April, 2005

Congratulations to everyone who is going to attend TechEd 2005 in Orlando, FL – since it is now sold out. I just wanted to point out a few exciting instructor led labs that I will be leading. If you like my blog content, chances are you will like these labs. These labs will give you a chance to walk through step-by-step the topics listed below. I will also be available to answer questions. Using InfoPath SP1 and SharePoint 2003 to Design an Effective Tracking System for BizTalk Server 2004...

Message context is a critical part of message routing and processing inside BizTalk Server 2004. How this context is handled during mapping is different depending on the location of the mapping. The context is copied differently using Receive Port mapping verses Orchestration mapping. Why should you care? If you are using Direct Message Box Binding to route message out of an Orchestration you might not have the correct context propertied to route your message. This only impacts messages that needed...

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...

Microsoft has released 5 new White Papers today in a “Beta” mode. Full details on all 5 are available here . They include the following: - BizTalk Server 2004 Web Services (Brian Loesgen) - BizTalk Server Internal Workings (Internal) - SQL Adapter Deep Dive (Todd Uhl) - Convoy Deep Dive (Stephen W. Thomas) - Extending BizTalk Server with Host Integration Server (Jon Fancy) They all look like great reading. I’m rather fond of the Convoy Deep Dive paper myself. As always, feedback...

In addition to all the other cool stuff available in BizTalk Server 2004 Service Pack 1 is the addition of the Additional Flat File Schema Properties to the schema properties window when working with Flat Files. Now, properties like Allow Early Termination, Generate Empty Nodes, Lookahead Depth, Parse Optimization, and Suppress Empty Nodes can be set inside Visual Studios. This will eliminate the tedious and error prone manual editing of the schema using notepad. Error prone? Yep, I messed this one...

Today I was working on some content for Tech Ed when I found a major error in a sample I posted about 4 months ago. The error caused the CR-LF’s between records to be included in the positional character count during debatching and actually into the messages themselves. This through off the file layout but did not give any errors. In fact, the expected result of three files were received. They just did not have the right data in them. I have seen similar problems in the past were the Flat File...