February, 2005

Yesterday Microsoft released a BizTalk 2004 Adapter for MSMQ v2.0. This works with MSMQ 2.0 and 3.0. Here are the key features from the download site: The BizTalk 2004 Adapter for MSMQ provides support for sending and receiving messages using MSMQ 2.0 and 3.0, and takes advantage of the new features in MSMQ 3.0. Major features of the adapter include support for: • MSMQ 2.0 and 3.0 • Multi-threading option for faster performance • Guaranteed delivery when using transactional queues...

I guess these came out several days ago. I did not hear about it until now. Anyways, updated BizTalk 2004 Documentation is available here .

I have talked a lot in the past about Convoys. But, under the covers what really makes Convoy message processing different? What makes a Convoy a Convoy? To sum it all up into one sentence: Convoys require database level message-to-Orchestration correlation independent of any running Orchestration instances. Is this confusing? Yes. But trust me, more detailed information is coming soon on this topic. For now, I want to briefly go over the basic internals of how Convoys work in BizTalk Server 2004...

This is a cool feature of BizTalk 2004! It allows you to map many documents into one or map one document into many. In either case, your inputs will not equal your outputs. This type of mapping does require some up front planning and careful consideration. First off, this type of mapping is only allowed inside the Orchestration. Basically, what the mapper does is creates a kind of multi-part message for either the input, output, or both. The parts of the multi-part message are the different input...