Blogs

Thanks to Packt Publishing, I am pleased to offer you the opportunity to win a copy of Richard Seroter’s book SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009 – a $60 value.  I will even cover the shipping costs, via book mail, to any place in the world the US Postal Service will deliver to.  Here is what you need to do in order to win: Simply let us know of a great BizTalk Tip or Trick using BizTalk 2006, BizTalk 2006 R2, or BizTalk 2009.  Tell us a little about it and why it is useful. ...

I have another copy of my book “Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform” to give away. The book is a $60 value and I will cover the shipping costs to the winner any place in the world as long as the US Postal Service ships there. Contest #2 – What is missing in BizTalk Server 2010? What feature, concept, UI update, or tooling would make BizTalk a stronger, more robust, simpler, or easier product to work with? As a special bonus, I was able to get the book signed...

For those of you who do not know, one of the features of BizTalkGurus.com is the aggregate blog feed .  This feed goes back over 8 years and has over 8,000 posts.  Since I started the BizTalk feed, I have expanded the aggregate feeds to include App Fabric and Windows Workflow. About once a year, I review Google to see if I am missing any BizTalk Blogs that should be included in the aggregate feed.  It is that time of year again but this time I would like some help. In doing so, I’ll...

It is amazing how time flies!  It seems like just yesterday my book on Applied Architecture Patterns hit the shelves, but that was almost a year and a half ago now. A few months ago, a new BizTalk patterns book written by fellow BizTalk MVP Dan Rosanova has been released.  It is called Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns published by Packet Publishing.  What separates this book from other BizTalk books is it covers both BizTalk Basics & Patterns and a detailed overview of a...

I was reading an interesting blog post today called Will Dublin Replace BizTalk? It got me thinking more about this and I wrote up the response below. I would love to hear other peoples comments and thoughts on this. I see a clear separation on when you would use BizTalk vs when you would use Dublin. I see a great story going forward with both technologies working together. I welcome comments and feedback on this. Comment on "Will Dublin Replace BizTalk?" blog post: "I like your article...

What is one of the biggest problems with having to set up BizTalk in a new Environment? Creating all the Hosts, Host Instances, and assigning the Adapters to these new hosts. This process has been made much simpler with the help of the BizTalk Host Setup Tool. This tool is fed by a configuration file to set up the Hosts, install Host Instances, and assign Adapters to those Hosts. This tool also has the ability to prompt for a user password and reset all the Adapters back to the default Host (this...

In the recent edition of The BizTalker Newsletter I featured the below article.  Read the article below or join the newsletter to have it delivered to your email.  I welcome and comments. feedback, or thoughts on this subject. Server AppFabric contains two core pieces – Hosting and Caching. Today, I’m going to focus on the Caching piece of AppFabric. AppFabric Caching is a new offering from Microsoft as part of the Server AppFabric collection of technologies for the Application Server role...

WCF support through the different WCF Adapters provided in BizTalk R2 is a powerful new feature. With the announcement of Oslo, working with the WCF Adapters now is even more critical to a BizTalk Developer. If you are like me, you do a majority of your BizTalk work on a Windows XP computer or laptop. This can cause some problems when working with the WCF Adapters. Lets take a look at what needs to be done in order to work with WCF and BizTalk on Windows XP. First, lets look at the core issue - lack...

Working with XPath inside Orchestrations is a powerful and simple feature of BizTalk 2004. The help guide does a good job describing the process (under Using XPath in Message Assignment). I have found that the XPath queries can only be done against a Message and the results can be set to a Message, XML Document or other orchestration variables. XPath queries can also be executed against untyped messages. That is, a Message that is of type System.Xml.XmlDocument. CRITICAL: BizTalk xpath can be used...

Recently the Windows Azure Storage API’s were updated to include the ability to do cross account, asynchronous blob transfers. This means it was no longer necessary to download the blob in order to upload it to a different Windows Azure account. You can read all about this here . Over the past few weeks I have been working with the Windows Azure Virtual Machine feature that is currently in preview mode. I talked in a past blog post and video about using the Gallery to create a BizTalk 2010...

This was a question (paraphrased) on the BizTalkGurus.com Forum: “How can I take email attachments and put them as is into a folder?” When using the POP3 Receive Adapter, you have the ability to receive multiple items as attachments and the adapter will handle them using MIME processing. You do not need a custom pipeline. When receiving a multi-attachment message, you have the ability to define one of the parts as the main message Body. If you leave the default (0), the email message...

Direct binding in Biztalk Server 2004 can be used to send messages from one Orchestration to another. It can also be used to send messages directly into the message box, but that is not the focus of this post. Direct binding is easily misunderstood, specifically Partner Port binding since can be somewhat confusing to set up. I will walk through the 4 simple steps to set up direct binding using partner ports. It is important to note direct binding still uses the publish and subscribe system in Biztalk...

Packt Publishing has given me a few copies of my book “Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform” to give away on BizTalkGurus.com. Over the next few weeks, I am going to have a few contests. The book is a $60 value and I will cover the shipping costs to the winner anyplace in the world as long as the US Postal Service ships there. Contest #1 – Below are the architectural patterns covered in our book. We started with a much larger list and cut it down to what we thought...

A few days ago BizTalk 2013 Beta was announced and released for download .  The plan is to make this available as a Windows Azure Virtual Machine Image just like the CTP but it has not yet been released.  Since the prebuilt image is not available, I wanted to try to manually install BizTalk Server 2013 Beta on a Windows Azure Virtual Machine. I did the same thing with the BizTalk 2010 R2 CTP without any issues. Below is a quick overview of BizTalk 2013 and my experience trying to get this...

With the release of BizTalk 2006 Beta just around the corner, why not get a head start by seeing how to call a Receive Pipeline from within an Orchestration. For starter, why would you want to call a Receive Pipeline from within an Orchestration? I had to struggle for a bit to come up with a good reason… I can find it useful in debatching Scenarios that require mapping prior to debatching or for debatching into smaller batches using a map. I could also find it useful when working with flat...