September, 2004

I have talked in the past about NACKs . These are great little messages that allow you to receive the status of your sent messages inside your Orchestration. For more information on NACKs, please see my earlier post and sample. The problem I want to point out here occurs if you want to map on the Send Port and have Delivery Notification set to Transmitted inside the Orchestration. I have found that everything works great as long as your map is successful. ACKs and NACKs are returned as expected....

Have you ever wanted to know the Instance ID of an Orchestration in BizTalk 2004 at run time? Just add this line of code inside on Expression Shape to return the Instance ID of your running Orchestration. OrchestrationInstanceID is defined as a String variable. OrchestrationInstanceID = System.Convert.ToString(Microsoft.XLANGs.Core.Service.RootService.InstanceId); What could this be used for? In the past, I have retuned this as a return parameter when I had an Orchestration exposed as a web service...

This is follow up on a post back in August on Untyped Messages . This also combines information from another post of mine on Promoted Properties . Ok, so what is the big deal then? Well, I took my untyped message sample and updated it to use MessageContextProprertyBase properties. This eliminates the need to cast the message into a specific type to get access to promoted properties. This greatly reduces the work inside the Orchestration and greatly increases your flexibility! What exactly are these...

Have you wanted to know what exactly BizTalk Server 2004 is doing at a giving instance? How many Orchestrations are about to Dehydrate? How about how many persistence points inside your Orchestration? Answers to these questions are easily available through BizTalk Performance Counters. Aside on Persistence Points: Persistence Points are key when designing optimized Orchestrations. A Persistence Point is any time the Orchestration saves its current state back to the message box. The less Persistence...

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...