November, 2007

For those of you who are unaware, XPath is a powerful query language for XML (ignoring XQuery for now). In my experience I've worked with a lot of BizTalk developers who have come from a C# (and usually VB before that) background, and so haven't...

I've spent this week in Minneapolis at some BizTalk training and while I was there had a chance to sit down with Delbert and talk about the Microsoft Certified Architect program, I think you'll learn something about the program I know I did. Tim...

For me at least :-). I’m off to India for my annual vacation tomorrow and will be there for Christmas and New Year. So unless I’m really bored, there wont be any posts from me for a long time. Theres news on the BizUnitExtensions front though...

People have been asking, so here they are. I've attached all of the presentations that were presented during the recent Canadian Business Process/SOA Conference. All of the presentations from both technical days and the business day are included in...

In recent weeks all of the buzz in the world of BizTalk has been about Oslo, the project which encompasses updates to many products, but specifically to BizTalk Server. As you can imagine there is a great deal Microsoft is not talking about in regards...

cXML (commerce eXtensible Markup Language) is a XML based standard for communication of data related to electronic commerce. The problem from a BizTalk perspective is that they don’t publish any XML schemas (XSD),  only Document Type Definition...

Came across Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 832017 - Service overview and network port requirements for the Windows Server system - today while researching required firewall ports for UNC share access. A good one to have in your back-pocket if you ever...

Just got this email from the user group.... get to it if you want to learn about MS RFID services.... (but more importantly, play some XBOX!!!!). Hi Chris Vidotto, Welcome to our last meeting of the year . I know its Christmas soon and we're all checking...

I recently created a retry activity that I've been wanting to write for some time now, and had a few features that I wanted to add. I was teaching a class a couple of weeks ago and took the opportunity to add a retry interval to the activity. The...

The South Central Developer Guidance Council is hosting an event, being organized by the fabulous Toi Wright, called We Are Microsoft . This event is a developer competition where teams of developers create projects for charities over the weekend of January...

Chris Koenig , our Local Developer Evangelist has a big event coming up, here are some details: To celebrate the RTM of Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft is teaming up with some of the local area User Groups to throw a set of Holiday Party InstallFests. We've...

Hi all and welcome to our last meeting of the year . I know it's Christmas soon and we're all checking out the best gifts to get.......well I got thinking..... why don't we have a 'try before you buy' session with a xbox360/media extender...

A number of you have contacted me in recent months to report that the BizTalk Orchestration Profiler and BizTalk Documenter didn't run on 64bit machines, this seems to have been down to compiler settings which I've now resolved. I've uploaded...

This short demo illustrates how to configure a WCF send port to invoke multiple WCF operations by configuring an operation name -> action mapping.

WS-MetadataExchange is a wonderful thing. WCF implements this spec and provides support for it over several different transport protocols including HTTP(S), TCP, and named pipes. All you have to do is choose the appropriate MEX binding. If you're...

As an IT geek, Dilbert has been my favourite cartoon for a long long time. It was the only cartoon that came close to reflecting my experience of the world as a cube rat. However, Dilbert's place has been usurped (sorry Scott Adams) by Randall Munroe...

We recently had an issue where we had a lot of a receive locations connecting to the same server (sum 1,200). They kept going down complaining the Messaging Engine failed while notifying an adapter of its configuration and The error threshold was exceeded...

This post follows on from yesterday's post: Creating BizUnit Test Cases for comparing Xml Files If you are using the XmlValidationStep / XmlValidationStepEx BizUnit steps and using XPath validation, then it can be a pain to write all these XPathValidation...

This week I’m delivering a BizTalk development class for my colleagues, and during my preparation of demonstrations, I spent a few extra minutes confirming the behavior of members variables and atomic transactions. Atomic transactions in BizTalk...

Warning, the following code is not pretty! Often times I get into a situation where I lose my confidence in the finesse of the Biztalk Mapper. That's when I pull out my sledge hammer. This is one of those occasions. The following map wouldn 't...