September, 2008

Business Activity Monitoring is a feature of BizTalk Server that allows businesses to capture important pieces of information throughout a BizTalk Solution. Once the information is captured, or recorded, any reporting tool such as SQL reporting services...

Today I’m sitting in a “BizTalk Administration” class being taught to 20 of my co-workers by my buddy Victor.  I’ve retired from teaching internal training classes on BizTalk, so the torch has been passed and I get to sit...

A new WCF adapter whitepaper entitled “Modifying Messages with the WCF Adapters” is now available for download at http://download.microsoft.com/download/c/f/b/cfbcd6ad-5454-4c23-85d2-0cc3d7627015/WCFModifyingMessages.doc . Here is a summary of its content...

I set out to write a bunch of PS functions to manage Biztalk to keep in a little script library that i could then call from external scripts etc (I found and came up with some other good stuff that i’ll share shortly but this is something i had...

While theres a ton of stuff on the usage of Powershell as an interactive scripting system there is not as much from a general programming perspective of a developer , at least not much that i could find today. For example, while there is a flood of posts...

I’ve added another two webcasts to the BloggersGuides.net website. One of them has been on my to-do list for a long time, there have been a lot of BizTalk mapping questions on the forums where the best answer is “Don’t use the mapper, use custom XSLT...

I’m one of those folk who cannot stand the new Office Ribbon. I frequently collate material from various sources into single documents for easy reference and Just remembering how to set up the page orientation and do a print preview itself is very...

If you’ve used the SQL Adapter in CTP3 of the BizTalk Adapter Pack V2, you’ll notice that there are two nodes in the Metadata Hierarchy for Stored Procedures – one is named “Procedures”, and the other is named “Strongly-Typed Procedures”. What’s the difference...

Folks - it's been one of those weeks (I know it's only Tues :) I just got to a point where I was just opening up tooo many RDP connections, managing them - some using Terminal Services Gateways, others not. Configuring BTS boxes/SQL Servers/MOSS...

This seems to be a big complaint, there are many companies that would like to have access to the envelope information in the map. There are a few VERY KLUDGY ways of getting data from the message into the map. All of them are VERY BRITTLE. The EDI logger...

By popular demand I have made some significant changes to the EDI logger. None I don't think are more important than the rest, but some do address a REAL thorn in a lot of peoples sides. I will get to that in the next entry about the change to the...

Reveals extensive enhancements for simplified application life-cycle management, provides sneak peek at all key focus areas for Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0. Find the press release here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/sep08...

Hi all Today i read an email from a guy who had a problem with optional elements in an input giving problems in a positional flat file output. The issue being, of course, that if an element in the input of a map is optional, it might be missing. If the element is missing, it will not be created in the destination of a map, and therefore, the flat file assembler will complain because it needs the element to create the correct positional structure. I seem to have it working, and will here walk through...

I first saw this article in SDTimes on VSTS 2010, and then found some official word on the subject in Brian Harry’s post titled Shining the Light on Rosario which is a fairly detailed note (and an earlier note titled “Charting a course for...

Q: Can I run BizTalk Server 2006 R2 on Windows Server 2008? A: No. I've been asked this enough times in the last couple of weeks to take the few minutes it takes to write this post and link to the three main resources I give customers who wants to...

This is the second part in the series of new things that are afoot with the MSDN websites. In this posting, I would like to discuss some changes in the posting of articles and code samples. As an example of the new experience, I’d like to draw attention to a refreshed article that was recently updated and reposted from Morgan Skinner, ‘ Creating a Custom WF Activity .’ In the prior years, we made extensive use of the MSDN Online Library. Information on the MSDN Online Library takes one of two forms...

I have a situation in which I need to cache lookup data from a database tables that will be used in the BizTalk Mapper. The part that makes it interesting is that it is not just key value pairs that I need to cache. I need to return a value for a 4 part...

I've been looking into the possibility of updating the highly successful Professional BizTalk Server 2006 book to take into account new features and capabilities in BizTalk Server 2006 R2 and the recently announced BizTalk Server 2009 product. A fair...

jQuery is a lightweight open source JavaScript library (only 15kb in size) that in a relatively short span of time has become one of the most popular libraries on the web. A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently...

To me there are three distinct type of developers. There are the day-job developers, the lazy developers, the average developer, the programatic developers, and the passionate developers. These are the main types by my definitions. The day-job developers...