Blogs

Today is a great day to be a BizTalk Developer! Why? Microsoft has introduced .Net 4.0, Windows Application Server (Dublin), and Microsoft’s Modeling Platform (Oslo). These new technologies compliment the existing Connection System technologies. As you look though the various technologies one thing is consistent: Take the best things of BizTalk and allow others outside of BizTalk to leverage it! I’ve put together over an hour of first look videos to help show the new features of Microsoft’s latest...

Make sure you check out the video content on Oslo available on BizTalkGurus.com: First Look at Quadrant – Oslo’s Modeling Tool First Look at M – Oslo’s Modeling Language Oslo is the codename for Microsoft's Modeling Platform. The end goal of Oslo is to increase productivity by promoting the use of model-driven applications. Oslo is composed of three pieces: a Tool, a Language, and a Repository. In this blog post, I will share some features and screen shots of the tool...

  The latest edition of the BizTalk Hotrod magazine is now available.  This is a awesome 45+ page magazine with loads of great articles. Get the latest edition here .

Ready to take a look at some of the new features of BizTalk 2006 R2? I have put together a short 13 minute video walking through how simple it is to expose BizTalk Orchestrations as WCF Services and then consume them inside a Windows Application. This video show how to use the BasicHTTP Binding and the WCF Wizard. This is intended to give you a first look into some of the new features in BizTalk 2006 R2. Take a look at the video today! Available via live play or WMI download. Source code is also...

Today (on Tuesday November 6th) I have upgrade the blogs and forums of BizTalkGurus.com to the newest version of Community Server 2007. You may have noticed the site was down for about an hour during the upgrade and everyone will have to login again. Please post a comment here or send me an email if you have any problems with the upgrade. The only problem I seem to be having is I keep getting logged out every few minutes. If anyone else has this problem, let me know. All my forum and blog templates...

With the release of BizTalk Server 2013 on Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) we have a new way to license BizTalk Server.  We can now license BizTalk Standard and Enterprise on a pay per hour basis.  This opens up a wide range of opportunities for dealing with short lived and bursting scenarios. What does I bill using these pay per hour features look like?  See below.  I used 3 hours of both a Standard and Enterprise edition of BizTalk Server.  Using the pay...

I'm just putting the final touches on my demos for my session at the 2007 SOA and BPM Conference in Seattle.  My session is on Friday, November 2nd at 10 AM in the Cascade room.  Session details are below.  Hope to see you there!   Track : Solution Architecture Track Session Title : BizTalk Advanced Orchestration Concepts and Best Practices Session Level : 300 Session Abstract : Business processes are a required component in most Enterprise Integration solutions today. Business...

Biztalk 2006 introduces many new and exciting features. One of these new features is Recoverable Interchange Processing for inbound receive interchanges. First off, what is an Interchange? An interchange is simply an item received by Biztalk. In Biztalk terms, an interchange is typically used to define a message that contains several messages inside it. Some typical examples are batch flat files and Xml envelopes. A specific example of this is a flat file document that contains a Header and many...

The Convoy Deep Dive white paper and sample code is now available on MSDN. You can read the paper on-line and download the sample code here . For anyone who read the “beta” version of the paper, Scenario 2 went through a minor change. I now use an atomic scope to build the output message rather then a simple string concatenation. This eliminates messages collecting inside the message box in the “Delivered, not consumed” status. It seems that the status of a message is not...

NAcks or Negative Acknowledgments are small SOAP messages that exist in BizTalk when a messaging error occurs. This happens when adapters fail, pipelines fail, messages do not match subscriptions, ect. These messages can be subscribed to and a business process can be written to react to all of these messages or specific error codes. This sample Orchestration shows how simple it is to catch these messages. To subscribe to a NAck, just create a subscription to: BTS.AckType = NACK. It’s that easy...

MSBuild is the new build platform for Visual Studios. It allows great flexibility, customization (through creating custom Tasks), and integration with unit tests. While MSBuild doesn’t directly support building BizTalk solutions, tasks are available to call the DEVENV executable and Microsoft UK has released a set of custom tasks to support a wide verity of common BizTalk tasks (available on GotDotNet ). This provided an easy method for scripting automated or ad-hock BizTalk builds and deployments...

AppDev Training is offering a free CD Training Class ! They have many great courses to pick from including a new Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 course called “Exploring BizTalk Server 2006”. If you are new to BizTalk 2006, this looks like it would be an excellent opportunity to get 3 hours worth of free training. This CD covers the new features and functionally in BizTalk 2006. Some other titles available are: Exploring ASP.NET "Atlas" and Web 2.0 Exploring SQL Server 2005 It looks like...

I just wanted to help get the word out about the BizTalk User Group in Bangalore India. It was set up and ran by MVP Lakshmi Murthy It looks like she has a lot of great things planned including contests with prizes! Get more information at the BizTalk User Group India Forum .

You probably know about untyped messages inside an Orchestration (that is, messages treated as Xml Documents rather than typed schema). Wouldn’t it be nice to have an untyped web service to submit messages into BizTalk? How would this make life easier? You could have one web service to receive all your different message types. Then, use direct binding and content based routing to get your messages to the correct destination. This will not work for all scenarios. But, it can greatly increase...

Are you missing the feature of Application Pools that was available in BizTalk 2002? Need to limit your running Orchestrations? Well, I hope my BizTalk Design Competition submission will help you out. I took that concept and created a Message Broker – Process Controller solution that will allow the user to limit the number of running Orchestration instances. In addition, the Orchestration parameters can be changed on the fly without stopping the Process Controller. The Process Controller can...