December, 2008

Warning: This post is about a beta product. Details might change before final release. The beta of BizTalk Server 2009 brings a welcome new feature: Some basic support for Unit Testing BizTalk artifacts; specifically for Pipelines, Maps and Schemas. You...

Just a quick post to say Happy New Year to all of the BizTalk community. I was planning on writing about the BizTalk 2006 R2 to 2009 upgrade experience, but I managed to forget my external drive so I can’t start the VM… instead you’ll...

I recently came across a Gartner report talking about all things to do with 'App Integration with Back End Systems' (in a nutshell... the report goes into detail) The end result of several pages within this report is a graph (we like graphs :...

In this short WCF screencast, you'll learn how to configure your WCF services with Metadata Exchange (MEX) endpoints - both over HTTP and TCP - allowing consumers to automatically retrieve metadata from your services at runtime. Enjoy! Be sure to...

I recently published a free video on Configuring MEX endpoints on WCF Services . In this short WCF screencast , you'll learn how to configure your WCF services with Metadata Exchange (MEX) endpoints - both over HTTP and TCP - allowing consumers to...

I have received this error when testing my adapter I am creating: The Messaging Engine failed to create the transport adapter "SQLBulkXML". OutboundAssemblyPath: "D:\Eric\Warehouse\Adapter\Run-Time\SQLBulkXMLTransmit\bin\Debug\SQLBulkXMLTransmitAdapter...

Background I was recently reviewing a BizTalk application where there were around a dozen orchestrations which had been exposed as either SOAP or WSE web services. The typical pattern that had been used in these orchestrations is illustrated in the below...

I’ve been looking around the new project system introduced in the BizTalk Server 2009 beta. As you might have heard before, it’s now based on MSBuild. This is an extremely welcome change from the obscure compilation model in previous BizTalk versions...

Now that the a public beta release of BizTalk Server 2009 is out, I thought I’d download it and try building and testing PipelineTesting on the new release. After downloading and installing the beta, I proceeded to import the existing Visual Studio 2005...

Hi all I have added a new program to be downloaded for free from http://www.eliasen.eu/DownloadSoftware.aspx . This time it is a program to help you do two things: Check an XML file to see if it is well formed Validate an XML file against an XSD schema I have had the need for a small utility to do this several times, in case a customer has some XML, and they want to know if the XML is even valid. The check for well formed-ness can be done by simply opening the file in Internet Explorer, but that...

Hi all Today, I took the 70-241 exam in BizTalk 2006 R2. I passed, and am now MCTS: BizTalk Server 2006 R2 :-) I have now passed the exams in BizTalk 2000, BizTalk 2004, BizTalk 2006 and BizTalk 2006 R2. Anyone else out there who has done this? :-) -- eliasen

Hi all At Logica we often participate in different events where employees compete to see who rides their bike more often to work, who walks the most steps in a month, and so on. After a month of competition, we end up with a spreadsheet, where I may have walked 180.000 steps, but my colleague Henrik only walked 78.000 steps (He is kind of a wimp :-) ) So lets say that we want to give a prize to one of us, and Henrik should have a chance of 78000/(78000+180000) (30,23%) of winning and I should have...

Hi all I am using http://www.last.fm to keep track of what I listen to, and to get inspired to listen to some new music that I didn't know I liked. You can find my profile at http://www.last.fm/user/eliasen and you can find information about an excellent Danish band Baal at http://www.last.fm/music/Baal . Please note, though, that I listen to the Danish band Baal, and not the Japanese band that unfortunately shares the band name Baal with the Danish band. Anyway, the point of this blog post is...

Hi all It is time for the third posting in my series about using BizTalk to integrate to Excel spreadsheets. My first two postings are here (Installation) and here (The schema generation wizard). This third posting is a talk about the runtime, and how it works. The setup To start out, I have done a simple test, and you can find my project here . It has a simple spreadsheet and a schema for this spreadsheet ( both are described in my previous post ) and the setup basically just has a FILE Receive...

Hi all The company hosting the eliasen.dk domain went bancrupt last friday (19'th December 2008), and I only just found out this morning (Monday the 22'nd December). So basically, everything since my last backup (27'th November 2008) is gone! Right now, I am trying to setup the blog on the new server and trying to see if I can repost the blog posts I have written since the 27'th November. -- eliasen

With all the developer extensions in recent time around SharePoint (Features, Solutions etc), I've found there seems to be a few little known and little used 'other' APIs within the SharePoint space. We've got things like WebServices and...

How to look cool at work.... Stick this poster by your desk, people will walk past and say "Hmmmm......" - guaranteed to reduce the amount of questions you get each day :-) (Then you could start talking about the 'flux capacitor' and...

I'm excited to announce that we have now listed our new "Dublin" course on the website . This will be a three day course where we dive in to taking advantage of the hosting features found in the new application server being developed at...

THe business rule engine in Windows Workflow Foundation is an often overlooked feature that provides powerful business logic processing and rich business rule engine execution semantics. Some mistakenly believe this functionality can only be used from...