated->Reader->Mandatory->"Add Device in Online Mode". In the Device Information, I set the IP Address and the Port for my device. The "Add Device in Online Mode" uses those settings to talk to my device, then closes the connection and then tries to open another connection using a different Port. Is this the intended behavior? I did not see any <applyPropertyProfile> commands going to the Provider. I thought that was the way to change the Port.

A: This test would try to add a device(with the transport setting that you have specified), create and start a process with this device hard linked to it. Then it will create another new device (with incremented port), simulate it and try to add to add the same to BiztalkRfid service.

Again, in %rfidinstalldir%\Documentation\BizTalkRFID.chm, you can find overview of manual and automatic testing of device providers, and how to develop a device simulator using Device Simulator Framework in section Microsoft BizTalk RFID Documentation > RFID Device Providers > Testing Providers and Microsoft BizTalk RFID Documentation > RFID Device Providers > Testing Providers > Testing Providers Using the Provider Certification Tool talks about the usage of the PCT.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,

Keerthi.

KeerthiKiran[MSFT] at 2007-9-13 >

Greg,

RFIDINSTALLDIR is an environment variable which is set to 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk RFID\'. So, by using %RFIDINSTALLDIR% we can refer to this path and the relative files.

I was not able to reproduce this error even after specifying a non-existing config file. So, the config file contents may have some invalid characters. Try opening both SimulatorConfig.xml and the corresponding NotificationConfig.xml in iExplore to check whether the XML contains any invalid characters or not. You can refer to the Acme sample to see the contents of these config files which are available at the following location: 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk RFID\Samples\Device Service Provider\Acme\AcmeEndToEnd\Simulator'.

The very first statement that comes when the simulator is started is: '1|Starting device simulator web service'. Were you able to see that? If not then may be the command line itself has some invalid characters in it. Also try launching the DeviceSimulator.exe directly from the folder.

--Ashish

Ashish at 2007-9-13 >