July, 2005

Martijn has made some excellent updates to his pipeline component wizard for Biztalk 2004. This visual studio wizard is a must have for anyone trying to write custom pipeline components. This new version supports IDisassembler and message spitting. It also has useful comments for each method explaining what each one does and how to use them. This wizard can be downloaded from his GotDotNet Workspace .

Microsoft’s official release of the Biztalk 2006 Beta program is now online. It goes into more detail about what is new in Biztalk 2006 and it also says how to sigh up. It can be found here: Biztalk 2006 Beta .

The Biztalk 2006 Beta Program is now available for sign-up. Biztalk 2006 simplifies the administration and deployment process. Some of the other major enhancements are improved BAM, executing pipelines inside an Orchestration, a flat file schema wizard, and suspended message routing, just to name a few. To sign-up for the program follow these steps: 1. Go to http://beta.microsoft.com 2. Sign in with your passport 3. At the top of the page it should say something like “if you have a Guest Id...

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...

I have put together a short 10 minute biztalk training video covering some of the different output options available using the Flat File Disassembler in Biztalk Server 2004. This video covers three different output options from the flat file disassembler. The three options covered are single detail records without a header or trailer, all detail records together without a header or trailer, or all details together with the header and trailer. This video walks through the Flat File Disassembler Sample...

Envelopes can be used with the Xml Disassembler in Biztalk 2004 to break up larger Xml messages into single messages. Another approach to message debatching is to use xpath in a loop inside an Orchestration. Both these approaches are covered in this Message Debatching Options Lab for Biztalk 2004. This lab will take around 40 minutes to complete and is based on Microsoft’s hands-on-labs. Download: Message Debatching Options Hands-on Lab Setup is simple. Unzip the download to your c:\ drive...

Jon Flanders has posted an excellent template wizard for implementing enterprise integration patters in BizTalk Server. Once installed, it will put a folder called Pattern Templates under your BizTalk Projects folder in Visual Studios. This wizard will walk you through the creation of the patterns step-by-step. It creates correlations sets, messages, and orchestrations for you. It covers Asynchronous Aggregation, First-In First-Out (three different types), Interrupter, and Retry. Get more information...