January, 2006

I've noticed that - despite a fair bit of discussion on the topic - many folks wind up using atomic scopes simply to avoid serialization requirements for .Net types within an orchestration. It isn't surprising this is the past of least resistance - after...

Last year a customer had a requirement to process DBF files in BizTalk. I created a custom pipeline component that saved the incoming binary stream to a physical file on the BizTalk machine and then used basic ADO.NET to parse the DBF File into an XML...

Jesús Rodríguez has finished a Beta 2 version of Service Broker Enhancements Adapter for BizTalk Server 2006. They are looking for beta testers, so please go HERE if interested. Service Broker is an exciting new feature for Microsoft SQL Server...

I had an interesting problem yesterday, and Google wasn’t able to find anything to help me, so I thought I’d do a post it here for the benefit of others that may experience the same thing. I had a project that built and compiled fine, but...

By way of background, let me take you way back to the proof-of-concept (POC), which is where the project I’m on had its genesis. It was a competitive situation, where various vendors were given a set of requirements and a month to deliver an ESB...

I am working on a 56 processor (yes, that was FIFTY SIX PROCESSOR) BizTalk project for a very large company in the Bay area. As far as I know this is the largest BizTalk project on the go right now on the planet. I’m going to start blogging about...

Tip: temporarily commenting out chunks of an orchestration Some of you will read this and say “doh, isn’t that obvious to everyone?”. Others will smack their foreheads and say “hey, what a cool tip”. So, to half of you: sorry...

My article on VS.Net templates is finally up on the MSDN Magazine web site [1]. I had a lot of fun diving into this feature and look forward to being able to use them in creating classroom materials and templates for my customers. [1] http://msdn.microsoft...

I was having numerous issues getting my orchestration to work, that I had published as a web service. The problem was calling it from my .net assembly. My problem was the debug processes stopped here: Internal SOAP Processing Failure

Craig McMurtry, Marc Mercuri, and Nigel Watling announced this weekend that they are wrapping up their forthcoming book currently titled “Presenting Windows Communication Foundation: Hands-on Programming.” All three authors work in the Developer...

Randal van Splunteren published a handy little utility over on the BizTalk Intelligence Agency blog this morning - the BizTalk Host Manager. Turns out I had a similar utility under way, but he already has the icon done, so what the heck - I’ll just...

Today I released the completed version of the BizTalk Performance Tester (BTSPerfTester). This application is intended to provide developers with an easily implemented and predictable method of determining the maximum sustainable throughput of their BizTalk...

The BizTalk load generation utility, originally released by Microsoft several months ago, was quickly removed from their downloads page for enhancement. The enhanced version is now available for download here. This tool can work in tandem with the BizTalk...

Scott Woodgate has announced that he has taken a new role within Microsoft, leaving the Connected Systems Division and the BizTalk Server product team. Filling his role will be Mike Woods and Kriss Horrocks for BizTalk Server; Paul Andrew will continue...

We are currently experiencing a bit of pain at my current client trying to configure BizTalk 2006 in a multiserver environment. The Active Directory configuration that this installation must adhere to consists of two forests . One of these contains all...

Trying to automate the process of creating Send Handlers in BizTalk 2006? You may be trying to use the class MSBTS_SendHandler, as shown in the snippet of code below. However, the class to be used in BizTalk 2006 is now MSBTS_SendHandler2 as the old one...

Just a quick post to point out that if you are configuring a BizTalk 2006 server and your group name length is over a certain amount of characters (around about 50 I think), then don't browse for the group, instead manually edit the group name within...

At my current client we have implemented various operational tools to manage suspended queues, cleaning up dead messages, monitoring states and throttling. We had created a lot of these utilities to achieve functionality that could either not be produced...

Flat file parsing in BTS2006 is pretty nice in general - you get a very specific error back in the error log if your incoming file is in the wrong format for the schema (or, put a more likely way, if you have buggered up creating the schema). However...

Here's a braindump that I did for people with 2004 experience who are moving across to 2006. It's just a very quick run through some of the new bits and pieces to look out for. It's not complete, but it might be handy as the 50,000 ft view. It's also...